“Because I want it to be true,” I whispered.
She rolled her eyes. “Fine, I’ll prove it. I’m gonna tell you something you don’t know. You can’t dream about things you don’t know.” Her eyes searched the air above my head for a moment; then she brightened. “Dad’s fifty-fifth birthday, when you were in Iraq,” she said to me. “Brie and I got drunk on champagne and threw up in the bushes behind Mom and Dad’s house. You can check the story with her.”
“That’s . . .” I shook my head. I believed her. “If it’s true, how did we . . . do this?”
She shrugged. “You tell me, Allie. You called. I just picked up the phone.”
“I miss you so much,” I said, my voice quavering. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there when he killed you.”
Sam rolled her eyes again. “You’ve gotta get over that, babe.”
“Get over what? Your death?”
Her face softened. “Get over the idea that you could have done something. Why do you think I sent you the dream of that time in the park? You could only do so much to keep me safe, Allie. At some point I was gonna be the person I was gonna be.” I must have looked unconvinced, because she huffed out a sigh. “Look, I chose to live in LA. I chose to go out that night. Even if you’d been with me, you probably couldn’t have prevented it.”
“You’ve been sending me dreams?” I said stupidly. “You can do that?” Sam nodded. I thought of all the dreams I’d been having since Quinn had officially dropped the case. “What does that mean?”
“It means your access to magic is getting stronger, babe,” she said gently. “You’re communicating across the line.”
“You know about magic?”
“I didn’t when I was alive, no. But I do now.” She cocked her head to the side for a second, as if she were listening to someone I couldn’t hear. Her face darkened. “But I’m not supposed to talk about that.”
“Sounds like you have a lot of rules.”
Sam scrunched her face at me. “And you know I do so well with those. I’m trying to be good, though, so we can talk.”
I just shook my head, too bewildered to even know where to start. “I don’t know what to say. I . . . I lost her, Sam. I lost Charlie.” My eyes filled with tears. “I was so stupid.”
“Hey, hey,” Sam said hurriedly. “Don’t cry. She’s not lost yet. You’re going to find her.”
“I can’t.” I drew my knees up, hugging them in front of me. “I’m too dangerous to go anywhere near her right now, Sammy. I killed all those people. I can’t control myself.”
Sam sighed and scooted to the edge of her bed, leaning forward and resting her elbows on her knees. She looked straight into my eyes. “Allison,” she said quietly. “Listen to me carefully. There is no one else, do you understand? The police can’t help, and the vampires only care about damage control. You are the only one who can help my baby.”
I sniffed, shaking my head. “I don’t know how. She could be anywhere by now.”
“Then you get your people together,” Sam said, “and figure it out.” She tilted her head again, pausing. Then she cursed. “I have to go. Babe, you’ve got to find my daughter. So get up.”
I did, or at least I tried to. I struggled for only a second before the pain in my shoulder and feet broke over me, making me writhe. A cool hand touched my face, brushed my sweat-stuck hair away from my eyes. “Lex?”
I went still. The man’s voice was so soft, so worried, that it took me a moment to place it. Quinn. I opened my eyes. I was lying on a couch, and he was crouched on the floor next to me. We were in some sort of darkened room. I recognized the carpeting and color scheme from Macky Auditorium. My eyes went wide as I remembered what had happened.
“Oh, God! Did I—all those people—”
“Alive,” Quinn said firmly. He hesitated for a second, then added, “But unconscious. The EMTs I talked to said they should be fine . . . probably.” In response to my questioning look, he added, “I pressed some of the cops into thinking it was a gas leak. Not my best story, but it will hold until Itachi can get some more vampires here to help.”
I struggled to sit up. Quinn must have popped my shoulder back in place while I was out, but the room still spun around me. When I tried to squint at a wall clock, the walls spun, too. At first I thought it was the pain, but pain didn’t make you feel drunk. I felt like I was about to burst from the forces swirling inside me. I lay back down. “What’s wrong with me?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said softly. “Your pupils are dilated almost to the edge of the irises. I called Lily and Simon, but there’s a clan assembly tonight. Nobody’s answering.”
“How long was I out?”
“Two hours.” He frowned. “I was starting to get worried.”
I tried to sit up again, but the room wasn’t any more cooperative this time around. Quinn laid a hand on my arm, trying to still me. “Lex, I don’t think you should—”
“He took Charlie,” I said, panting. “Help me, please.”
Quinn hesitated for one more second, then nodded. He draped my left arm around his shoulder and stood me up, supporting me around the waist with his right arm. For a moment I helped him as much I as I could; then I remembered that he was a vampire and let my body sag against him so I could focus my energy on thinking.
“Where exactly are we going?” Quinn murmured to me.
“You said the witches are getting together tonight?” He nodded. I smiled grimly, or at least I think I did.
“Well, I’m a witch, right? Let’s go get introduced.”
Chapter 34
We made our way out of the building that way, with Quinn supporting me as I staggered forward. Then he grunted with annoyance and abruptly reached down to scoop up my legs, clasping me to his chest. My dress had torn a little when I’d fallen, but I still felt like I was on the cover of a goddamned romance novel, getting carried around in my formal gown. It would have been embarrassing as hell if I’d had the energy to give a shit.
Neither of us said anything as he hauled me to his car, but I caught Quinn glancing down at my feet a few times, and I realized he could smell the blood that had seeped out of my reopened wounds, gluing my shoes to my feet. Gross. It was sticky and uncomfortable, but I figured it might be even worse for Quinn if I took the shoes off, so I just tried to ignore it.
The edges of my vision seemed to blur and twitch. Now that my body was in motion, the scenery rushing past me, I was having trouble keeping my eyes focused on one thing, so I closed them. My skin felt like it was about to explode. “Quinn,” I whispered. “It’s getting worse. Hurry.”
He tore down the country roads, arriving at the Pellar farm in about half the time it should have taken. When Quinn finally put the car in park, I braced myself against the dashboard and squinted. A few different sets of headlights were backing away from the farmhouse, so I figured the meeting had to be breaking up. That was probably for the best.
Quinn took one of the spots that had just been vacated, blocking in a red minivan. He came around and opened my car door. I managed to unbuckle my seat belt before he scooped me up again. “I can walk,” I said woozily, but neither of us really believed me.
There were a few voices moving in our direction, chatting and laughing. The voices kept stopping when they got close to us. I ignored all of that and closed my eyes so I didn’t have to try to interpret any more images with my addled brain.
Later—a minute? Ten minutes?—I heard Quinn call out Lily’s name. I lifted my head again. We were in a big, open clearing behind the farmhouse, and there were candles everywhere. I couldn’t understand how the flames were staying lit . . . or why the air above them was so shiny. “Pretty,” I murmured.
“What happened to her?” said Lily, who was right next to my head now. Or at least her voice was.
I jumped in Quinn’s arms. “Hey, Li
l,” I said drunkenly. “The lights are super pretty.”
Lily looked at me hard. “Simon!” she shouted, without looking away from me.
Simon moved away from a group of people and jogged over. “You better set her down,” he told Quinn. There was concern in his voice, real concern, and I squinted hard at him.
“You sound sad, Simon,” I told him. There was someone hovering at his shoulder, a pretty Asian woman with jet-black hair cut to frame her face. “Ooh!” I said happily. “Simon’s lady love! Simon says you’re a witch, too.” I giggled. “Heh. ‘Simon says.’”
“She’s getting worse, I think,” Quinn said over my head. “She was coherent when she first woke up, but she’s losing it.”
He started telling them about Charlie, and I tuned out, not wanting to let them kill my buzz. At some point Quinn put my legs down, but his arms were still the only things keeping me upright. Lily began touching me, but that was okay. I’d seen her boobs, so we had real trust.
Then Simon reached a thumb up and lifted my eyelid, shining a penlight in my eye. “Hey!” I complained. “Not cool, Simon!” I tried to karate-chop him away, but my arms weren’t working quite like I wanted. I sighed and endured his examination of my other eye. There was some more discussion, and when I tuned in again Simon was saying, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” There was a frown in his voice.
“I have,” announced an annoyed, steel-cut voice.
Suddenly Hazel fucking Pellar was in my line of sight, moving her son aside to peer at my face. She put her hands on my cheeks, probing my skin. I could feel energy pass between us, but I didn’t know if it started from her or me. “She’s magic-drunk,” she said matter-of-factly. “Witches aren’t meant to hold this much magic inside. We’re conductors, not car batteries. She needs to ground it.”
There was an uneasy silence, and I saw Hazel look back and forth between her two children. “What?” she demanded.
“That could be a problem,” Lily said sheepishly. There was a pause; then she added, “We’ve only taught her one spell, and she overdid it.”
At the same time Simon chimed in: “She can’t manage regular spells yet.”
There was a terrible silence. “But you should see her sense out life?” Lily offered in a small voice. I started snickering, which probably didn’t help.
“You two swore to me,” Hazel exploded, “that you were just trying to teach her control! Not teach her everything but control.”
That made me mad. “Hey! That’s not fair,” I said, glaring at Hazel. Or trying to, anyway—her image kept flickering around like one of those jumping spiders. “They’ve been helping me, working their asses off and donating time that I’m sure they’d rather spend doing a million other things instead of—”
“Lex,” Quinn interrupted. I paused. The hair on my arms was standing on end, and there was an electric charge in the air, like when I’d done that spell in the mudroom. Hazel was watching me with narrowed eyes, and I dimly realized that whatever she’d thought of me before today, I’d just made it a lot worse. I whimpered.
“She’s too powerful,” Hazel snapped. “I warned you about this—”
“Please,” I broke in. “I have to save my niece. Please. Whatever’s going on, I have to save her tonight. Please, she’s a null, and this vampire took her—”
Hazel drew in a sharp breath. “Your niece is a null?”
She said something to Simon and Lily for a minute, and they answered, but I barely heard what they said. “Do you guys hear kind of a buzzing?” I wondered aloud.
I got distracted for a while, listening to the buzz, and then Quinn’s voice was whispering in my ear. “Lex, honey,” he said, “There’s too much magic in you. It’s too much for your body.”
I could hear the thread of worry in his voice. I turned to look at him, and for a second I thought I could even see it. I raised my hand to run a finger along it, but instead I touched his face, experimentally running my finger over his lips, tracing a line across his cheek to his ear. “Do you like me?” I asked idly.
Amusement sparked in his eyes. “Much to my chagrin,” he said solemnly. “But I need you to listen. Lily thinks she knows a way to get the magic out, but it’s going to hurt.”
“What happens if she doesn’t?” I asked, immediately proud of my competence.
“We don’t know,” Quinn told me. “You could die, or you could hurt someone.”
“Do it,” I said. He said something else after that, but I didn’t hear it because the buzzing was back, bigger, like a wave that had chased the smaller wave that came before it. “What?” I yelled.
The second time I half heard him and half read his lips, until finally I understood what he was trying to tell me.
“I’m gonna have to hold you down.”
Chapter 35
I would never remember much of the next few hours, except the pain.
Lily needed me to lie on my stomach with my arms stretched in front of me. I held still as long as I could, but then the pain was too much. I began to struggle and then fight them outright. It was just in my nature.
Eventually, Quinn had to lie down on my back to hold me with his body weight, but even he couldn’t keep all of me from moving, and for a few seconds it looked like I was going to hurt Lily very badly. Then Hazel, of all people, lay down on the ground in front of me and took my hands. She looked straight into my eyes without fear, and I obeyed her order to be still.
Then finally the pain was gone, and it was like gravity had suddenly been restored to the world. Up was up, down was down, and I was me again. For a second the relief was so great I almost blacked out. I think I maybe did lose consciousness briefly, because when I opened my eyes I was lying on my side in the field, not touching anyone. I curled inward, enjoying the feel of the cool grass on my skin. Then I realized that the pain in my shoulder was gone. I wiggled my feet experimentally. They also felt fine.
I sat up without incident and looked down at my dress. The skirt was in tatters and one strap was ripped off, but the upper half was still more or less intact. “Quinn?” I said, squinting against the dim light. The only light in the field emanated from the candles, which I now realized were encased in long vertical tubes of glass, to protect them from the wind.
“I’m here,” came his voice from behind me.
I turned around and saw him sitting in the grass, peering at me over the screen of a cell phone. “Where is everyone?” I asked. “Did I hurt someone?” A new thought occurred to me. “Was it all a dream?”
He smiled briefly. “No and no. Hazel thought it might be best to give you a little space, and Lily needed to rest for a while. It took a lot out of her, but she’ll be fine.”
“What took a lot out of her?” I asked, puzzled.
I saw a strange look come over his face, mostly thanks to the glow from his phone. “You don’t remember what she did?”
“No . . .”
“Look at your arms,” he instructed.
I held out my arms and tried to look. There was some sort of marking covering my forearms, stretching down over my wrists and almost into my palms. “What is it?” I asked.
“Here.” Quinn tapped something on his phone’s screen, then scooted across the grass and held it up to my arms. The light from the phone flared, and for the first time I could make out the swirling black ink that crawled up my arms.
“You guys tattooed me?” I said in amazement. It was a hell of a lot of tattooing. “Why?”
“To pull the power out,” Simon called. I looked up, and when my eyes adjusted to the dimness again, I could see him hurrying across the lawn toward us. A flashlight beam bounced along in front of him.
“Lily’s tattoos,” I remembered. “She said they were a long story.”
Simon nodded. He knelt down in front of me and gently took my hand, flipping it over to inspect the ta
ttoos with his flashlight. “They look good.”
In the better light, I could see they weren’t just swirling patterns—my arms were a mirror image of each other, and together they formed an emblem. “A griffin,” I said, looking up at Simon in wonder. I was wearing the little griffin earring studs at that moment, which seemed like an unbelievable coincidence.
He smiled. “She’s been working on the designs pretty much since we met you, but she wasn’t sure it was a good idea.” He shrugged.
“What do they do?”
Simon answered, “Think of them like . . . a funnel. They’ll let you channel magic through your hands. That should help with the problem you’ve been having.”
“A filter, not a focus,” Quinn reminded me softly.
“Oh,” I said. “Not that I’m not grateful, but why do this now?”
“We had to get the magic out of you,” Simon explained. He gestured at my arms. “The only way to construct something like this on a witch is by using the witch’s own power. Lily’s tattoos took her a couple of years to complete, using a little bit of power each time. Yours drew all the power out at once, more or less.”
“They’re not even bleeding,” I said, examining them.
“True.” He smiled at me. “You should be feeling better in general, because of transferring so much magic. I can explain, but it’d take a while, and I know you’re in a hurry.”
“Charlie,” I said suddenly. I looked at Quinn. “What time is it?”
“Two a.m.,” he said matter-of-factly. Two in the morning wasn’t exactly late for him.
Then again, it wasn’t late for me, either. I stood up. “We’ve got to—” I wobbled, a little unsteady. “Where do we go?”
Quinn shook his head. “That’s a good question.” He held up his phone. “Itachi and Maven have their vampires watching the highways, all the major roads out of the state. Kirby tried to pass into Wyoming two hours ago. They turned him around, but he got away.”
“Was Charlie in the car?” I asked.
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