Dark Heir

“Yes,” Sabina said, her tone placid, “at first. And if he cannot be held in this cage, and if I cannot best him one on one and keep him there in a test of our joined power, then I will use the Blood Cross sliver and send him to the light.” Which was vamp for killing him true-dead, which went against Leo’s proscriptions, and her own, and Bethany’s, for that matter. “As you would say, I have planned for all eventualities, even the most dire.”

Worst-case scenario, I thought.

“It’s okay, Jane,” Molly said. “The circle you’re sitting in isn’t activated. The moment that Santana touches the outer circle, you’ll feel it. We all will. Then you just have to roll over the inner circle, on the side away from him. You rolling over the circle wall will activate the snare of thorns, and the energies will then pull Santana inside.”

Yeah? No. “I don’t like being inside a cage, even if the door’s wide open.”

Sabina said to me, “You have agreed to be our lure. You brought the stains of his life force, the fluids that were hung upon the wall with him?”

I hesitated. This sounded too simple. And too dangerous. Though not as dangerous as what the fifty-two humans had experienced. What choice did I have? “Yes,” I said, after the pause had gone on too long. “I brought it.” I opened Eli’s gobag and dug around for the gauze. I reopened the packet and set it on the grass between my knees, making sure it wasn’t touching me, or the chalk of the inner circle, and that there was plenty of space for me to roll or somersault over it if needed. I didn’t like this. Not one bit. I didn’t like that witches I didn’t know were in charge. I didn’t like that Sabina was involved—a fanghead so powerful she could probably do what Santana had done and immobilize us all—and who was a witch herself. I didn’t like that Sabina and Lachish seemed so chummy. I didn’t like that two very weak witches were finishing out the circle, instead of five strong witches. New Orleans had plenty. Why two weak witches? Was I missing something? Yes, of course, I was flying by the seat of . . . of someone else’s pants, which was stupid and dangerous. Mostly, I didn’t like that Molly was there. I wanted her safe at my house. Dang it all.

I hung the gobags around my neck and made sure I had ash-wood stakes within easy reach in my bun. If it came to a physical fight, wood wouldn’t kill an old vamp, but it might immobilize him long enough for me to break the circle and get my weapons. If the cage I was sitting in didn’t hold him. I looked at Molly, my misgivings clear even by witch-light. She gave me back a look that said she was worried too. Great. Just great. I mouthed, Does she know about your magics?

Molly shook her head, the motion tiny, to keep others from noticing. Crap. She hadn’t told Lachish that her magics had gone to the dark side, from strong earth magics with a hint of moon magic, to death magics. “Molly—”

“I’ll be fine,” she interrupted.

I compressed my lips together, holding in the words I wanted to say.

Lachish looked back and forth between us, but when neither of us spoke up, she indicated that all the witches should sit and take up their implements for a working. As an air witch, Lachish took out a necklace of feathers: hawk, owl, and one long, golden eagle flight feather. The two weak witches already had theirs on the ground—the moon witch using a fist-sized moonstone, polished and bright in the night; the stone witch using a dark green stone the size of her own bony knee, smoothed by water. Molly laid a gnarled stick of wood in front of her knees. A whole, small tree, based on the way it twisted off at both ends. I sniffed and recognized the scent of the plant. Rosemary. The last time I’d seen Mol cast in a group working, she had used a live rosemary plant, and she had killed it with her death magics. Now she used the root, trunk, and branch of a rosemary plant, and I had to wonder if the aromatic dead plant was the one she’d killed that day.

“What do I do? Just sit here?” It felt like time-out at the principal’s office when I was growing up. Except the scenery was nicer than the principal’s tiled floor and army green walls, and the outside air was better smelling, even in the middle of the city at night.

Good food smells, Beast thought. Want to hunt.

“Pretty much,” Molly said.

I just smiled, stretched my neck, rolled my head, and rotated my shoulders, getting ready for . . . anything. But mostly to move fast. I was sitting so that I was facing the two weaker witches, and so that Molly was at my back. She’d had my back at workings before and I trusted her to smack me with her magical root if I needed to do something, a thought that made a titter tickle in the back of my throat. Nerves.

“Breathe in,” Lachish told the witches, “and breathe out.” Her witch-light fluttered and went out. “Again. Slowly. And”—she lifted her hands into the air—“we are together and we are separate, as the circle of power that binds us rises, making of us like-minded family.”

There were several kinds of workings witches could do, from manipulated energies that changed human perceptions—like glamours and obfuscation spells—to wyrd spells, where the energy for a working was prerecorded into a single word or phrase. Hedge of thorns was a protective shield spell that Molly and her sisters had created, and which combined a warding and a modified wyrd spell. Santana had used offensive battle wyrd spells against me, and he’d nearly killed me. There were also summoning spells that called a specific person, and communication spells that allowed witches to talk over long distances, though with the advent of cell phones they were little used these days. There were also the off-the-hip workings that accomplished something new, but they came with inherent dangers and outcomes that were often difficult to predict. This spell started pretty simply, with the witches matching one another’s breath patterns, even Sabina, who didn’t need to breathe.

The outer circle began to glow again, that pale moonlight color, silvery gray, opalescent and feathery, a soft sheen of energy. Beast pushed into the forefront of my mind and the circle changed color, glowing brighter, but now with dark green shadows that moved, as if the wind pushed forest leaves against the surface, as if vines crawled up from the ground to meet at the center overhead, a dome of protective power. In the distance of the park grounds, I caught a glimpse of white, flowing like a mist, or perhaps a ghost, across the lawn. Then the magics brightened and I lost sight of it.