Midnight Curse

Her face and body language were wary, but she carefully raised her head and shoulders, tilting to the side so she could take a sip of the water. A little bit dripped onto the sheet. “Let me guess,” she said when she’d finished. “This is where you do the good cop thing, yes? Water, maybe some food, and you hope I’ll spill my guts?”

“Nah. I mean, if you want to spill your guts, that’s cool, but I thought we could just chat for a minute. Not about Oskar,” I added quickly. “I don’t know much about boundary magic, is all.”

Her eyes narrowed just a tiny bit. She hadn’t expected me to sound so friendly about it. Most people in the Old World hate boundary witches, especially all other types of witches. The way Kirsten tells it, boundary witches were responsible for a decent chunk of the Inquisition. That still didn’t make them inherently evil.

“Jesse knows a little more, though,” I went on, pointing my soda in his direction. “He’s friends with a super powerful boundary witch.”

Katia snorted so hard that Shadow’s ears pricked up suspiciously. I kept my face absolutely even, and after a moment Katia’s expression settled into skepticism. “Sure he is,” she said sarcastically, eyeing Jesse. “This human is what, a catalog model? And he knows a boundary witch. The rarest of all witch breeds.”

“Hey,” I protested on Jesse’s behalf. “That’s not nice. He could definitely go runway.”

Jesse shot me a look that said we don’t have time for dicking around, Scarlett. Okay, that was fair. “Anyway, he knows a null,” I said, pointing at myself. “Jesse’s pretty connected. Right?” I looked at him.

Jesse, who had probably figured out where I was going with this, nodded. “She lives in Colorado,” he said to Katia. “I’ve known her about . . . mmm . . . four years? Five? Funny thing, though, she hasn’t aged a bit.”

Katia’s jaw clenched, so subtly that I probably would have missed the reaction if I hadn’t been watching for it. She was fighting an internal battle, wanting to ask a dozen questions, but also not wanting to give us anything we could use against her. “There have been rumors,” she said finally, grudgingly, “of a power rising in Colorado. But you may have heard those same rumors. This means nothing.”

It was too late. I’d seen the hope in her eyes, and I knew I was right. Katia was working for Oskar because she didn’t have anyone else. No family, no other boundary witches. I could understand that. I had, after all, worked for Olivia for a long time. I put down my soda and stood up. “Let’s go for a ride,” I said to both of them. To Katia, I added, “and on the way, Jesse’s going to make a phone call.”

Katia’s expression was reluctant, but we didn’t give her much of a choice. Jesse picked up one end of the cot and I hefted the other. It was just narrow enough to make it through the doorway. Shadow walked just behind us, growling a little at Katia.

At the van, I opened the back doors and we loaded the cot straight in, urine bag and everything. Katia didn’t protest, but her eyes rolled around wildly, watching for one of us to pull out a gun or a machete or something. I had a couple of bungee cords in the back, and I used them to secure the head side of the cot to the back of the driver’s seat, so at least she wouldn’t be sliding around back there.

Jesse got behind the wheel, and I rode sideways in the passenger seat so I could keep an eye on her, but I didn’t really think she would try anything. She was too weak, for one thing, and there was also a hundred and eighty pounds of twitchy bargest drooling about fourteen inches away from her lap.

Before we pulled out of the driveway, Jesse called Lex and explained the situation. I wanted to tell him to make sure Lex knew we hadn’t given Katia any private information or anything, because I was deeply afraid of Lex, but I managed to bite my tongue.

The Colorado witch readily agreed to talk to Katia. Jesse passed her the phone—not on Bluetooth or speaker, which I think got him points from our hostage. I told him to head north on PCH, and the van started to move.

For a moment, Katia held the phone like she was expecting it to explode, but after a few seconds, she sort of curled her body toward the window and spoke quickly in a low tone, asking questions. The first few were about boundary magic—making sure Lex was who she said she was. After that, though, there was a lot of listening. I heard Oskar’s name and a weird phrase in Latin. And then there was more listening. I was occupied for a few minutes with giving Jesse directions, and when I glanced back again, Katia was crying.

Finally, she reached out—Shadow growled, and Katia moved more slowly—and handed me the phone. “She wants to talk to you,” Katia said, her voice shaky. If anything, she looked a little sicker. Had Lex threatened her? I could see why that would scare her. Hell, I’d been there.

I held the phone to my ear. “Lex?”

“I want her,” came the boundary witch’s brusque voice. For a moment I was preoccupied with relief that she didn’t seem mad at me.

“What do you mean, you want her? We’re not choosing kickball teams.”

“I mean,” Lex said with fake patience, “I’m getting in the car now, and I’m driving to you. When I leave, I want to bring Katia with me. Oskar has her passport, so she can’t fly.”

“Oh. Um, that’s not my decision to make,” I said, glancing at Jesse. “She’s done some bad things here, Lex. I can’t guarantee she won’t need to face punishment for them.”

“You’re going to have to,” Lex insisted, “if you want her to testify in your friend’s trial. Which she’s willing to do.”

I rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand. Was I willing to let Katia get away with her part in this? She’d helped set up Molly. At the same time, she was probably the only one who could save Molly.

I didn’t like it, but I didn’t have a lot of choices, not if I wanted to save my friend. “Okay, look,” I said to Lex. “Let me get my cardinal vampire to call your cardinal vampire and approve all this, and you’ve got a deal. Does that sound fair?”

Lex didn’t even pause. She’d expected me to say that. “Fair. And Scarlett?”

“Yeah?”

“Keep her safe, get her to me, and you and I are square. In fact, I’ll owe you one.” And she hung up the phone.

I held it away from my ear so I could stare at it. Seriously? Just like that? I had been pretty sure that somewhere in Lex’s gloomy castle, which was where I figured she lived, was a dartboard that had my picture on it. And a lot of bullet holes driven through it.

I turned in my seat to look at Katia. “She seems to really care about your well-being.”

Katia’s tears had stopped, but she was still sniffling a little. “That is because,” she said with a tiny hiccup, “she is my niece.”

Chapter 36

See, it was good that Jesse was driving. I would probably have wrenched the steering wheel sideways so I could stare at her. As it was, the van stayed on the road, and Jesse and I both blurted “What?” at the same time. There was no mention of jinxes or Cokes.

Katia was still sniffling, so I grabbed a few fast-food napkins out of the glove compartment and passed them back. Trying to keep my voice level, I said, “Can you please explain that?”

“When I heard about boundary magic being used in the West,” she said, “I should have guessed that we were related. There are so few of us left. But I just never thought . . .” She took a moment to clear her throat, swiping at her eyes with the wadded-up napkins. I wanted to go back there and do it myself, so I could get her talking again, but I managed to wait.

Finally she was ready to speak again. “In my family, I was the . . . mmm . . . ‘surprise’ baby. Change of life baby, it’s sometimes called here. I had a sister who was fifteen years older, Valerya. She was like a second mother to me.”

Her voice was warm when she said that, but then it hardened. “When I was five and she was almost twenty, she was taken.”

“By whom?” Jesse prompted. I could see him fighting the urge to turn around in his seat and look at her.