I instinctively paused, waiting for him to make a joke about death and the boundary witch. It didn’t come. “What’s going on, Simon?”
“I can’t talk—”
“If you don’t tell me, I’m coming over there right fucking now,” I broke in. I’d had a long day.
Deep sigh. “Look . . . a bunch of the other clan leaders are here. And they’re pissed.”
“Because of the weekend passes?”
“Among other things.” A loud banging began in the background and Simon yelled, “One minute!” To me, he added, “I need to go. They’re going to take my phone away until we figure this out.”
Take his phone away? It should have sounded a little funny, like someone was threatening to ground him, but Simon’s voice was so grave it chilled me. “Are you guys in danger?”
He let out a choked laugh. “Not physically, no.”
“What’s going to happen when one of them looks at your phone and it says ‘Lex’?”
“You’ve been listed as ‘Emily-TA’ in my phone for the last six months.”
God, he was smart. “Then why do you sound scared?”
A beat, then Simon admitted, “One of the other clan leaders got in Lily’s face. She . . . reacted badly.”
“Reacted how?”
“She zapped the woman.”
“Shit.” As part of her original deal with the witches, Maven had cut off the Colorado clans’ access to the most powerful level of witchcraft—apex magic, which included Lily’s favorite trick of turning into a human Taser. Maven had restored Clan Pellar’s magic so Simon and Lily could help me stop the sandworm. We’d all kind of hoped no one would notice.
“We knew this could get out, though, right?” I said, hoping they’d had a contingency plan. “If you just explain about the sandworm—”
“Oh, we’re way past that.” Simon sounded weary. “It’s the timing, Lex.”
“What does that mean?”
He started to answer, but I heard another knock on his end, then Simon’s voice explaining very calmly that he had to tell Emily how to proctor the exam and he’d be done in a minute.
While he was speaking, I jerked a hand frantically through my hair, yanking at the tangles. This was getting worse and worse. When Simon finally came back on the line, I blurted, “Maybe if I come over and tell them about the sandworm—”
The same choked laugh, this time with an edge of desperation. “Don’t. Your name has already come up, and not in a good way. Somehow the other clans found out that we’ve been helping you with your side project, and . . . you know.”
My heart sank. Most of the witches I’d met considered boundary witches the next best thing to the Antichrist. No wonder they didn’t want him calling me. I might use my evil powers to corrupt him further.
I knew I should apologize for making a bad situation worse, but instead my mouth decided to double down. “What’s so wrong with helping me lay ghosts?” I asked defensively. “It’s not like you and Lily are sacrificing goats and worshiping the angel of death.”
Heavy sigh. “Lex—”
I kicked at my bedsprings, hating myself. “I know. I’m sorry, Si.” My voice came out thicker than I’d expected. “Before you go, please just tell me. How worried do I need to be? What’s the worst-case scenario, here?”
There was another pause, and I could practically feel him trying to decide how to downplay the situation. “Don’t you dare lie to me, Simon Pellar,” I snapped.
More silence. Then, finally: “Fine. Worst-case scenario? The other clan leaders bring in help from outside the state, and they’ll . . .” His voice broke for a moment. “They’ll take away our access to magic.”
“What? They can’t do that! It’s in your blood.” You couldn’t take magic out of someone’s blood . . . right?
“Oh, it would still be there, but if the other witches decide that Clan Pellar has turned against witches, they can bind our access to all magic, the same way Maven already bound part of it.” His voice was raw with pain. “No more spells, no more connection to Wicca or the earth or our religion. They can wipe away our whole way of life. It’s the worst thing you can do to a witch, short of death.”
“Oh, Simon . . .” I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, other than, “I’m not going to let that happen.”
There was another loud bang in the background, like a door slamming, and Simon cursed. There was a muffled sound and Hazel Pellar’s annoyed voice came on the line. “Who is this?”
Crap. “It’s me. Lex.”
Simon was talking to her in the background, but Hazel ignored him, snapping, “Do you have any idea the danger you’re bringing to my children by calling here? Or the danger you’ve already brought them by dragging them into your messes?”
I swallowed hard. Hazel and I were never going to exchange Christmas cards, but I respected her, and I knew that, with me, she at least tried to overcome her lifelong conditioning against boundary magic. It was more than I could say for most of the witches in Colorado. “I’m starting to see that, yes,” I said in a small voice. “What can I do to help?”
Hazel sighed. “Maybe the hardest thing there is,” she said, sounding suddenly exhausted. “Nothing. You have to stay away from this whole thing. You’ll only make it worse.”
“I’m sorry—” I began, but I realized she had already hung up.
I stood there for a long moment, staring at my phone in disbelief.
Intellectually, I had always known that Simon and Lily might get in trouble for helping me, or even just for being my friends. But we’d been getting away with it for so long now that I’d taken our security for granted.
There had to be something I could do, but if I had to stay away from the Pellars, what did that leave? Even if Quinn and I found the person who’d killed the werewolves, it wouldn’t undo any of the problems I’d created for Simon and Lily.
Feeling shitty, I stuffed the phone in my pocket and opened the bedroom door, relieved to see that Mary and Keith weren’t eavesdropping right on the other side.
“Hello?” I called, heading down the hallway. “Mary? Is the pizza here?”
I turned into the living room, where a sitcom rerun was playing loudly on the television—to an empty room. “Oh no.”
I ran through the kitchen to the door that led to the garage, flinging it open. The Ventimiglias’ truck was there, right where Mary had left it.
I felt an instant of relief; then I hit the button to raise the garage door. It opened slowly, revealing a dark night with a drift of snowflakes beginning to settle on the empty driveway.
They had stolen my fucking car.
Chapter 14
“What do you mean, Mary’s gone?”
Quinn didn’t look angry so much as confused. The poor guy had returned from a fruitless trip to Wyoming to find his girlfriend wild-eyed with anger and worry—and sporting a goose egg in the middle of her forehead. I’d pretty much met him at the door with invisible steam coming out of my ears.
His nostrils flared briefly, and he pulled down the collar of the clean T-shirt I had put on, exposing a few drops of dried blood I’d somehow missed. “That isn’t yours,” he said. He was trying to sound calm, but having to work at it. “You head-butted Mary? Is that why she left?”
“No,” I said, touching the lump on my head. The ice pack had helped the swelling a little, but it had already started turning bright purple and blue. “This wasn’t her. Come in, let me tell you the whole thing.” I went over to the sofa and sat down stiffly, one of my knees jiggling wildly. I was still angry about Quinn keeping shit from me, but this was business and he needed to know.
No dummy, Quinn perched cautiously on the ottoman instead of joining me the couch. I told him about Keith arriving, and the misunderstanding where both of us thought the other was there to hurt Mary. “Then I needed to call Simon to ask if the werewolves could hide out in the lab, and I didn’t want them to overhear the call. In case . . . you know.”
Quinn nodded, understanding. In case Simon was worried about sleeping down the hall from a strange werewolf. I thought he kind of trusted Mary, but I couldn’t vouch for Keith.
“But why would they take your car?” Quinn asked, practically. “They must know you could report it stolen.”
I sighed. “Yeah, but Mary probably figured it was better to steal mine than get caught driving a vehicle belonging to a murdered couple who are all over the news.” And she was betting that I wouldn’t bring the police into Old World business. She was right.
“True.” Quinn wasn’t a pacer—vampires didn’t feel the impulse to walk away nervous energy—but he had the same distant look in his eyes that Maven got when she was thinking. “You could call Elise, see if she can find it quietly,” he suggested.
I shook my head. “You know she’ll ask a hundred follow-up questions.” My cousin Elise was a cop, but she was also human. I couldn’t exactly call her and say that I had lost my car to werewolf frenemies and could she please hunt it down without telling anyone or speaking to the thieves? It was already hard enough to keep the Old World hidden from her. I slumped back into the couch cushions, feeling exhausted.
Quinn crossed the space between us and sat down next to me, lifting my legs and pulling them into his lap so I was facing sideways. He did it gently, slowly, so that I could easily pull away at any time. What can I say? The man got me.
“Would it make you feel better,” he said quietly, “if you yelled at me some more?”
I considered this for a minute. “It might,” I said, “if I really understood what I’m upset about. I’m still . . . sorting through it.”
He nodded.
“How about we turn our full attention to this werewolf thing, but I reserve the right to reopen this fight at a later date, when I know exactly what horrible thing you’ve done to piss me off?”
Quinn smiled, as I’d hoped. “Sounds fair.”
It really wasn’t, but we did need to move on. “There’s more,” I said. I told him about Simon and the witches and the very real threat of having their connection to magic stripped away. Quinn’s eyes widened with worry, which for him was the equivalent of screaming “holy shit!”
“Jesus,” he breathed. “Losing magic would kill Lily. Simon might get over it eventually, with his work, but Lily . . .”
I shook my head. “Simon has spent his entire life examining connections between science and magic. If he lost half of that, it’d be like losing half of himself. I practically heard it in his voice.”
“But they don’t want you to get involved.” This was a statement, but there was also a hint of a question in his tone, like he was worried I wasn’t going to listen.