“Wait.” I turned to Seth, shooting silver daggers at him with my gaze, the figurative version of the very real thing another witch would drive between his ribs. “What is she talking about?”
“I bought the house,” Seth said.
I shook my head. “You can’t.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“You can’t live next door to me.”
“I have no choice.”
“Of course you have a choice,” I said. “If this has anything— If you think I’m going to—” I cut myself off. He always flirted with me, but I’d figured it was a power play. A joke.
But what if he was serious? Could he really, truly… No. Surely not.
“If I think you’re going to do what, Alma?” he asked. “You’re looking good, by the way. Your brown eyes are especially warm this afternoon.”
I scowled at him.
“I didn’t realize you’d known each other so well,” Birdie said, smiling mischievously. “Did you buy some of his apples too? That’s how I met him. Totally sucks you had to sell the orchard, Seth.”
“All the money’s in wine now,” Seth said. “Pinot noir sells for a lot more than apple juice.”
“You told her you owned an apple orchard?” I asked him.
“I did own an apple orchard. Now I own that house right there.” He pointed across the yard.
“No,” I said again. “You can’t live there. You can’t live here.”
“I can’t live anywhere else.”
“You—”
“Alma, listen to me.” His voice lowered. “I can’t live anywhere else. Literally.”
I stared at him.
Birdie suddenly busied herself with Random, hooking her finger through his collar and turning toward my house. “It’s almost dinnertime, isn’t it, buddy? If you two don’t mind, I’ll take Random inside for his evening chow. Let me know if you need me.”
I thanked her, grateful for her belated instincts, and looked at Seth. Although I was annoyed with him for—for everything—a huge weight lifted to see he was alive.
He’d survived. For almost two months, I’d fought an unwanted grief, fearing he was dead, assuming I’d never see him again even if he’d survived. And now he was here, as difficult as ever, but I was glad, very glad.
Of course, I couldn’t let him see that. “Let’s go for a walk,” I said.
“Toward my new house, if you don’t mind.” He took a set of keys out of his jeans pocket. “I feel better the closer I get to my grave.”
Chapter Three
I hurried to catch up to Seth, already striding down the road to Birdie’s old house. The sun had sunk behind the last of the trees, and the growing darkness caused me to trip over a sprawling rosemary bush.
“Your grave?” I called out, tripping again. Seth always shook my equilibrium. Already my feet felt disconnected from my legs, my heart disconnected from my brain. I took a moment to pause and catch my breath. “What do you…? Please slow down. I’m wearing slippers.”
He stopped at the end of the neighboring driveway and turned. His hair was uncombed, longer than it had been, and he hadn’t shaved in a while. It only made him look more like a movie star.
“That’s better,” he said. “Your house drains me. You’ve erected quite an unpleasant fortress against the likes of me.”
To my surprise, when he wiped his brow, I saw the sheen of sweat on his skin catching the last of the day’s light. Beneath those good looks, something wasn’t right. I’d been blinded by our complicated past and my own mixed feelings not to see it right away. He was displaying the signs of a possessing spirit who was losing his grip on the human host.
“Are you sick?” I asked, alarmed in spite of myself. I’d saved his life at least twice now, at a high cost to myself; it would be a shame if he wasted it.
“I’m dead,” he said. “My true body is no more. I killed it, remember?”
Only recently had Seth told me he was a changeling, a fairy put into the body of a human baby some thirty years ago. His fae mother, wanting a glorious future for him, had done it when he’d been a baby himself.
I hadn’t known such beings were real; the Protectorate, the global witch governing body, had taught me that all possessed humans were demons, nothing more or less. Maybe most of them even believed it.
But Seth didn’t have the soul of an evil demon, and he’d grown up to feel guilty about the human body he’d stolen. He’d tracked down the ex-human, then a fairy named Launt, and offered him his body back. The fairy, however, had tried to kill Seth instead, and he’d died in the resulting fight only a few feet from where we stood.
“I thought you’d die when Launt did,” I said. “But I’d hoped… when you seemed all right and apparated away—”
“I learned the hard way that I’m unable to travel away from here very long.” He inhaled deeply. “And so here I am.”
“How far or how long can you travel?” I asked.
“I got as far as San Francisco before I began to die a slow, painful death.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t the high cost of living?” I laughed nervously. He didn’t join in. “Sorry.”
“If it wasn’t for Dr. Mendoza, I would’ve died behind a bush in Golden Gate Park.”
“Helen found you?” The old witch wasn’t the type to offer help for nothing. In fact, I owed her myself for a favor she’d done me, and I feared she would insist on collecting soon.
“She gave me some wellspring water and stuck me on a bus to Santa Rosa,” Seth said. “By then I was feeling good enough to get to Sebastopol where I owned an apple orchard.”
“How long have you owned property in Sebastopol?” That was only twenty miles away.
“Two years,” he said.
I shook my head. All that time, the creature who had caused me so much trouble was only a short drive away. “Right,” I said. “You have an apple orchard. Right here in Sonoma County.”
“Had. Just a few acres. Or ten. Tiny, really.” He smiled at me. “After our first meeting, I longed for your company but knew I had to go slow. I didn’t want to scare you away.”
I’d been tracking him down to kill him. I doubted it was my company he’d wanted. “You knew Launt was nearby. It had nothing to do with me.”
“He was making his way along the Russian River. I tracked him to Guerneville and then decided to settle down and figure out my plan.” He wiped his brow again. He seemed to be breathing more normally now.
I had to admit the proximity to Launt’s death site was indeed helping him. I’d been trained as a demon hunter to recognize the signs of possession sickness so I could finish the job, which I’d lacked the ruthlessness to do. They’d called it an Incurable Inability when they’d dismissed me.
“Where do you get all this money to buy apple orchards and bungalows in California?” I asked. It was only one of many questions I had, but perhaps the easiest for him to answer.
“My parents left it to me.” His voice softened. “My human parents.”
“In Minnesota,” I said.
“In Minnesota.”
“How’d they die?”
“I ate them.” After a moment, during which I glared at him, he added, “Just kidding.”
“Ha ha.”
“Car accident,” he said. “Forget demons. That’s what you witches should really worry about. Traffic accidents are far deadlier than spirit possession.”
“It’s not my opinion of demons that matters. As soon as the Protectorate finds out you’re here, they’ll kill you.”
The town of Silverpool held a secret wellspring, a magical pool that was highly valuable to witches, fae, and demons. Wellsprings were such hotbeds of supernatural conflict that a Protector—a high-level witch in the Protectorate—would be assigned to live nearby and keep violence to a minimum. The last Protector had been murdered, and a replacement had not yet arrived. As soon as one did, however, Seth would be history.
“I have no choice. If I leave,
I die. If I stay, at least I have a chance to defend myself. Like you, my power is greater here where—” He cut himself off and stared over my shoulder. “Bye!”
He vanished.
I had only a split second to admire the absolute perfection of his teleportation—no smoke, no flash of light, no fading, just immediate absence that left me stunned and blinking—before the rumble of a motorcycle caught my attention.
I froze to listen, my stomach tightening. For some symbolic assignments, agents for the Protectorate rode motorcycles. Even now, my first reaction was relief that Seth had escaped in time. If the Protectorate found him, even a minor agent, they’d kill him. One possessing spirit was as intolerable as another.
But my relief vanished. A rider at sunset was probably coming for me, not Seth. My guts clenched at the sound, remembering the trauma it had led to the last time I’d heard that engine. I broke into a run.
One narrow lane, surrounded by tall trees, led up the hill from the bridge into town, and the single beam from the motorcycle’s headlight lit up the trees in front of me.
Before it had passed the first house on our block, I was already sprinting through my front garden, snatching up a handful of oak leaves from the leaf-littered path, and plucking a thick stem of oleander from the hedge along the road. At least there was only one bike. If there had been three, I’d know they intended to take me tonight.
Into my bra I shoved the oak leaves, which would help me lie convincingly, and tried to remember what oleander could do. My formal training had been modern hard magic, in the classrooms of the Protectorate, and only after I’d been fired had I begun educating myself in the old ways. Herbs were fussy and unpredictable… like me. I’d taken to them immediately.
Oleander was poisonous, right? Would it deter a silver-jacketed Protectorate agent with instructions to interrogate and possibly collect a nonaffiliated witch? I didn’t work for them anymore, but any witch would be powerless to refuse. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t try.
I held the branch out toward the road like a sword. The motorcycle roared past my arm, turned in front of my driveway, and parked next to me, its front wheel facing the street for quick departure.
The oleander had failed me. I made a mental note to study it more carefully later—if I got a later. Management at the Protectorate was always changing, and I didn’t trust any of them.
Letting the oleander drop to the ground, I put my hand on my beads and waited for the agent to dismount and announce himself. A moment later, when she stood before me and removed her helmet, I saw the rider was a woman. She looked about twenty, with medium-brown skin and curly black hair in a short Mohawk. She wore the heavily studded leather jacket that agents wore to issue a summons. In criminal cases, they would come at midnight, so maybe I wasn’t in serious trouble.
“Raynor expects you at first light.”
The slight tremor in her voice told me she wasn’t as tough as she wanted to appear. The last time I’d been summoned, I’d put up a small resistance. And once I’d cast a witch or two, including the former director of the Diamond Street office, into the air.
“Why?” I asked.
She frowned. “Why?”
“Why does he want me?”
“How would I know?” she asked, showing some spirit.
I liked her guts. “All right, I’ve gotten the message. You can go.”
“You’re supposed to come with me.”
“Thanks, but I’ll drive myself,” I said.
“But—”
“The summons is for first light. You’ve done your job. You don’t want me on the back of that thing,” I said. “I have terrible balance and I startle easily. We’d never make it.”
“Raynor said—”
“I’ll be there. That’s all he cares about. First light.”
She licked her lips. “He said if that was a problem for some reason, to tell you seven would be acceptable. He… He’ll have bagels.”
Raynor was going to pretend I had a choice about coming? That made me more suspicious than ever. What did he want? “He offered bagels?”
“And coffee. The hot kind.”
“The hot kind?” I asked.
“He told me to say that, just that way. I don’t know why. Please don’t— Please just come. Will you?”
I was more powerful than the agent, but it didn’t matter; if I fought one, more would come, and eventually I would have to give in. “Yes, I said I would.” I rubbed my temple. Raynor mentioning hot coffee was meant as a tease; somehow he’d learned I drank it cold out of a can most of the time. Would he be joking if he was about to kill Seth? Was it a trick to get me out of town?
It made no difference. I couldn’t fight the Protectorate indefinitely; if the new director of the San Francisco branch wanted me in San Francisco, I would have to go.
“I’ll be watching for you.” The agent marched back to her bike, pulled the helmet over her head, and was soon riding back the way she’d come.
I let out a long, slow breath. If I didn’t love living in Silverpool so much, I might’ve considered moving to a distant corner of the world with less of a Protectorate presence. But I did love it, and I was too stubborn to give any more of my life to the Protectorate than I already had.
“Seth? She’s gone,” I said. But he didn’t reappear, and I couldn’t blame him for being cautious. They would never stop hunting him if they knew he was alive.
How could he possibly live here in Silverpool when the presence of a wellspring ensured there would always be powerful Protectorate witches here at all times? I’d do my best to guard him, but—
I stopped myself. Why? Why would I try to keep him safe… again? I’d already ruined my career because of him.
I looked over at the house that was now his, a small bungalow with a faint light glowing in the kitchen. Maybe he was inside making a burrito, having a beer, reading the news. Then I imagined a silver stake going through his human heart… and felt a wave of fury. I fisted my hands, knowing how quickly it would happen, how righteous the agent would feel, how hopeful of a promotion for doing the world a favor.
I pointed at the oleander branch and used a tendril of magic to fling it into the air.
Not on my watch.
I went into the house and told Birdie I had to go to San Francisco in the early morning. Birdie was new to the witch world and didn’t have much experience with the Protectorate.
“The director wants to talk to me,” I said. And then, to prevent her from worrying too much, I added, “A witch named Raynor has the job now, and he’s a big improvement over the last guy.”
“But why?” Birdie asked. “I thought you didn’t work for them anymore.”
“They’re like the witch cops. They can make me come in whenever they want.”
“Can they make me? Since I’m a witch too?” she asked.
“Technically, but they won’t. You’re untrained. They don’t usually bother with wild ones.”
“Wild. Cool.” She smiled.
A few weeks ago, I’d finally told her about demons, what I’d been taught and the ones I’d seen, and how the Protectorate’s ancient calling was to defend humanity from them. To my relief, she’d instantly taken my side in wanting to understand the motive of a creature, even a terrifying one, before trying to kill it. Or, Brightness allowing, not trying to kill it at all. Her loyal response had touched me more than I’d expected; in spite of my cautious, independent nature, I’d begun thinking of her as an actual friend.
But I hadn’t told her about Seth being a changeling; it was a dangerous piece of information, and I hadn’t expected her to ever see him again. But now I wondered, with him next door, if ignorance was more dangerous.
In fact, to survive as a witch, she was going to have to learn a lot more than how to sit on the ceiling.
“You’ve got to meet some other witches soon,” I said, “if just so you can make a few allies, learn who to avoid. You need to protect yourself. Ignorance isn’t safe.�
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She pumped the air. “Yes. I totally want to meet some witches. Let’s have a Halloween party.”
It was October, and I loved the season, but I recoiled at the thought of inviting a group of witches into my home. “No. I don’t do parties. We’ll find another way.”
While Birdie sighed in disappointment, I went to pack for my trip. There was no way to know how long I would stay, what Raynor wanted, or what I would need. They would strip me of metal and stone at the door, so I wore one of my beaded necklaces with a jute string. Plants meant nothing to them, so I left the oak leaves in my bra. What else? I’d escaped before; I could escape again. But why would he lock me up now?
I continued stuffing herbs and wood amulets into velvet bags.
Because maybe Raynor wasn’t in charge anymore. Maybe that was a trick and the new witches were going to—
I sighed and put my hand over my heart, willing it to calm down, to let whatever was going to happen, happen. Helen Mendoza had once told me a good witch’s curiosity should be more powerful than her sense of self-preservation, and if I ever took the easy path instead of the interesting one, I would regret it.
I bent over to stroke Random’s thick, soft fur for comfort. “Let’s see if I regret listening to her,” I muttered.
Chapter Four
Just before seven the next morning, I climbed the steps to the front door of the Victorian house on Diamond Street that held the San Francisco offices of the Protectorate.
I’d parked out front, perpendicular to the street; the hill was too steep for parallel parking. I touched my plain jute-and-redwood necklace, craving the extra power of silver, just the thin chain I usually wore. But last time, they’d confiscated everything of value, and I’d never gotten it back.
Before I placed my palm on the metal plate beside the old door, I squeezed a slimy wad of wet sage leaves in my pocket. The residue from the herb would put a barrier between my skin and the metal, which would try to put me under the authority of the witches inside.
The door opened to a trainee agent in a gray jacket. It was the messenger who’d come to my house on the motorcycle, now dressed for office work. “Raynor is waiting for you upstairs in his office.”
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