I shifted my arm up around her shoulder and led my sister from the warehouse to the SUV. I’d thought the worst tonight. I’d thought her dead. I wasn’t sure what I would have done if that had been her half-eaten in the pentagram, rather than Rusty. I pushed the nasty thought away and took Sienna home.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I’d never been so relieved to feel the protection wards on my apartment slide over me as I did that night. In fact, I’m not sure I’d ever noticed them as intensely before. My sense of relief was palatable, and coming home tasted a lot like my go-to one-bowl chocolate cupcakes.
The apartment felt foreign, though, like I’d been gone weeks instead of hours. Sienna, still clutching my necklace around her neck, fell onto the couch and instantly burrowed underneath one of Gran’s woven blankets. She refused to move further, muttering that she’d shower the blood off later.
No matter how exhausted I was, leaving my sister bloody and bruised on the couch wasn’t going to happen. I bathed her arms in diluted tea tree oil and wrapped them in strips torn from an old cotton pillowcase. I had no idea if that was the correct approach, but I had to do something.
Sienna watched me with sleep-hooded eyes but didn’t pester me with questions. I, on the other hand, desperately wanted to ask her about Rusty. About his mother and his other friends, and how this could have gotten so out of control. When had Sienna known? Not until tonight? How had Rusty hidden everything from her? How and when had Rusty managed to kill Hudson?
Sienna sucked in her breath as I dabbed the tea tree oil-soaked cloth over a particularly deep cut on her left forearm. I quashed all the questions in my head and just focused on caring for my sister. Someone would have answers tomorrow — probably Gran when she swept into town to clean up the mess.
“We’ve never left such a big pile before,” I said. And felt instantly deplorable for referring to the bodies of Hudson and Rusty as a ‘pile’.
“What?” Sienna asked. I shook my head and tucked the blanket up higher underneath her chin. “Thank you,” she murmured as I stood to take the bloody rags and used tea tree oil into the kitchen. I left the light on over the stove so Sienna wouldn’t wake and find herself in darkness, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t enough to give her sweet dreams.
I was dead on my feet, and didn’t manage to do more than brush my teeth and strip down to my panties and tank top before I crawled into bed.
As I drifted to sleep, I was acutely aware that there were many things Sienna and I hadn’t talked about. Gran would show tomorrow — I assumed I’d see her bright and early — but I didn’t have any of the answers she would be seeking. Perhaps Sienna did. Perhaps ‘why’ wasn’t important at all right now. Perhaps all we could to do was figure out ‘how’ and hope there wouldn’t be any sort of further retribution. It wasn’t as if I or the shifters or Sienna had killed anyone, but Rusty’s mother was a necromancer. Presumably they had rules of conduct as well?
I was starting to think like the vampire, Kett. Gran wasn’t going to like him at all. And with that delightful thought in my head, I sunk into blissful unawareness … for a moment, at least.
∞
Though I had fallen asleep with no problem, I almost immediately began dreaming of being surrounded by different levels of blackness. Rationally, I knew my brain was just trying to work through the previous terror of feeling trapped in the warehouse and walking through the dark, with no idea where each step was going to take me. Unfortunately, the rational side of my brain didn’t conquer the dream. The inky blackness shifted — now pressing against me, not just surrounding me as before. I was actually having a difficult time breathing, but fighting the dark oppression only made it worse. I began to panic, then to hyperventilate. Right before I thought I might be dying, might be suffocating in the blackness, a shudder ran through the darkness and it released me.
I woke sitting upright in bed with the taste of Rusty’s ‘unliving’ magic in my mouth. I was covered in rapidly cooling sweat, shivering in it. My hand was wrapped around the hilt of my knife. I was holding the blade before me as if warding off an attack. It should have been sheathed in the pile of clothing at the side of the bed. How had I laid hands on it in my sleep?
My heart was racing as if I’d been running or … fighting. Fighting off the effects of a spell … I breathed in deeply and slowly exhaled, attempting to gain control of my body and mind. Where had that idea about the spell come from? I’d only been subjected to ill-intended magic a few times in my life — most notably and recently when Kett tried to compel me in the morgue. It hadn’t felt like that oppressive darkness.
I toweled off my sweat-soaked limbs and torso with the bed sheet, managing to keep the knife in hand while doing so. And then I did something I’d never attempted to do before, never thought to do before. I reached out with my dowser senses and tasted the magic of the apartment wards. Lavender and berries filled my senses, calming my heart rate further. The wards felt fine, uncompromised. I was sure no malignant spell could have gotten by them.
Had I left a light on in the kitchen? Oh, yes. But was the stove light usually that bright? Maybe Sienna was watching something on the TV. I slipped out of bed, noted the time on the bedside table clock — 2:08am — and exchanged my sweat-soaked tank top and panties for clean ones and Lululemons.
I stifled my need to simply call out to my sister. I didn’t want to wake her if she was sleeping. I padded on bare feet out to the living room.
The couch was empty. Gran’s blanket was dumped on the floor. I picked it up and folded it over the back of the armchair as I glanced about for Sienna. The extra light was coming from the craft room on the opposite side of the living room from my bedroom. It however looked empty from this angle. I’d noted the bathroom was empty as I passed by it. Sienna wasn’t in the kitchen either. Had I left the chain off the front door? Maybe … I didn’t usually come and go that way, but I could have forgotten it, though that was unusual.
The door to the bakery stairs was slightly ajar. But again, that could have easily been me when Sienna and I stumbled home.
Perhaps Sienna was in the bakery seeking cupcakes or chocolate? Except both were easily obtainable in the apartment kitchen.
Instead of heading downstairs, I found myself continuing on to the craft room. The desk lamp, its shade made of stained glass, was lit. No werewolves or vampires were perched on the balcony, which was a relief. I leaned over to switch off the lamp, even though I had no idea when I would have turned it on. I usually worked on the trinkets using the overhead light. The lamp was a gift from Sienna actually, and more of a dust collector than anything useful.
My eyes strayed to the coat rack that held my completed trinkets. I only worked on one at a time, and usually didn’t walk away until I felt it was complete. But once complete, I hung the new trinket on one of the arms of the coat rack before taking it to the bakery or giving it away.
The rack was empty. I told myself there should be eight or more trinkets hanging there, but then I just as quickly started to convince myself I was wrong. Yes, I was seriously deluding myself. My brain wanted to click together all the pieces of the puzzle that were the last three days, even as I wanted to acknowledge that there was nothing to piece together any further.
My neck and chest suddenly felt bare, naked without my necklace. I deliberately blanked my clamoring mind and yanked open the desk drawer to pull out three trinkets I’d tucked away a few days ago. Those trinkets had felt unfinished, but I’d had no idea what to add to them at the time. I instinctively knew what they wanted to be now, and as I retreated back into my bedroom, I knotted the ends together until I could wear them around my neck, as Sienna had been … like Sienna …
Oh, God. My brain railed at my utterly blind, willful ignorance while my heart lamented the facts I was compelled to acknowledge.
I felt a little more grounded with my knife strapped across my hip. I wiggled my toes into the pink flip-flops I used when I got a pedicure
and pulled on a T-shirt over my tank top.
Then I went looking for my sister, though I knew I didn’t have to go far. Just two flights of stairs, but somehow, I knew it would be one of the longest walks of my life. I knew … I had always known what she wanted. What she’d wanted from the moment she set eyes on it. The moment I stupidly agreed to the reveal spell and pricked my own finger. Had she known it was there all along, before she’d suggested the reveal spell? Did she think she’d gathered enough magic to open it now? Open a portal? Because that’s what I was pretty sure was in the basement. Knowledge I hadn’t been able to accept at the time because I had no idea where it came from.
∞
The stink of the magic hit me in the bakery kitchen, and I suffered a moment of utterly irrational, almost debilitating anger in reaction to my space, my sanctuary being polluted.
I grasped my knife and it calmed me enough to keep moving. I headed for the basement stairs.
The wooden stairs creaked under my weight. I’d never noticed how noisy they were before. Fear that someone could be hiding underneath and grab me through the treads rose to briefly war with the anger still coursing through my synapses. The anger won, and I continued downward into the sea of nauseating magic.
The basement was well lit — perhaps a dozen candles had been added to the ones Kandy lit only a few hours before. Other than that, the storage room looked very different.
I stood on the second stair from the bottom, one hand clutching the trinkets around my neck and one clutching the hilt of the sheathed knife. Now that I knew how to do it, I sought to use the protective magic stored in each as a shield against the swamp of ‘unliving’ magic that now seemed to live and breathe in the basement. I struggled to find an anchor within the magic of my own creations that would hold against the magic my sister had released. My sister, not Rusty. Or at least it wasn’t Rusty this time.
A large pentagram had taken the place of the witches’ circle in the middle of the room. Kandy, her eyes wide but unseeing, was spread-eagle within it. Her hands had been staked though their open palms, her legs bound by silver chain. I knew it was silver because I kept a large roll of it in my craft room for making trinkets. Plus, a chain that thin shouldn’t be able to hold a werewolf in place. That part of the myth was true, then. Blood — too much to be Kandy’s alone, I hoped — soaked the dirt ground beyond, though somehow not intersecting, the edges of the pentagram. In fact, all the dirt in the room seemed oddly dark, and I knew when I took the second of my next two steps that the ground would be wet, soggy with blood under my feet.
Kett, his ice-blue eyes edged with red, turned his head to me as I entered, but his feelings and thoughts stayed hidden behind his typically frozen facade. He was pinned by some invisible force against the south wall. He seemed able to swivel his head with effort, but couldn’t move his limbs. He was pale — too pale — but appeared unharmed. Of course, I’d already figured out it was difficult to judge a vampire’s health until right before he ripped your head off in a blood frenzy.
Desmond was also pinned in a similar invisible fashion against the north wall, his demeanor the complete opposite of the vampire’s inscrutability. By the multiple layers of duct tape over his mouth, I gathered he’d been overly verbal. His eyes were bright green, his fingers edged in two-inch claws. He’d obviously attempted to change — or was still attempting to do so. As I watched, he strained — every muscle on his body tensed — to pull his arms away from the brick wall where they were pinned above his head. He cleared an inch, held his hands there, and then, shaking with the effort, fell back into his invisible binding. His eyes — which had been fixed on my sister where she stood with her back to me, facing the east wall — turned to meet mine. And I then understood the show of strength was for my benefit, but to what end I didn’t know.
“Took you long enough,” Sienna said, though she didn’t turn. “I’ve been calling for hours.” A set of my stainless steel mixing bowls sat at her feet.
“Calling or trying to … siphon my magic?” I answered. My tone was surprisingly flippant, though I was reeling from the inhuman tableau Sienna had set up.
She laughed and turned to look at me. Her eyes were dark — totally black, as if the pupil had expanded to overtake the whites. I’d never looked into the face of a black witch before … at least not one unmasked. I tried to not be terrified that this was the face of my sister, my best friend. I tried to just keep that small, screaming voice firmly closeted.
The sickening magic rolled off her, and my stomach lurched in response. How was she so powerful that her binding spell could hold a vampire and a shifter pinned while she initiated a conversation with me?
“I figured out pretty quickly that wasn’t going to work with you. I guess you’d have to invite me to your bed, and we both know that would never happen. And, frustratingly, even with possession of the necklace, I can’t manage to trigger the outline.” She turned back and ran her blood-soaked hand across the brick wall that concealed — or rather, held — the portal. God, she sounded so normal.
“Sienna, have you been bathing in blood?” I heard myself ask, and then wondered why I chose to vocalize that question instead of all the others running around in my head.
“Of course. And drinking it.” This drew Sienna to the mixing bowls at her feet. She bent to retrieve one and crossed to Kett. Before I could react, she slashed her fingers across his neck and attempted to catch the resulting gush of blood in the bowl, though some of it sprayed across her face, neck, and chest. Vampire blood all over my necklace and in my freaking mixing bowl! I tamped down on the selfish lurch of my offended brain.
Kett flinched. The wound on his neck healed to a pink line that then quickly faded. My mind reeled as Sienna raised the bowl and drank from it. With her head thrown back, she shook the final drops into her open mouth.
“He heals too fast,” Sienna said, her lips in an actual pout. She turned to cross to Desmond. “I like the werewolves better.”
“Sienna! No!” I found my voice, though it didn’t sound like me — didn’t sound like it was coming from my own lungs and throat. I think I might have been in shock.
Sienna paused and tilted her head at me. “You want some?”
“No!” I cried. “This is insane. What … how… why …” I couldn’t figure out how to form any sentence. I shut my eyes and tried to focus. Was Kandy still alive? Could I break Sienna’s binding spell? Could I get out of here and get Gran? Would Sienna even let me leave? Would she kill them all and flee before I could return with help?
“Jade,” Sienna said, her voice soft and cajoling. “You wouldn’t believe the power, the feeling.”
“Stolen power, fleeting feelings,” I said. And with the return of my anger, my voice sounded like my own again.
“No one will ever doubt me. No one will ever tell me what I can or cannot achieve. No one will ever call me a half-blood.”
“They’ll still call you a half-blood, but with ‘crazy’ as your given name. Crazy half-blood. Right before they hunt you down and kill you.”
Sienna stopped smiling and dropped the mixing bowl. Her attention was diverted from Desmond at least, but she wasn’t upset. She was simply flipping subjects.
“That’s where you come in, Jade. You’re going to open this door. I could feel the power from it when you cracked it before. Think of what it would feel like fully open. This is the root of Pearl’s and Scarlett’s power. This is what the Godfreys have hidden from us. Sheltering and lying, keeping us in place. This is the fountain of their power.”
I made the noise of a buzzer. “Sorry, wrong answer. Try another door.”
Sienna glared at me. “I know they’re hiding something. I know they’re hiding this,” she snarled.
“You may be right, but you’re wrong about it having anything to do with you.”
“It’s all about you, is it, Jade? That’s new. Tell me something that hasn’t been beaten into me my entire life. But
now, you’re not the special one, I am. You better step up if you want to keep up.”
“I never did play ‘follow the leader’ well.”
Sienna barked out a laugh. “You don’t even know yourself, Jade. You follow Pearl around like a puppy whining for a teat. You don’t even know the power that lies dormant in your veins.”
“All this blood, Sienna. All the power in it, even if you were to drain me as well. It would never be yours.”
“Mine to command, at least. And I think you might be wrong. True, with the others you attracted for me, it was short-lived, but I’ve learned. I’ve learned to prolong death, and to take the power within me, to consume it from the blood-filled meat. These two are terribly powerful. A lovely gift from a lovely sister.”
I was having a hard time continuing to meet Sienna’s eye, a hard time standing around chatting with her. But Desmond was getting his arms further and further away from the wall, and Kett had just managed to lift one of his legs. Sienna was either distracted or the spell was fading. Either way, keeping her occupied appeared to be a good idea.
“I’m in no way complicit in any of this, Sienna.”
“Sure, Jade. It’s all just milk and cookies with you. I can pretend for you that you had nothing to do with it. Even though I never would have gotten my hands on someone like that other werewolf — the big, pretty one — without you.”
“Hudson,” I gritted out.
“He was so perfect for you. So big and strong and comfy. He just walked right into your apartment with that dopey smile on his face. He even brought you chocolate. Three of those twenty-dollar bars you lust after and never buy. Smart werewolf, he already knew that roses wouldn’t get him anywhere with you.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, she was making me visualize Hudson in my apartment … in my life. “The damn stools,” I muttered. “You knocked over the stool when I was in the shower. And broke my bowl.”
Cupcakes, Trinkets, and Other Deadly Magic Page 19