“Black light magics? I thought you said most magics are blue or green. Or red.” He thought and added, “Sometimes purple.”
I nodded. “Yellow, orange. Prisms of the rainbow, light and energy as used by a witch. They work like a signature to people who can see them. Angie’s used to be white. Blue sometimes. Rarely with little motes of black power in them. Except the very first time I ever saw them manifest. She was barely out of diapers, and she got mad, and a whirlwind of her magics ripped through the mobile home they were living in. The magics were dark, like an angry cloud. She could have killed her parents. Instead Beast calmed her and stopped the attack. Molly and Big Evan bound her that day for the first time.”
I drank more tea, trying to put it all together in a cohesive timeline. Working with long-lived vamps, I had learned that timelines were important. “When Little Evan and Angie were in the witch circle waiting to be sacrificed by the Damours, Angie was surrounded by dark magic. And when she freed me from the head Damour, there were streaks of dark motes in her magic. I had never seen her magic up close enough to get a good look, and back then I couldn’t bend time, slow it down, to really study it, and I didn’t understand . . . but I think her magic became dark that night. I think she learned something and has been using it. Or was contaminated by it. Maybe not black magic, not blood magic, but something that can go either way.” I looked up from my mug. “This is going to be hard on Molly and Evan.”
Eli nodded. “You want me there?”
I shook my head. “No. Yes. I don’t know.” I thought some more. Having Eli with me would be cowardly. I was not a coward. Or not often. “No,” I decided and stood. I refilled my cup and added more cream and sugar, stirred it, but then left it on the table. I walked out one of the new doors to the side porch. Molly was sitting there in one of the rusty chairs, rocking, her dress full-skirted and flowing out and down to the decking, chatting on the phone. Her red hair was flopping to one side, and the curls followed the same line as the dress. She looked as if she were posing for a painting by some famous watercolor artist. The thought was way too artistic for me, and I shook it away.
Molly’s tone informed me that she was talking to Big Evan, her hubby. I walked over and sat at her feet, my legs curled up guru-style in a half lotus. It was an intrusion as well as an act of submission unusual for me and especially for my Beast. Her perfumed scent was too strong for me, augmented as it was with my Beast senses, and I resisted the desire to sneeze or wrinkle my nose.
Molly’s voice trailed off and we could hear the dripping and tapping of rainwater and the ever-present sound of traffic. “Jane’s here,” she said.
“Would you put me on speaker?” I asked.
Molly tapped the screen and said, “Evan, you’re on speaker. Jane has something to say. And she’s sitting at my feet. Like a house cat.”
I managed a smile. Molly understood what my position and posture meant.
Evan said. “I’m not going to like this one little bit, am I?”
“Probably not,” I said. To Molly, I asked, “You already told him about Angie?” Molly nodded slowly, then shook her head. Mixed signals meant he knew parts. Slowly, I went on, knowing that I needed to say this in a special way, with compassion and tenderness and all that crap. But I didn’t know how to do things like that, and hadn’t figured out how during the walk out here. I was a bull in the china shop of my friends’ emotions. “You know I can bubble time. So when I heard Angie scream, it just kinda”—I shrugged—“happened. And I ran inside. She had her hands buried in the hedge—that’s the new and improved hedge, by the way—over the sabertooth lion skull. The trap part of the new hedge had been activated, and she was stuck. But I was standing outside of time and I saw what she was doing. She was zapping the manacles. And her magic was like black light. She’s using her power raw, without maths to give it form. Controlling it just with her mind and will. And I have a bad feeling that she saw me bubble time, which means she might know how to do that too.”
Molly closed her eyes. Her face went a paler shade of cream; clearly she hadn’t told Evan yet. I caught a whiff of her reaction, which was all tangled and twisted and broken.
“Thanks for sugarcoating it, Jane,” Evan said, the sarcasm so thick even I understood it.
I shrugged and stood, patted Molly’s hands, and walked back inside. I was still barefoot, the wood floor smooth but with the rolling surface of a very old house. At the table, I picked up my tea. “That went well,” I said, lying.
Eli chuckled, and there was no amusement in the sound at all.