Raven Cursed

nearly kill you. Because I put your mama in danger.” Big Evan’s glower turned uglier, colder. I thought about werewolves in the mountains near this house, killing people. “Because he loves you all so much that he’d fight anything to protect you. Your daddy’s doing the right thing, Angelina. He is.” I handed her to him.

The big man took her in gentle hands and set her down behind him, his body a barrier between us. I thought my heart would break. “Go back to the movie, Pun’kin,” he said.

“Okay, Daddy.” Her footsteps tapped away.

There weren’t many men who made me feel little, but Big Evan was one of them. He stood six feet six, and weighed over three hundred pounds, mostly muscle. He had red hair, a full red beard, and brown eyes so hard they could cut stone. He crossed his arms and braced his feet. Waiting. I pulled the damp lavender scarf out of my pocket and held it out to him. “Tell me what you smell. If you think it’s important, we need to talk. You, Molly, and me.”

Evan took the scarf and held it to his nose. He breathed in. Evan is a sorcerer, one of the few alive anywhere, and still in the witch closet, to protect his kids from unwanted attention. His eyes flew down to mine. Widened. He inhaled again. “I smell Evangelina and blood magic.”

I nodded. Evan knew about the witches in New Orleans and the diamond. Of course, he thought it was still safe and in New Orleans. “She stole the pink diamond from my weapons safe,” I said. “She’s been using it on vamps, blood-servants, and me. She’s using it to grow younger and prettier. Though she has the right to draw on her sisters’ magics, they haven’t noticed the changes in her. Which means she’s not just drawing on them as coven leader, she’s spelling them too.”

“That bitch is spelling my wife?” he snarled. Evan’s eyes narrowed, calculating, putting together what he might do to stop it. When he reached the end of his ruminations, he said something vile under his breath. “And I can’t interrupt the spell without serious consequences. Why didn’t you destroy the relic?”

“How?” I asked. “How do you destroy something that absorbed the energies of dying witches for hundreds of years? Drop it in the ocean? In a volcano? What happens to the energies in any of those cases? They don’t just wink out, poof, it’s gone.”

“You’ve brought nothing but evil to this house in years. I don’t want you here.”

Tears burned in my eyes, but he’d never see them. “Fine. You figure out how to handle it.” I yanked the scarf away, swiveled on a heel, and stalked back to the SUV.

“She lost some weight.” It sounded like the words were dragged out of him. I stopped, staring out at the curve of the world. The sky was bright, a patch of blue showing in the west. “Evangelina has. And”—he blew out a breath that sounded like a small storm—“at least fifteen years.”

I clenched my hands and turned back. “Her hair is silky as a child’s,” I said, “something adults’ hair loses by the time they’re forty or so. If her skin glowed any more we wouldn’t need lights. She let a vampire feed from her. I saw the wounds. When I accused her of it in front of her sisters, I don’t think they even heard the words.”

“This is your fault.”

“Accepted.”

“You better come in.”

I took a breath to steady my nerves and entered the house. The new door opened into a great room. The former carport’s back brick wall was now a fireplace with merrily burning gas logs and a hidden laundry room. Bump-out windows were on the western side, Molly’s orchids on display. Some were in bloom, including a heavenly vanilla. Big Evan stood still, mentally checking the house wards, eyeing the locks. “No opening the doors, Angie,” he said.

She nodded without looking at us. A kiddie film was on the TV screen, and her attention was fastened on a princess and a pony, her small body curled into the seat cushion of an Evan-sized, leather couch. She yawned and pulled an afghan over her, looking sleepy.

Little Evan was standing in the door to the kitchen, bare-chested, wearing footie jammie bottoms. He stared at me, eyes wide. I patted him on the head as I climbed the steps into the kitchen. The small intimate space had been expanded into the old family room and now housed a larger table, a pantry, and a central island as well as skylights for Mol’s herbs, growing in a bay window. But the heart of the kitchen was still the old Aga stove with bread baking in the oven, beef stew bubbling on top, the teapot on perpetual simmer, and copper pots hanging over it all.

Molly was leaning against the counter when I came in, wearing a denim smock and dark red blouse. Her hair was up in a ponytail, and she wore garnet earrings. She clutched a fist between her breasts and her eyes were hesitant, sliding back and forth between Evan and me, nervous. “What’s wrong?” she asked. I cringed to know that, when my best friend saw me, the first thing she thought was trouble.

“Evangelina,” Evan said, “is dabbling in black magic.”

Molly’s eyes seemed to lose focus for a moment; then she smiled brightly. “I have hot chai on the stove. Evan, would you get the mugs?”

Evan looked like he’d been poleaxed. He had expected Molly to agree or deny or get angry, not act as if the words had never been spoken. His eyes on his wife, he opened the new glass-fronted china hutch and hooked fingers through three teal mugs. Molly took them and started setting up for tea. Evan said, “Evangelina is practicing black magic.”

“I have homemade gingersnaps and snickerdoodle cookies. And I know Jane wants whipped cream in her tea.” She opened the fridge and Evan took the spray can from her. He closed the door, cupped her head in his huge hands and tilted her face up, in what was the most tender gesture I had ever seen. He smiled down at his wife and she smiled back. I heard mumbled words, likely some form of Gaelic, saw his lips purse and heard him breathe out as he blew at Molly’s face.

I thought for a moment he had broken the spell on Molly. But she jerked back, strong emotion flushing through her, so hot I could feel it across the room. She whirled to me, pain and hurt on her face. “You never liked Evangelina,” she said. “But you don’t have to make up things about her.”

“Make up—”

“You never liked my sister. I tried to give you time to get to know each other, to become friends. And instead, when she met a man she liked, you took him away. How could you do that?”

Bruiser. She was talking about Bruiser. “She used a love spell on him, Molly. That’s wrong.”

“A love spell?” Evan asked. I nodded and he released his wife’s arms, stepping back, his shoulders drawing together. He was watching her the way a doctor watched a patient he was diagnosing. I just felt sick to my stomach.

“All I did was tell him he’d been spelled. I didn’t take him away,” I said gently.

“You always treated her like she was less than you, unworthy of you!” Mol said, as if neither of us had spoken. As she slipped past Evan, he made a circular motion with one hand, indicting that I was supposed to keep Molly talking. I didn’t think that would be hard to do.

“I’m scared to death of her. Doesn’t mean I hate her,” I said, “or look down on her.”

Tears gathered in Molly’s eyes. “My sister has suffered more than any woman should ever suffer, and all because of them,” she nearly spat, “the things you work for now.” She advanced on me, one finger pointing, her arm out straight like a wand or a staff, a weapon of destruction. Tears coursed down her face. “They took her family!”

Oh crap. A vamp turned Evangelina’s family? I vaguely remembered she had been married long before I met Molly, but thought the hubby divorced her and got custody of their daughter. But then, I hadn’t been friends with all of them until just before Carmen’s baby was born, and I didn’t know much family gossip about Evil Evie. Behind Mol, Evan looked confused, as if he’d never heard that vamps took Evangelina’s family. With a tiny head-shake, he put that bit of news away for the moment and blew up a pink balloon. The sight of the big, bearded man blowing up a girly balloon was comical, but then it hit me. Evan was an air witch. He was using what he had on hand to construct a spell on the fly. “Why did Evangelina come home from New Orleans?” I asked, trying to guide Mol to safer topics.

Molly hesitated, “To get away from the vampires. The things you’re helping to—”

“She’s dating a vampire,” I said. “I saw the bite marks on her—”

“No. That’s a lie,” she said. Behind her, I saw Evan pause in the balloon blowing and sip something from a