“Yeah. This was too easy.”
“We actually transported a vampire and her victim out of her lair and into our circle with a simple find spell. I’m good and all,” Cia said, looking up at the black sky, “but I’m not this good.”
“Me neither.” They had until sunrise to figure out what to do. At sunrise the vamp would burn to death. And from the look of her, by sunrise, Evelyn would be long dead.
Thoughtfully Cia closed the outer circle, and the twins walked to the car.
? ? ?
Back at the Subaru, they had a good signal and Liz dialed Jane on her cell. Cia went to work on her tablet, researching the property they were on to see if she could discover why the power levels were so strong.
“Yellowrock,” she answered.
“It’s Liz.” Jane didn’t say anything. Jane didn’t say much of anything at the best of times, and this couldn’t be one of them. “I know we need to talk about Evie, and about family and about . . . stuff, and all, but, well, Cia and I were hired to do a finding spell for a missing woman who turned out to have been kidnapped in the middle of a blood-magic spell, and now we have a psychotic vampire and her kidnapped dinner—that missing human woman—stuck in a hedge of thorns spell on the side of a mountain.”
Jane chuckled. She actually laughed. “Why is this funny?” Liz demanded.
“You Everharts are . . . interesting.” Which was marginally better than other things Jane might have said.
“Fine. You have any advice?”
“Yeah. Send your GPS to my cell. Stay put. Asheville’s heir and I’ll be there as fast as we can.”
“Liz? Don’t hang up,” Cia said, holding her hand out for the phone. Liz passed it to her, and Cia said, “Jane, we’re on a site that used to be called Mayhew Downs, about a hundred twenty years ago. That didn’t seem important until our magic was a lot more powerful than it should have been. So I went back online to the history site and discovered that there was this big mystery about the town in the 1890s. The town was fine one day. By the next week, all the inhabitants had disappeared. Which is weird, right?”
Liz heard Jane grunt an affirmative.
“So I looked through all the daguerreotypes on the site and one shows the mayor and his wife—who is a dead ringer—pardon the pun—for the vampire trapped in our circle.”
“Hold.” The cell muted. When it came back on, the background noise had changed and they were clearly on speakerphone. Jane asked, “How did you get directed to that mountain?”
“By a Christian Louboutin boot, five-inch-spike-heeled black suede with fringe down the back seam. Size six and a half. It’s a right boot, and it was left in the middle of the missing woman’s bedroom,” Liz said.
“Huh. And how do you know the spell that took her was a blood ceremony?”
“Blood-magic charms in her bedroom.”
“Hold,” she said again. A moment later Jane came back on and practically snarled, “Do not get out of the car. Do not go back to the circle. Send me the coordinates. We’ll be there as fast as we can.”
The connection ended, and Liz sent the directions before putting her phone away. Outside, the black of night was filled with shifting shadows and a pale gray fog. “Did the vamp empty the town?” Liz asked, as much to hold off the night as to communicate with her twin. “Where did all the people go? And why?”
“I don’t know, but I have a feeling it has something to do with why our magic was so strong tonight.” Cia reached over and took her sister’s hand.
? ? ?
A little over ninety minutes later, Cia nudged her and Liz came awake with a start. “Lights.” Three, no, four sets of headlights were winding up the mountain, a line of cars that—even in the dark—looked heavy and powerful. “Is that what I think it is?” Liz asked.
Cia said nothing, but her grip on Liz’s hand tightened.
The cars pulled in and parked in a half circle around them; the engines went off and the headlights went dark. There was nothing sinister in the positioning of the vehicles, but Liz’s palms grew itchy. Sitting in the Subaru felt vaguely like being at the end of a net that was about to close. Forms emerged from the cars, gliding forms that moved with a predatory grace. “Vampires,” Cia whispered.
“And Jane.”