Molly hadn’t come to my hearing. None of her sisters had come. I’d kept glancing to the back of the courtroom, hoping. But they hadn’t come. I had only seen two of the Everhart witches while I was in Asheville, and that was because of vamp business, not friendship. Molly’s friendship had died. And why not? I didn’t deserve to have a relationship with her.
Despite, or maybe because of, the media coverage of Evangelina’s dying, I’d been cleared of any wrongdoing in the same way anyone would have been cleared, anyone who had stopped an armed killer from talking more lives. But the feeling that I’d managed to hide from in the months since I killed Evangelina had roared up like hot flame and taken me over. I couldn’t get rid of the feel of her blood, hot and sticky on my hand. Even now, I wiped the back of my hand on my jeans, feeling the cooling blood, long gone, but as real to my flesh and nerves as if it still coated my hand.
I had survived the distance from New Orleans and my accidental binding by Leo Pellissier, Master of the City of New Orleans, but only by hours. I’d flown back on Leo’s private jet, the fastest transport available to me. And retched the entire way home, sick as a dog because of my Beast’s inadvertent binding to the MOC, one that put a deadline on how long I could be apart from him, and also how far away from him I could go, even for short time periods. Getting my legal problems settled had made me deathly sick, but maybe the nausea was only partly from the binding. Maybe the rest of the sickness had been because Molly hadn’t been there. Hadn’t returned my fifteen million phone calls to her cell.
“Send her out!” Evan shouted, and a burst of wind hit the house. It creaked under the pressure. Evan wasn’t attacking my house on purpose. He was losing control. He was so furious that his magic was operating on its own, ripping free.
“Molly . . .” I stopped as my voice cracked. I took a slow breath, bent, and set the nine-millimeter semiautomatics on the floor in the open doorway where he could see them. The rushing air nearly froze the skin on my hands. I stood and crossed my arms, putting my hands under my armpits to warm them. “Molly’s not here. I haven’t seen her,” I shouted to him. “Why would you think she’d come to see me? If Molly ever really forgave me, she would have called. Answered my calls. Texted me. Something.” I laughed shakily. “She didn’t.” My voice dropped. “Though why that would surprise me, I have no idea. I haven’t been able to forgive myself.”
Moments later, the wind slowed to a trickle. Something in my bedroom overbalanced at the change in pressure and shattered to the floor. I glanced back to see the bed skirt dropping down and a lamp on the floor. I shivered in the cold. Over my head on the landing upstairs, I heard a faint click. Eli readying a gun. I looked up and saw the barrel of the rifle angled down from the floor. Eli was lying prone, aiming into the doorway. “Put it away, Eli.” When he didn’t move, I stepped into the doorway, standing so he’d have to shoot me first, before any attackers. He cursed softly behind me.
I stood in the doorway, the sun’s glare hiding Evan from me, except for a silhouette. A huge bear of a silhouette, six-six and more. Squinting, I made out his red hair and beard, fire-bright, his flannel plaid shirt and jeans. Boots laced up.
I put up a hand to shield my eyes from the sun and studied him. His face was drawn and pale, nose red as if from crying. Dark circles puffed beneath his eyes. He stood less than fifteen feet from the freebie house I lived in. Molly’s minivan was behind him, sunlight bouncing off the chrome. Evan’s rattletrap red truck hadn’t made the trip; it had barely made the previous trip to the Deep South, even with an air sorcerer tinkering with it. Which meant that if Molly was traveling, it was by air or rental car. Or maybe bus. Train. Anyway, easy to track, no matter how she’d traveled. My investigational brain kicking in when the emotional one was in turmoil. I tried for something lighter than his unintentional attack on my house. “You coulda called, you know. I’d have told you she wasn’t here, saved you a trip.”
Big Evan looked bewildered. “Why would you tell me the truth? Where is she?” he whispered. Louder, he said, “Her sisters agreed that she wanted to put things to rights with you. She’d been talking to all of us about you.” His body wavered, and he put a hand to the minivan to steady himself. I figured he was drained by the magic, or maybe drained by trying to control his magic, and wondered if my house would still be standing had he really been trying to destroy it. He said, “She forgave you a long time ago. I told you that she forgave you.” He raised his head and met my eyes, his cloudy with worry, his leaning, propped body looking unutterably weary. “She even went to your trial, in disguise, so the press wouldn’t give her trouble. With the numbers of people, you never caught her scent, did you?”
I opened my mouth, but no words came. I couldn’t help the rush of joy that flooded through me. Molly had come? Did that mean she had really, truly forgiven me?