by Jayne Faith
Roxanne turned to me, accusing. “What is it?” she demanded.
Deb and I traded another look. “Let’s let Deb get to bed, and I’ll give you the short version. But first, I need your magical detective skills.” I held up the ballots.
I knew Deb was trying to protect Roxanne, but the girl was going to find out about the coven soon enough. I would tell her only what she needed to know.
“Get,” I said, shooing Deb toward the bedroom. “Sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
She dragged herself into the room, and a minute later the strip of light under the door went dark. Deb had to be truly exhausted to skip brushing her teeth and washing her face. Poor thing. I hated to think of the strain she was under. First the horror show with me, and then the coven imploding. She needed some peace and quiet.
I flipped through the ballots and found they were still divided into the two groups—real ones and falsified ones. I separated them, folded the stack of real ones in half, and shoved those into a back pocket of my jeans. Then I quickly sorted out the ones that had me as the write-in vote for Keeper of Means. I really only needed Roxanne’s read on those ones.
“Okay,” I said, beckoning Roxanne to join me on the sofa. “I know you’ve been working on reading the intent of the person who handled or magicked an object. Do you think you can try that on these pieces of paper?”
She looked down at them curiously. I’d turned the stack of fake ballots face down. I didn’t want her distracted by what was on the papers.
“Yeah, I’ll try.”
“Okay, one at a time, go through them and tell me who you think had the strongest influence on each piece of paper, and their intent, if you can read that.”
I held out the first one, and I felt her draw magic even before she touched it. She closed her eyes in concentration. Fine filaments of blue air magic spun around her hands and the ballot.
“Several people handled this,” she said. “Women in the coven. But Lynnette’s signature is the strongest.”
Roxanne’s brow furrowed. She cocked her head as if listening to something far off.
“Her intention is . . . yuck,” she said and made a sour face. Her eyes popped open. “Lynnette intended harm with this. Or, no, that’s not quite right. She didn’t intend harm with this literally, but she expected harm. Hoped for it.”
My stomach tightened, though I wasn’t surprised.
“Harm to who?” I asked, already fairly sure of the answer.
The corners of Roxanne’s mouth turned down. “You.”
She began to look seriously upset. I placed my hand over hers.
“I know this is kind of awful, but I really need you to do a couple more if you can,” I said quietly.
“Why would Lynnette hurt you? Does this have something to do with the stuff Deb didn’t want to tell me?”
I nodded. “It’s related. Do you think you can read some more?”
Her unhappiness was clouding into the start of anger. “What did she do to you?”
I leaned forward. “Nothing. She didn’t hurt me. But you can help me understand what she had in mind. It’s really, really important.”
Roxanne took a breath, clearly trying to re-center herself. She wouldn’t be able to read the ballots if she got too upset. She placed the ballot on the coffee table and took the next one from the top of the stack.
“Same thing, several witches handled this paper,” she said. “And it has the same icky signature. Lynnette manipulated this while thinking about something bad happening to you. I think . . . I think she expected you to die.”
Roxanne’s big eyes began to fill with tears.
“Okay, that’s all I need,” I said, quickly deciding not to force her to handle any more ballots. “I’m sorry that was so hard.”
I reached over and pulled her into a hug.
“You have to tell me,” she said, her words muffled against my shoulder. She pulled back. “You have to tell me what happened tonight with the coven.”
I smothered a sigh, suddenly wishing I had Deb there. She was naturally maternal. She’d know how to deliver the bad news in the right way and how to comfort Roxanne afterward. I took a deep breath and looked into Roxanne’s round eyes.
“It turns out Lynnette and a few of the other witches tried to falsify ballots for the officer elections,” I said. “It was a seriously bad thing to do. Lynnette and those women won’t be able to stay in the coven.”
Roxanne pressed her fingers to her lips for a second. “Who are the others?”
I gave her the names.
She shook her head. “But why?”
“Well, we don’t have all the answers yet, but we’re pretty sure Lynnette has been trying to hide some things from the rest of us. Some of it has to do with money, we think. We don’t know what else.”
Her shock was fading into worry, and her eyes filled again. “What’s going to happen to the coven? Are you going to split up?”
“I don’t think anyone wants that, but we’ll have to figure it out,” I said. “No matter what, the witches still love you and we’re all here for you. Deb and I aren’t going anywhere, and I’m sure I can say the same for the rest of the remaining members. Okay?”
She blinked and gave a faint nod. She stared at a spot on the floor for a long moment.
“Lynnette is a bad person,” she said and slumped dejectedly.
I couldn’t disagree. “Why do you say that?”
“She just is. I could feel that something was off with her, but I didn’t want to believe it because she seemed so dedicated to the coven. To all of you. How could she be such a traitor?”
“Lynnette cares more about power than anything else,” I said, deciding to be frank with Roxanne. She’d had plenty of people let her down in her life, and I hated to add to the list even if it wasn’t me specifically, but trying to hide the truth wasn’t going to help her. “She saw the coven as a way to gain greater power. That doesn’t mean she didn’t care about the witches. I think she did want all of us to benefit from the coven’s success, too. It’s just that power was the most important thing to her.”
“Yeah, I can see that now,” Roxanne said, her voice tiny. “It sucks. It really, really sucks.”
Tears spilled over her lower lids and ran down her cheeks. I wrapped my arms around her again.
“I know,” I said. “And I’m sorry.”
We sat there for nearly a minute, and I listened to her quiet crying and thought about how unfair it was. Roxanne had been abandoned by her parents years ago, her flaky brother had moved a thousand miles away for work, and now some of the women she’d looked up to and trusted had turned out to be traitors. It really, really did suck.
She sat back and wiped her cheeks. “Sometimes it seems like you can’t absolutely count on anything, you know?”
“Yeah, I know it can seem that way,” I said. “I’ve been let down by people, too. So has Deb. But you know what that makes you do? Really, really appreciate the people you can depend on. They’re like gold.”
She considered that for a couple of seconds.
“Better than gold. They’re like . . . what’s the rarest thing? I don’t know. Platinum. I think that’s more rare than gold. Yeah. You and Deb are my platinum people.” She gave me a fierce look and waggled her index finger in an admonishing gesture. “Don’t you dare make me demote you to, like, aluminum or something you can find everywhere. Aluminum is that crap friend who won’t even write back when you text.”
“I solemnly swear that I will always be one of your platinum people,” I said seriously.
That actually seemed to give her a bit of ease. She took a deep breath and nodded, and then she gave me a watery little smile.
“It’s late,” I said. “You should get some sleep.”
“Are you staying?”
“I’d like to, but I shouldn’t.” I shrugged. “I’m still a fugitive, and I’ve already put you guys at risk.”
She gave me a glum nod.
&n
bsp; “This will all be over soon, okay? Hang in there,” I said.
One more hug, and then she went to the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face.
Loki and I slipped into the kitchen, where I ran some water in the sink and then melted from the realm of the living into the in-between. We traveled back to Rogan’s, where I wearily fell into the easy chair and stared into the dark.
So. Lynnette had most likely expected me to die at the conflux, and that was why she’d wanted me to win the election for Keeper of Means. I wouldn’t have enough time to dig into the records, and getting me out of the picture would give her plenty of additional time to figure her shit out before putting someone else in the position. She must have done something really bad with the coven’s money to stoop to such an extreme. But I knew Lynnette, and she wasn’t the type to just stand by and hope the mages killed me. She’d said she had a plan to help me save my brother from the mages, but that was bullshit. No, she’d wanted to be there so she could make sure I didn’t make it out.
When had the tipping point happened? What exactly had turned her from wanting me in the coven badly enough to coerce me against my will to planning my death?
Maybe it was when she’d had to give up her exorcism talent to the oracle. That was her most coveted skill, the one she’d made her career and reputation on. But my guess was that the switch flipped when I became a Level III. It made me the most powerful witch in the coven, and far more powerful than she could ever dream to be. With Lynnette, it always came back to power. Perhaps she thought she’d lose her authority with the other women. Or maybe she just couldn’t stand to have a witch in her coven who could wield so much more magic than she could.
I supposed I didn’t have to worry about her showing up at the conflux and trying to get me killed. She was done for, as far as the coven was concerned. We had access to all the records, Becky had changed all the passwords, and Lynnette was out for good.
I fell asleep sitting in the chair and dreamed reaper dreams of roaming the in-between in eternal gray and silence. Eventually my dreams turned to the coven and Lynnette.
When I awoke to sunlight forcing its way through the living room curtains, I sat straight up. Something had occurred to me while I was asleep. It had seemed very, very important. I exhaled slowly through my mouth and closed my eyes, trying to bring the thought back to the surface before it disappeared into the fading memories of the night’s dreams.
My brain had been chugging hard while I slept, trying to make connections.
I reached for Rogan’s phone and texted Deb for Becky’s number. She picked up on the first ring.
“Hey, I was just about to get your number from Deb,” Becky said.
“Let me guess. You found something in the records that has to do with me. Maybe something to do with my brother?”
There was a second of silence. “How did you know?”
I let out a short, humorless laugh. “Moment of clarity.”
“Are you sitting down?” she asked. “’Cause you’ll want to take a seat before I tell you what I discovered.”
My stomach was already winding itself into a hard ball.
“I’m sitting down,” I said. “Shoot.”
Chapter 23
“I BELIEVE LYNNETTE took a bribe from the mages, or perhaps Jacob Gregori working in concert with the mages,” Becky said.
I gripped the phone hard against my ear. “A bribe for what?” I asked, but I already had an inkling.
“Well, it’s like it’s spelled out in a memo attached to the deposit, but—” She cut off, clearly not happy about what she was going to say next. “Didn’t Damien take Evan from Lynnette’s house?”
My breath stilled.
“Yes,” I said after a long pause. “I broke him out of the Gregori Industries campus, and Lynnette was there with a getaway car. We took Evan to her place, and Damien ghosted my brother right out of the guest room.”
“I imagine she was the one to initiate contact with whoever gave her the payment,” Becky said quietly. “My guess is she offered up your brother’s whereabouts.”
“How much financial trouble was she in?” I asked.
“She was lying about the coven’s income, and there were some large expenditures that she never told us about. I’m not sure what they were for yet.”
“What about the supposed angel investor?”
Lynnette had distracted the witches from my attempt to force her to confess some of the awful things she’d done by producing a letter from an anonymous donor who was offering large sums of money to fund the coven’s early days. It had worked, taking the focus off her and giving the women a reason to believe the coven would be financially viable. Most covens failed in their first few years, and every woman in our coven had a lot riding on the success of the organization.
“I can’t prove it definitively, but I don’t think there was one,” Becky said. “There are a few regular deposits of what I believe is the bribe money, and I think she made up the story about the anonymous investor and planned to make it look like the bribe money was investor donations.”
My head was starting to hurt. “So Lynnette sold out me and my brother. She’s the one who told the mages where Evan was. She’s the reason the mages were able to steal him away from me.”
“I believe that’s the case,” Becky said.
Maybe I should have felt angrier, but mostly there was just hollow clarity.
Becky told me a few other things she was looking into, and then we ended the call.
I slowly got up, stiff from spending the night in a sitting position. Loki was whining to be let out, but it was broad daylight. If the neighbors saw a strange dog in the yard of a house that had seemed abandoned, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it. I crouched down, out of view of any of the windows, and opened the back door for him.
Sitting against the wall while I waited for Loki to do his business, I pulled my knees up, hugging them to my body, and propped my chin on one kneecap.
The conflux was less than two days away. I didn’t really have a plan. I didn’t know what else to do to prepare.
Everything in me was pulling to try to do it on my own, but the oracle’s—Switchboard’s—voice echoed in my head. Going solo would lead to failure. The witches had offered to help. But what good was the comparatively feeble power of a handful of mid-level crafters against the most powerful mages in the world?
I pulled out Rogan’s phone and texted Deb.
Does collective magic still work when we don’t have a full coven of witches?
Female crafters had the ability to combine their power into group magic, and I’d seen it in action with my own coven. Collective magic was powerful, resulting in greater power than the sum of the individuals, but it wasn’t mage-level. Still, if it were an option, it might be my best bet.
Deb replied a couple of minutes later.
It should be possible, among women who have gone through a bonding ceremony. It wouldn’t be as spectacular as a full bonded coven’s collective magic, but the remaining witches should be able to get a little boost, if that’s what you’re thinking. Is that what you’re thinking? Because if so, we’re all in. We’ve already talked about it.
My thumbs hovered over the keyboard on the phone’s screen as I wavered. I hated the thought of putting the witches, and especially Deb, in the mages’ crosshairs. It made me nauseous to even think about it. But I forced myself to a reply.
Yeah. I need you guys. I hate to put you in danger, but I can’t do this alone. I need you to help me get Evan away from the mages. I can disappear into limbo land, but I can’t take him there with me.
Remembering what I saw at the site of the Boise Rip, suddenly I knew what I needed to do.
Deb texted back: What’s the plan?
My breath was coming a little faster as my idea took shape and my pulse sped.
I’ll let you know later tonight.
I stuffed my phone in my pocket, let Loki in, and disappeared
us into the in-between. I used limbo land to go to a spot near my old headquarters downtown, the building where I’d checked in for my Demon Patrol shifts for so many years. It was also the place where the elite Supernatural Forces was headquartered, though in a different wing of the building than Demon Patrol.
An in the nearby parking structure, I knew I’d find Demon Patrol cars. More importantly, I’d find armored trucks. Just like the ones that patrolled the Boise Rip. I no longer had my work ID that would have gotten me into the garage, but that didn’t matter. I could use the in-between.
First, I popped into the realm of the living outside the parking structure, across the street next to an office building I knew well. I made sure to place myself behind the large sign angled on one corner. There would be people around, but I just needed a quick glimpse of the parking garage to make sure I could get what I needed.
I faded back into limbo land and stepped out from behind the sign and into the swirling mist. Loki and I loped across the street and straight into the garage. I sensed the nearby souls of the living—guards in the booth of the garage, and others walking past or going about their work. But in limbo land, I had the parking structure to myself.
We walked up the ramp and circled up the gentle incline. A couple of times we moved out of the way of ghostly vehicles coming or going. On the third floor, we found what I wanted. The armored trucks.
I popped out of the in-between to rattle some truck doors, but of course found all of them locked. That was okay. I mostly needed to get a look at the situation. I was going to come back later when there were fewer people around.
The darkly tinted glass panes of the truck’s cab didn’t exist in limbo land, and I knew it would be a push-button ignition that didn’t require a key. Perfect. I could climb in easily and then pop into the living realm and take off with the truck.
Next, I needed to swipe a uniform. Most of the witches could hide in the back, but the driver would need to look legit to get on the rip site. I went back to the main entrance of headquarters, stood in the gray mist until the door opened, and then piggybacked inside on someone’s ID swipe. Loki and I jogged through the corridors of the elite forces wing until I got to where I knew I’d find the uniform racks just inside the women’s locker room.
