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Gradually her convulsions subsided. She whimpered and went limp.
I shut off the water to a trickle. Julie drew a long shuddering breath and sobbed. Slowly tension leaked from her muscles. “I’m okay,” she gasped. “I’m okay.”
I pulled her from the bathtub and put a towel on her head. She trembled and hugged herself.
I opened the door and glanced out. The lavender-eyed thing hovered by the kitchen window, her eyes fixed on the door. She saw me and hissed again.
“Girl…Come…Want…”
Julie sank to the tile, squeezing into the narrow space between the toilet and the bathtub, chopstick legs sticking out. “She was in my head. She’s trying to get back in right now.”
“Try to shut her out. We’re safe behind the wards.”
“What if the magic falls?” Julie’s eyes widened in pure panic.
“Then I’ll cut her head off.” Easier said than done. That hair would grab me like a noose. It’s hard to cut hair unless it’s held taut.
“Girl?”
“Shut the hell up!”
Why Julie? Why now? Was that thing her mother, turned into something by the coven’s magic?
“Julie, does that thing look like your mother?”
She shook her head, locked her arms over her knees and began to rock. She could only move an inch or two squeezed into that narrow space. “Gray. Muddy, sliding, shifting, nasty purple gray.”
“What?”
“Gray like the skeleton. Nasty…”
“Julie, what’s gray?”
She looked at me with haunted eyes. “Her magic. Her magic’s gray.”
Oh God. “What color is a werewolf’s magic?”
“Green.”
A sensate. A living m-scanner, who could see the magic, very rare, very valued. I had her with me the whole time. I knew there was something magic about her, but between metal dogs and infected boyfriends, I never got a chance to ask. “That thing, she’s gray and purple? Did you say purple? Like a vampire?”
“Weaker. Pale purple.”