? ? ?
Supper was a quiet affair, though Angie didn’t seem to sense it. Angie had sat Ka Nvsita, the Cherokee doll I had given her, on the chair beside her, and was telling the doll about her day, omitting her time-out and concentrating on the flight and KitKit, who was still hiding on the top shelf in the butler’s pantry. According to the doll chat, Angie had enjoyed a stellar day.
Molly stared alternately at her daughter and at her own left hand clenching in her lap. She ate with determination, but I could tell she wasn’t enjoying the salmon and black rice Eli had made, nor the mixed greens salad—which wasn’t bad for green leaves and veggies and nuts and stuff.
With nothing settled and no decision made about what to do with Angie or the skull, Molly pushed away from the table and called Evan again, her voice low and worried. Together, over the cell connection, they warded the house, Molly’s incantation and Evan’s flute playing following her from door to door and window to window. When the house was protected, Molly took a pouting but seemingly obedient Angie Baby upstairs. I followed and watched as Molly and Evan put their daughter to sleep. They used a new working that Angie wasn’t expecting, a sneak attack that they didn’t announce or warn her about. The little girl’s eyes flew open in surprise and she resisted for some five seconds before she fell back on her pillow, eyes closed, and her breath even. Asleep. Molly looked from the little girl to me and said, “We had to.”
I nodded, relieved, and Mol turned back to her daughter. The music and chanted words of the new magical binding sounded through the house, the energies shivering along my skin and through the soles of my feet, sweet and dangerous and tight as thorny vines.
When Angie woke up, her powers would again be bound, more constricted than ever. I had a feeling that she was gonna be one ticked-off little girl. But safer. Much safer. When Angie was bound, Molly said some sweet nothings to her hubby and I pulled on Beast sight. The little girl’s body looked as if it had been wrapped in a cocoon of blue and red magical strands, with a touch of bright sunlight energies thrown in to seal it. There was no way she would be able to break this one. The bright yellow magics would cancel out her nascent dark magics. I knew next to nothing about how magic actually worked, but I understood this one on some basic, intuitive level.
Satisfied, Molly and I took the stairs down and joined the card game waiting for us at the kitchen table. Poker. Five-card stud. It seemed that I had a natural advantage in the game, because I could smell the difference between players’ excitement at really good hands and their change in scent when they were bluffing. Alex wanted to take me to a riverboat casino offshore in the Mississippi for some high-stakes gambling. I wasn’t interested in risking the money I had put aside, but the Kid wasn’t to be denied his experimentation and, with Molly here, he had another subject to test me against. I won every single one of the matchsticks we bet. Later, the Kid told me that if it had been real money, I’d have made about fifty grand, according to his own geeky conversion mathematics based on a terribly inflated value for the matchsticks.
I still refused to go gamble. Repeatedly. Watching his avaricious eyes go blank each time was priceless.
At nine sixteen p.m., I was holding a perfectly awful hand of a pair of threes, but it beat the other players’ hands if I was still reading the scents correctly.
A boom shook the house. Inside, the lights flickered twice and died. A drawn-out zzzzzz sizzled outside, in front. The sound resembled a transformer exploding and sparking. Or a small bomb? In the next second I realized that it couldn’t be a bomb, because Eli didn’t throw himself on top of the rest of us, but he did draw a weapon and vanish into the shadows. I didn’t remember seeing electrical transformers close enough nearby to make the sound we had heard.
I stood in a crouch so I couldn’t be seen through the kitchen window. Looked out into the street. The houses across from my house were still lit.
Eli’s voice sounded from the living room. “Lights are on at Katie’s.” He craned his neck, visible as a silhouette in the window, which was brighter from outside lights. He added, “And both neighbors have light.”
Molly said, “Y’all? We have a problem.” Her voice quavered on the last word. Her body smelled of sudden sweat and the acrid, bitter tang of terror.