She wrinkled her nose at me. “Ewww, really?”
I found an old cardboard box for Lily, who held it as far away from her body as she could. “Rabid fox in a box,” she grumbled. “I swear this is the beginning of a twisted Dr. Seuss book.”
While she took the fox-box out to her car to keep it away from my animals, I ran upstairs to throw on jeans and a T-shirt. I also strapped a shredder stake to my arm with two doubled-up athletic headbands. Months ago, I’d nearly died for lack of a shredder. I no longer left the house without one. This meant that I wore long sleeves all the time, but that was fine by me. When summer came, it might be a different story, though.
Lily had returned and was waiting for me at the front door, twirling her keys around one finger. Despite her earlier complaints, she seemed pleased to be doing something useful, which probably had a lot to do with her inability to master the art of punching people.
I was just flicking off the lights to leave when I realized my skin was tingling. I paused and held up my arm, examining one of my tattoos. Was it pulsing? Or was something wrong with my eyes? “Lil . . .”
I felt, rather than saw, her turn and look me over. “You killed the fox,” she said, understanding. “You have to ground the magic, Lex.”
Oh. Right. Witches are made to channel, not possess. If I didn’t expel the death magic, I could end up “magic-drunk,” which was not nearly as fun as it sounded. Unfortunately, I only knew two trades witch spells, and one of them involved throwing people backward. “Hang on.” Stumbling a little, I made it back down the basement stairs and planted my palms flat on the floor so the tips of my tattoos touched the cold concrete. I mumbled the spell Simon had taught me for cleaning a space.
“Good,” Lily said approvingly, as the grime, fur, and fox saliva vanished from the floor. “The tattoos help with your control.”
“Yeah, thanks to you.”
I gave Lily Jake’s address, waved goodbye, and climbed into my own ten-year-old Outback, steeling myself for a nighttime drive into Boulder. Since I’d unblocked my ability to see ghosts, being behind the wheel after dark had gotten . . . complicated. A lot of people die in car accidents each year, and their deaths are so sudden and traumatic that they often leave behind remnants, spiritual snapshots of the dead. Driving through translucent figures of people was unnerving as hell, so these days I rarely drove anywhere after dark unless my job or my family required it. I had developed a few routes that bypassed as many ghosts as possible for when I needed to go somewhere alone at night, but I still had to mentally brace myself every time. They’re not real people, I would tell myself. They’re just psychic echoes.
It sort of helped.
I tried to distract myself by figuring out why Maven had called me in on a Tuesday. I had fallen into the habit of dropping in at Magic Beans, Maven’s twenty-four-hour coffee shop, on Sunday and Thursday nights to see if she had any daytime errands for me. A summons tonight meant some sort of Old World emergency, which was bad.
On the other hand, if there was a problem, Quinn would be there—we did this job together—and I was looking forward to seeing him. In theory, we’d been dating for six months now, but the first few months of that had been spent dealing with the aftermath of the Unktehila’s rampage. It hadn’t just killed people in Boulder; it had also attacked a spa in Indian Springs, leaving behind a lot of evidence and plenty of witnesses. Before confronting the creature, we’d arranged for a vampire to wait at the main exit of the spa to catch the people who were stampeding out of the building. She had used vampire mind control—“pressing minds”—to convince them nothing had happened. But a few people slipped the net, including a very sweet and unfortunately photogenic young mother and her toddler, whom the Unktehila had briefly cornered. The young woman was already on the nightly news screaming “giant snake monster” while the rest of us were still off dealing with the bloodshed.
I had to admire the way Maven had handled the whole thing. The official story she’d cooked up was great: some of the natural chemicals used in the spa went bad and were circulated in the air, causing temporary (but harmless) hallucinogenic effects. Several spa clients panicked and stampeded, causing a great deal of damage to the building’s interior.
Maven also sent vampires to work their magic on the authorities, getting them to stay out of the spa building while a “team of specialists” safely aired it out and checked for any people left in the building. The police were so busy calming witnesses, dealing with reporters, and handling the minor injuries caused by the public panic that most of them never did much to investigate the chemical story. Those who did follow up were pressed to stop.
The Grizzly Springs and Spa couldn’t survive the blitz of negative publicity that followed. I’d felt a little sorry for the spa’s owners, an older couple who reminded me of my own ex-hippie parents. But Maven, who has money the way other people have skin cells, quietly made them a very generous offer for the property, which of course they took.
Although everything appeared to be tied up with a neat bow, Quinn and I had been kept busy making sure the frayed ends of the official story held together. It wasn’t enough to just buy the property and shut it down. Stampeding, hallucinating spa guests could explain a great deal of damage, but they definitely couldn’t explain the snake-monster-sized holes in the walls and the pool floor. And as it turned out, the building couldn’t simply be demolished because of the fragile underground tunnels that ran beneath it. So Maven had to renovate the whole place, which meant pressing the minds of a number of construction workers on a regular basis. Pressing minds was Quinn’s department, but I had to hang around during the daytime to make sure it was working, which meant he and I were on opposite schedules for months.