Evan and I were having trouble with them, with the blood and the butchery. Of course, nothing fazed Jane. And, after years of dealing with crime in New York City, little fazed Brax.
I met Evan’s eyes, seeing the steely anger there. My husband was easygoing, slow to anger, and full of peace, but the photos of the five McCarleys had triggered something in him, a slow-burning, pitiless rage. He was feeling impotent, useless, and he wanted to smash things. The boxing bag in the garage would get a pummeling tonight, after the kids went to bed for the last time. I offered him a wan smile and went to the AGA stove; I poured fresh coffee for the men and tea for Jane and me. She had brought a new variety, a first-flush Darjeeling, and it was wonderful with my homemade bread and peach butter.
“Kids okay?” Brax asked, amusement in his tone.
I retook my seat and used the tip of a finger to push the photos away. I was pretty transparent, I guess, having to check on the babies after seeing the dead McCarleys. “They’re fine. Still sleeping. Still . . . safe.” Which made me feel all kinds of guilty to have my babies safe, while the entire McCarley family had been butchered. Drunk dry. Partly eaten.
“You finished thinking about it?” he asked. “Because I need an answer. If I’m going after them, I need to know, for sure, what they are. And if they’re vamps, then I need to know how many there are and where they’re sleeping in the daytime. And I’ll need protection. I can pay.”
I sighed and sipped my tea, added a spoonful of raw sugar, stirred, and sipped again. He was trying to yank my chain, make my natural guilt and our friendship work to his favor, and making him wait was my only reverse power play. Having to use it ticked me off. I put the cup down with a soft china clink. “You know I won’t charge you for the protection spells, Brax.”
“I don’t want Molly going into that house,” Evan said. He brushed crumbs from his reddish, graying beard and leaned across the table, holding my eyes. “You know it’ll hurt you.”
I’m an earth witch, from a long family of witches, and our gifts are herbs and growing things, healing bodies, restoring balance to nature. I’m a little unusual for earth witches, in that I can sense dead things, which is why Brax was urging me to go to the McCarley house. To tell him for sure if dead things, like vamps, had killed the family. How they’d died. He could wait for forensics, but that might take weeks. I was faster. And I could give him numbers to go on too: how many vamps were in the blood family, if they were healthy, or as healthy as dead things ever got. And, maybe, which direction they had gone at dawn, so he could guess where the vamps slept by day.
But once there, I would sense the horror, the fear that the violent deaths had left imprinted on the walls, floor, ceilings, furniture of the house. I took a breath to say no. “I’ll go,” I said instead. Evan pressed his lips together tight, holding in whatever he would say to me later, privately. “If I don’t go, and another family is killed, I’ll be a lot worse,” I said to him. “And that would be partly my fault. Besides, some of that reward money would buy us a new car.”
“You don’t have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, Mol,” he said, his voice a deep, rumbling bass. “And we can get the money in other ways.” Not many people knew that Evan is a sorcerer, not even Brax. We wanted it that way, as protection for our family. If it was known that Evan carried the rare gene on his X chromosome, the gene that made witches, and that we had produced children who both carried the gene, we’d likely disappear into some government-controlled testing program. “Mol. Think about this,” he begged. But I could see in his gentle brown eyes that he knew my mind was already made up.
“I’ll go.” I looked at Jane. “Will you go with me?” She nodded once, the beads in her many black braids clicking with the motion. To Brax, I said, “When do you want us there?”
? ? ?
The McCarley house was on Dogwood, up the hill overlooking the town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, not that far, as the crow flies, from my house, which is outside the city limits, on the other side of the hill. The McCarley home was older, with a nineteen fifties feel to it, and from the outside it would have been hard to tell that anything bad had happened. The tiny brick house itself, with its elvish, high-peaked roof, green trim, and well-kept lawn, looked fine. But the crime scene tape was a dead giveaway.
I was still sitting in the car, staring at the house, trying to center myself for what I was about to do. It took time to become settled, to pull the energies of my gift around me, to create a skein of power that would heighten my senses.