Blood Trade

But what wasn’t happening was an ending to the spell.

Which meant something else was happening. The spell was speeding up. Whatever was supposed to happen slowly was suddenly happening faster.

Silandre lifted her head, her mouth open, and she took a breath so deep it made the candle flames waver. She sang a note. Only in that moment, with the single, strident note vibrating against my eardrums, did I recall Bodat’s comment back when we first started researching Silandre. She had been into opera. She and Lotus had sung opera. And the note she sang was interfering with both the spell and Evan’s attempt to break it.

The woman beside me shuddered and slid beneath the earth. All around the circle, the witches were sliding deeper, their faces stoic and unyielding as the dead.

Lotus took a breath, as long and slow as Silandre’s, about to join in the singing. I was out of time.

And that was the spell. Time. Immortality. Not the enhanced life span of the vampire, tied to the night and to the taking of blood, but true immortality—dependent on nothing, with the speed and power and physical perfection of the flawless predator. I raced forward, my arm swinging back, my grip changing with my purpose. Settling and firming. From the corner of my eye, I saw Bruiser draw his own blade, following my lead.

Lotus’ note sounded, a clarion call to eternity. And I stepped over the circle. The ground shook. Lightning danced over my skin. Striking deep as my foot landed on the inner side of the circle. Pain shot through me, but my foot landed true. My body pivoted, all my weight behind my arm. My blade followed, sweeping ahead of me. Taking off Lotus’ head. The note stopped the instant her head left her neck. There was little blood. A drop that flew upward, a trickle that followed gravity. Her head spun, her silken hair flying in an arc, obscuring eyes that looked, for a moment, startled.

Silandre’s head left her body an instant later, falling toward the sheet. Evan pulled the flute from his lips, stopping his melody. The silence was awful for three rapid heartbeats that fluttered against my eardrums. The heads landed, soft thuds. The bodies slid down.

The earth moved. The clock-working fell in a shower of sparks. With a roar of sound, like a sandstorm, the earth disgorged the witches. Bodies erupted from the grave.

I fell. Bruiser’s feet slid, his balance gone. Evan caught himself on one hand.

On hands and knees, feeling my way in every respect, I crawled across the moving earth to Misha. When I reached her side, I grabbed the amulet on her chest. Gave it a mighty jerk. Misha’s eyes opened. She gasped.

“The amulets,” I shouted. “Rip them away!”

The next moments were never clear in my mind, seen in snapshot instants of memories, as Big Evan raced widdershins and Bruiser raced sunwise, ripping the amulets from the witches, including the one who had been swallowed alive by the earth and regurgitated, gasping and vomiting sand.

Then the house above us began to groan and shudder, dust and debris raining from the old floor. There wasn’t time to get us all up through the trapdoor. Evan Trueblood took up his flute and, with a working he had ready, stored for use, he blew a hole through the foundation wall.

We grabbed every live being and threw them out the hole into the icy, wet night. I had a feeling that Evan held the house up through force of will and every spell he had stored, because it fell just as Bruiser and I dragged the last witch to the curb.

•   •   •

Two days later, Big Evan sat in his pickup truck, his head bowed, his hands draped over the steering wheel, fingers dangling. He had been avoiding me, so I had ambushed him in his truck. I waited till he had the key in the ignition, opened the passenger’s door, and leaped in. “Not before we chat,” I said.

He heaved a sigh that moved the air through the cab—or maybe that was just his magics settling. “First,” I said, “You worked with me when you might have sent me packing and tried to do this job on your own. Thank you.”

When Evan didn’t look up from his hands and only pursed his lips, I went on, realizing later that he might have been pursing his lips to kill me with a whistle. “Second, I tried, I really tried, to do it the witch way. And I’m sorry I interfered with your spell—”

“It wasn’t working.”

I closed my mouth. I wasn’t sure what wasn’t working, but these were the first words Evan Trueblood had spoken in my presence in two days and I wasn’t going to get in the way.

“I thought I had all the math in my head. I can do math around ten other witches, I can see it in the air around a working. I thought I had it. But I messed up.”

I was staring at his hands now too, not sure where this was going, but it sounded perilously close to an apology.

“If you hadn’t been there, the fangheads would have gotten totally free of the temporary binding and attacked me, and I’d have been part of the circle. And they would have finished the working. All of the witches would have died. Molly would have killed me.”

I smiled at that, but Big Evan wasn’t watching me. He turned his hands over and stared at the empty palms. “In the past hundred years, the witch population in the Southeast dropped by seventy percent.” He turned his head to take me in. I was sitting there in my jeans and sweater, my hands pale from the cold, attempting to keep my face unemotional, nonreactive. “Vamps are responsible. We knew it, but we couldn’t prove it. The European council of Mithrans wasn’t interested in anything we said, though we petitioned them for decades at every convocation, or whatever the fangheads call their gathering of the chief bloodsuckers.

“Because of you,” he nearly snarled the word, “because of the investigation you did into the Damours, the holder of the blood diamond, Leo Pellissier had to admit there was a problem, had to admit to the kidnappings, the murders, the whole nine yards. He had to report it to the European vamps.”

Evan shook his head and, frowning sourly, looked out into the day. “The Witch Council had been trying to get the MOC involved in the investigation for decades and he wasn’t interested. Not till you got involved and discovered the answer to something that we had been investigating for more than twenty years. And you did it all in a matter of weeks, without getting my children killed.”

“Nearly.”

“Shut up. I’m not done.”

I sat back and shut up.

“You saved my wife. You saved my kids. Admittedly, you put them in danger in the first place, but I know my wife, and she was right in the middle of the trouble anyway. Then you killed one of us who had been caught up in the darkness of demon calling. You saw it and you dealt with it, and I didn’t see it and I did nothing. You saved us all. And I have treated you like shit. And, yeah, I know how you feel about that word, but that’s what I treated you like.”

Evan laughed again, this one through his nose and almost real. “You can talk now.”

“Wow. That’s a lot of self-flagellating hooey.”

“I am— It is not— You are so fuc—”—he paused, fisting his hands—“dang polite, it’s sometimes hard to remember you carry an arsenal and have a posse to do your bidding.” He looked from his fists to me and said, “Stop grinning and go ahead. Talk. I’m listening.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

Evan glared at me, and I shrugged. “Seriously. Thank you. I love Molly. I love your children. I even love you, though that shocks the heck outta me. And I have missed you all so much. I want back the family we once had, but I know that Molly may never again let me. It makes a huge difference to know that you aren’t sabotaging that in any way.”

“I know it wasn’t sensible to have been so angry at you for everything that happened,” he said. “Evangelina was out of control, so steeped in demon magic and blood magic that the entire Witch Council working together might not have been able to bring her down. You did us all a huge favor taking her on. You put your life on the line.”

I shuddered, remembering the way her flesh gave to the pointed blade. The feel of her blood, hot and thick, as it erupted over my hand. “I would take it back, if I could,” I whispered.

Evan sighed. “I knew all along that my feelings weren’t logical and that I should just deal and get over it. I knew that. But . . . there’s stuff you don’t know. About me and my history. And it makes it hard to let people in, close to my family.”