“Noted,” Eli said.
The smaller children were sleeping deeply, a spelled sleep that had kept them silent, out of harm’s way, and safe from playing with the weapons in the room. Evan carried them both up the stairs while Eli and I took care of securing the house, which meant putting weapons and noisemaker alarms at the windows and doors. You don’t always need a fancy electronic security system. Fog can make some systems useless, and if witches are involved, they might have ways to eliminate or decrease even a magical system’s effectiveness. I’d seen it happen—once—to an Everhart-Trueblood ward, a hole blown into it, leaving the edges tangled and frayed.
A pyramid of empty cans was a nifty, low-tech way to be alerted to a B&E.
When Evan came back down, I picked the conversation back up. “You can hear long-distance spells?”
“Sometimes. If the spell is directed at me, if the speaker isn’t in a vault with no outside air flow, and if the working isn’t warded against it, which most practitioners don’t bother to do.” He went to the kitchen and brought back three cans of Coke. We each popped a top and took a swig. “Warding against long-distance listening requires more energy, and not many witches have the ability. Since I’m not officially registered with PsyLED—yet—not everyone knows I’m an air witch.” The weariness in his tone pulled at me. His wife was missing. His children were in danger. Because they were my friends and my extended family, they were my responsibility. And I hadn’t helped much so far.
I looked down at my drink can for a moment. It was my fault that Big Evan was out of the closet in any way. Maybe my fault that Molly was in New Orleans, and therefore her family in harm’s way. Again. “I’m sorry,” I said again, feeling the weight of guilt. I stared at my hand and clenched my fist, remembering the feel of hot blood spurting over my hand as I killed the violently psychotic witch Evangelina, Molly’s sister, the demon-caller. Remembering. Knowing I had no choice. Yet knowing that I’d hurt Molly beyond imagining.
“No help for it,” Evan said, reading my body language. “Once Evie brought her power play public, in front of cameras, it was only a matter of time before someone looked closer at the Everharts and, by extension, me.”
But I knew he was thinking about the children upstairs. The witch gene was X-linked, meaning it passed through the X chromosome. Molly was a witch, Big Evan was a witch. There was a one hundred percent chance that all their daughters would have the X-linked gene and be witches. There was a fifty percent chance that any son, like EJ, would be a witch, making him predisposed to the childhood cancers suffered by almost all witches, cancers that killed almost all males. And there was also a fifty percent chance that any girl child would have the witch gene on both X chromosomes, making her a weapon, dangerous, something to be feared or desired. The Trueblood children had already been in danger, as Everhart children, the descendants of a known witch, a danger made far worse by me when I let others in on Big Evan’s secret. I had done it to save Rick LaFleur, my ex. I had done it with all good intentions. And like most of the things I do when flying by the seat of my pants, my action had unintended consequences.
My anger, my protective instincts, which had seemed to be cooling, flared hot again. “I have to go back to vamp HQ,” I said, “and see what Edmund found out from the humans Wrassler took back. I’ll be home after dawn.”
Eli tossed me a set of keys, which I caught single-handed. “Take the SUV. Weapon up. And don’t surrender them at the door. Be careful.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said. But I did as he said, and weaponed up fully, holstering four semiautomatic handguns, my Benelli M4 shotgun loaded for vamp with silver shot—rounds made with sterling fléchettes—two vamp-killers, and twelve stakes in my bun before I left—the new stakes with small buttonlike ends to make them easier to shove through flesh. As I departed the house, I heard Evan singing softly, “B-b-b-b-bad. B-b-b-b-bad to the bone,” George Thorogood’s version, his singer’s voice low and rough and not hiding the anger and fear inside him.
As Evan sang, Eli chuckled, his eyes telling me that I looked good, real good, and that if other people hadn’t been present he would have been ragging me about being a totally kick-ass, hot chick. I just shook my head and closed the door on the lyrics. The sad part? I probably was bad to the bone. As if listening in to my darker thoughts, Beast whispered softly inside my skull, Jane is killer only, a litany she had begun not that long ago, and which, for reasons I didn’t understand, made me feel really awful.
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