Shadow Rites

“Right,” I said, relief scudding through me. “Get Alex to send Edmund here.” I stopped, thinking about what I had just said. I was treating Edmund like a blood-slave, which made me no better than a vamp. I rubbed my head and drew on the hard-taught manners I so seldom used. I rephrased, “Please ask Alex to please request the presence of Edmund here.”

Eli gave a half-smothered, derisive breath at my polite words.

“Molly, remember what Edmund promised. Evan will be fine. He’ll see it happens. But what we need right now is for you, all of you, to tell us what happened.”

“I’m breathing,” Evan said, his voice tight with pain, “so I can talk.” In the distance multiple sirens sounded as police and ambulances closed in from every direction.

“Okay,” Molly said, though it was a lie. She wasn’t okay at all. But the word meant that she was reining in her anger.

I knelt beside Evan as Molly lent her Earth magics to helping Evan with pain relief, tears drying on her face. “Evan,” I said, “you were outside the circle, and Jodi and I smelled a spell go bad. And then you jumped into the circle. And then we saw that you were on fire. Did you go on fire before you jumped into the circle or after? How do you remember it?”

“I didn’t jump inside. I’d have broken the circle.”

“You did jump,” Lachish said. “The circle didn’t break and it should have.”

“No, no,” Jodi said, her eyes holding a faraway stare. “There was the circle you had already raised, and then the ward you were starting to raise. And there was a third working. Something outside that was activated before Evan jumped into the circle, before he caught on fire. And it wasn’t your workings. I smelled something odd.” Jodi pulled out a psy-meter and started scanning the grounds.

“Iron and salt,” I said. “And here all along I thought that salt and iron were the antithesis to magic.”

“Nothing is ever an absolute,” Jodi said. “So that means the circle itself may have been a target instead of a bystander. Is that even possible?”

“It’s possible,” Lachish said, drawing out the word, sounding uncertain.

“Explain,” I said.

“There are two ways it might work. One: a group of witches were nearby with a working in process. Then our working triggered it, attracting it to us. The timing and similarity of energies being raised would have to be impeccable, which, to my mind, rules out an accidental merging. Two, which is much more likely: there was a booby trap working on the grounds, and when we raised the circle, and triggered the hedge of thorns ward, our actions activated the concealed working. The explosion was close enough to Evan to propel him into the circle.”

“That’s it,” Evan rasped. “The magic was under my feet. It exploded upward and threw me inside.”

I remembered the spell that had knocked Evan flat to his back earlier in the morning. That might have made him more likely to be hit again, but I didn’t want to say that aloud. “Okay. Assuming door number two,” I said, “and assuming Evan was an accidental target instead of the intended target, what would be needed for a booby trap?”

“A focus is the easiest method,” Lachish said.

“That’s it,” Big Evan repeated, now sounding dreamy, as Molly’s and Ailis’s magics pulled his pain away. I wondered if the young, untrained, and inexperienced witch could tell Evan was a witch, but she didn’t act odd, so I guessed not.

Emergency vehicles closed in on the Elms, the sirens doing that house-to-house fast echo of a neighborhood in the muggy South. “Yeah,” Evan said. “I saw a green leaf iron . . . focal.” And he was suddenly asleep, knocked out by the healing spell.

I knelt and checked his palms. Nothing there except blisters on the burned one. Eli said, “Jane, my cell just went out.”

“Lachish,” I said, pulling my own cell, “we need to keep everyone away from here, away from Evan, away from the circle. You know that my house has been attacked twice, by two witches using iron focal items. So was I, personally. Evan got some of the backlash.” I took a surreptitious look at my left palm, which was unmarked, no green eye there. Thankfully. I scrubbed my palm on my pants before opening my phone. “Alex sent you the photos. Did you recognize anyone through the pixelated-out mess?”

“No,” she said. “Their body shapes might have been any of dozens of witches in the state. But there was nothing visible of their faces.” Which I knew.

“My phone’s out too,” I said to them, poking at the dead screen. “Proximity to the broken circle?”

Lachish said, “It could be. Or it could be a multilayered spell with interrupted communications as part of it.” She looked at Jodi, who immediately started barking orders at the officers, to cordon off the whole block. Too many things were going on, going wrong, and I tried to think, while Jodi, standing on the patio tiles, waved the approaching ambulance into a parking spot. I could hear the voices as they explained to the cops and the paramedics what the witches were doing and what the holdup was. The cops checked their cells, to discover that they were out. Even their radios were nonfunctional, though the car engines themselves were seemingly fine. While the human cops cordoned off the area, I walked around the healing working and murmured to Molly, “Where are your kids?”

“Being watched over by a teenager playing World of Killer-Death-Something, and a werewolf.” She sounded wry, as if her life had taken off on an inexplicable tangent and nothing made sense anymore.