I took the stairs two at a time, the birdcage swinging from my fingers, and the porch creaked in question. I was back early, and the old house knew something was up. Linus was no slouch, and he never cut classes short. She was right to be suspicious. But there was no good way to tell her I was having impure thoughts about the guy who had violated her trust instead of the one she adored. Though impure might be too strong a word. It’s not like I was picturing him naked, I was just…picturing him. And that was bad enough, all things considered.
“I’m not feeling so hot,” I told her, and it was the truth. “Linus let me go early.”
Concern warped the boards under my feet until I had to choose between stopping or face-planting.
“It’s not my jaw.” I brushed my fingers across Linus’s handiwork. “I’m just out of sorts.” The door swung open to reveal Boaz standing in the kitchen shoveling in cereal. “Have you eaten all your waffles?”
“You say all like there were dozens of them when in fact…” his lips moved in silent calculation, “…there were only sixteen fatalities.”
Suspicion confirmed, I made a mental note to buy more the next time I went shopping.
Casually munching, he gestured toward me with his spoon. “I wasn’t expecting you back so soon.”
That made two of us. Three if you counted Keet, who was thrilled to skip our lessons. The little dork was actually tweeting his heart out while hanging upside down from his perch. “Linus gave me the night off.”
“Really?” His eyebrows climbed. “Did Mumsy need her toenails painted?”
I cracked a forced smile. “You’re bad.”
“I never claimed to be otherwise.” He turned up the bowl and drank down his milk. “I’ve got a while before I have to go.” Whatever he saw on my face had him ducking down to kiss me with sugary lips. “I’ll be back soon. I get four days off in two more weeks.”
“I’ll add it to my calendar,” I grumped.
“Are you pouting?” He tapped my chin with his hooked finger. “You can’t miss me that much.” A purely masculine gleam brightened his eyes. “Do you?”
“Stop fishing.” I stuck out my patchwork tongue. “You just got here, and you’re already leaving.”
“Work sucks.” His gaze fixated on my mouth. “I would quit all this if I could.”
“Do you mean that?” Joining the sentinels hadn’t exactly been his idea.
“I enjoy the job. I like my unit. Becky is a hoot. She’s a good partner to have at your back.” His knuckles grazed my cheek. “What I don’t enjoy is the leaving.” His voice softened. “I want to be home more often.”
“So you can spy on Amelie?” Goddess only knew who he had watching her since I wasn’t a snitch.
“I need to keep an eye on her.” His rough thumb glided over my bottom lip. “I need to keep an eye on you too.” He exhaled. “It kills me not being where I’m needed.”
“Will things always be like this?” I had no idea what the career of an Elite sentinel entailed, not really.
“I can’t say for certain.” His expression shifted into thoughtful lines. “Things are intense right now.”
“The Undead Coalition?” The governing body for vampires balanced on the knife’s edge of an all-out civil war. Longtime members, wealthy and powerful clans, were withdrawing from the organization, forsaking the protection of the Society, and joining a movement spearheaded by the master vampire responsible for kidnapping me. The clans left behind were getting antsy. A war with this splinter cell meant pitting them against their brethren or suffering the wrath of the Society. Rock, meet hard place. “Are things still destabilizing?”
“Yes.” He dropped his hand. “Half of the master vampires in the Coalition are in favor of maintaining the old laws. The other half are fighting over every damn thing and bogging down the system. Of those masters, half have established ties to vampires we found at the estate where you were held or to the vampires the dybbuk killed. Odds are good they’re plants meant to gum up the works, and they’re doing a damn fine job of helping chaos reign.”
“Any fresh leads on the Master?”
“I would have updated you if there had been.” He hooked an arm around my shoulders and led me into the kitchen. “Classified intel or not, your safety is my first priority.” He put his bowl and spoon in the dishwasher then turned back to me. “Has Linus mentioned what his mother learned from the masters involved in the attack?”
“Four out of the six committed suicide by ingesting UV capsules prior to interrogation.” Perhaps scenting the trap, they came prepared with a pill stuffed between their cheek and gums. All they had to do was bite down and incinerate. “The others carried their secrets to the grave.”
Boom.
A percussive blast struck the wards surrounding Woolworth House, and the resulting tremors rattled the foundation beneath my feet.
Panic seized my lungs in a vise as I ran into the living room. “Woolly?”
“Grier,” Boaz snapped. “Get back here.”
With the wards operating at full power, I had nothing to fear as long as I was in contact with the house. Before he could catch me, I bolted out onto the front porch and kicked off my shoes. I stood barefoot on the peeling boards, flexing my toes, reading the magic.
Mentally, I reached for the wards, drawing their weft and warp into sharp focus. Ear-splitting dissonance near the front steps clued me in to where Woolly had been struck. I examined the area, turning over the weave in my head, but found nothing. Confident she remained secure, I scanned the yard, my gaze landing on the carriage house.
Linus.
Fingers trembling, I palmed my phone and jogged down the side of the wraparound porch. I thumbed the keys and pressed the phone to my ear, relaxing when it connected with a static burst of background noise that hinted at a location downtown. “Where are you?”
“I’m at the Lyceum.” A dark undercurrent sharpened his tone. “What’s wrong?”
“Woolly was attacked.” The planks under me shivered, and I amended, “She’s under attack, right now.”
A furious growl rose behind me, and I didn’t have to turn to know it was Boaz and that he was pissed.
“Get your ass back in the house.” He wasn’t looking at me, he was scanning the garden for signs of intruders. “I mean it, Squirt. There’s nothing you can do out here except make yourself a target.”
“For once, we agree,” Linus murmured. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Hating that they had ganged up on me, and that they were right, I stomped back into the foyer and stared up at the chandelier. “What can you tell me, girl? You’ve got to give me something here.”
Woolly projected images in my head, the chaotic jumble difficult to understand since houses and people didn’t process information the same way. One picture I had no trouble recognizing. The front porch stood out in stark relief. That was the unharmonious area I had already identified. There were other flashes too: a radiant starburst, a fallen tree limb, and two English peas. None of them made sense.
I patted the wall to let Woolly know I was proud she had done her best. “Where’s Amelie?”
Boaz, right behind me, no doubt to make certain I followed orders, blanched. “She didn’t do this.”
“What?” I fully disconnected from Woolly and shook my head clear. “I didn’t say she did, but we both felt the tremors. Where is she? Why didn’t she come running too?”
The rest of the blood drained from his face. “I don’t know.”
“Let’s split up.” She had to be here somewhere. Linus hadn’t bound her to the house as he promised his mother, but surely Amelie wasn’t so foolish as to have used the distraction to escape. “We’ll cover more ground that way. Start in the attic? I’ll take the second floor.”
We raced upstairs together, peeling apart on the landing. I shoved into her bedroom. Empty. I moved on to mine. Empty. Other rooms lined the hall. I ducked my head into each of them. Empty, empty, empty.
Amelie wasn’t here.
A flash of blue light snared my attention as a small boy popped into existence beside me. He wore a dark blue sailor suit with sagging ankle socks and dirtied canvas shoes. A matching cap, wrinkled within an inch of its life, sat at a jaunty angle on his mass of blond curls. “What’s wrong? I heard yellin’.”
Apparently good diction was a respect paid only to strangers or parents, and I was neither. The more comfortable Oscar got with me, the more he relaxed, and the more suffixes he axed off words.
I affixed a smile on my mouth for his sake. “We can’t find Amelie, that’s all.”
“Is she playing hide-and-seek?” The black voids of his eyes sparkled like polished coals. “Can I play?”
“Sure thing, kid.” I could use all the help I could get. “First one to find her wins.”
“Deal!”
Magic swelled in the room, easy to sense through my connection to Woolly, and he vanished.
I met up with Boaz out in the hall as he was climbing down from the attic. “Well?”
“No luck.” He folded the access ladder up then secured the hatch behind him. “She wouldn’t leave.”
Blue light blasted my corneas as a boyish face appeared at the end of my nose.
“I found her,” Oscar crowed. “I win! I win!”
Smiling to acknowledge his victory, I cut my eyes toward Boaz, but Oscar wasn’t great with hints.
In all the excitement, the little ghost had forgotten we couldn’t talk openly in front of Boaz for his safety.
“Since she’s not inside,” I reasoned with Boaz, “she must be outside.” I made a subtle gesture at hip level for Oscar to lead the charge. “The wraparound porch covers a lot of real estate. We need to search all four sides.”