Annoyed now, she said, “Hang on a minute. I’ll see if I can get him, but you’ll need to make it quick.”
“Ohmigod, thank you so much!”
There was a pause, then some shuffling around; then a confused-sounding Simon came on the line. “Uh, hello?”
I toned down the irritating voice. “Hi, Professor Pellar? This is Emily, your TA.”
To Simon’s credit, it took him only about a second and a half to catch on. “Oh, hello, Emily. What’s going on?” There was a tightness in his voice that suggested someone else was listening in.
“I’m supposed to proctor your exam, but I’ve got this emergency family problem.”
“Oh?”
Shit, how was I going to phrase this? “Yeah, remember I told you about my older sister, the one who, like, disappeared for a while? We thought she was in a psychiatric facility or something, but it turns out she’s not. She’s on her way home, and it’s causing all this family drama. My parents want me to come home right away.”
“I see.” Simon’s voice was still perfectly even. “Thanks for letting me know, Emily. Are you on your way home now?”
“Yes.” I checked the clock. “I’ll be there in two hours.”
“Safe travels. I’ll find someone else to proctor the exam.”
Damn, Simon was smooth. “Thank you, Professor. Have a good holiday.”
“You too.”
When I hung up, Katia raised both eyebrows. “Do you think that will be enough?”
I exhaled, leaning back in the seat. “I hope so. Simon’s pretty smart. At any rate, that’s the best I can do without completely giving him away.”
Katia nodded. We drove for a few minutes in silence, her letting me catch my breath. When I glanced over at her face, illuminated in the dashboard lights, I was struck by how much she looked like Sam and me. My aunt was only six years older than me, in her late thirties. She aged slowly because of boundary magic, but I aged even more slowly, a shitty souvenir from my shitty birth father’s powerful bloodline. When all the math was said and done, Katia looked twenty-eight or so, and I still got carded regularly. Eventually, I was going to need to leave Boulder and my human family behind, but I wasn’t going to worry about that until Charlie turned eighteen.
“Okay,” I began, “here’s what’s going on.”
I walked Katia through the events of the last few days, starting with the night the werewolves had shown up at my door. I didn’t leave out anything, including my discussion with Sam. As close as I was to Quinn, Lily, and Simon, they all got a little weirded out when I talked about my conversations with my dead sister. I suspected they believed I just had really vivid dreams about her, and they were too polite to break the news to me. Katia was one of the few people on the planet who didn’t find my conversations with Sam the least bit odd—because she did the same thing with Valerya.
When I mentioned the part about ghosts not being tied to places, I asked Katia if she had any idea what Sam had meant. She shook her head. “As you know, I experience ghosts differently,” she said, frowning. “For me all ghosts are a faint glow in the air, like a charged mist, the size of a person. I never get details like you do, and I don’t have a sense of ghost . . . levels. Types.” She waved a hand. “Whatever you call it.”
I nodded, but I was a little disappointed. My aunt had used boundary magic since she was a teenager, but she wasn’t as strong as I was. With Katia, I sometimes felt like a big, clumsy Newfoundland trotting along with a sleek greyhound. She was efficient at using everything she had, and half the time I was barely in control of myself. “All right. Anyway, that’s how I ended up at the meeting.”
She nodded, processing. “So if I am understanding this correctly, you tried to return a favor to this alpha werewolf, and accidentally stumbled into Morgan Pellar’s plan to poach the Colorado witches from her own mother?”
“Yes. No, wait. What do you mean by ‘poach’?”
Just then, Katia’s cell phone rang, and Quinn’s name appeared on the screen. I found the button on her dashboard to send the call to the car speaker. “Quinn?”
“Lex.” That one word was full of relief. “You’re okay?”
“I’m fine.” I didn’t expect him to get all mushy, but just in case, I added, “You’re on speaker with Katia, by the way.”
“Right.” He sounded just the tiniest bit embarrassed, like he’d been caught professing his undying love. “I’m going to put you on speaker, too, so Maven can talk. We’re in her office.”
Which was safe, and which Maven regularly swept for listening devices. There was a tiny beep as he sent the call to a Bluetooth speaker; then Maven’s voice came on the line. “Katia,” she said pleasantly, but I knew her well enough to hear the thread of anger in her voice. Every single Old World resident in Colorado had declared loyalty to Maven in one form or another, but my aunt was stubbornly determined to remain independent—which was how she had ended up having to move away. “You’re in my state again.”
“You said I could visit for the Christmas holiday,” Katia reminded her. “You didn’t say when that would start.”
There was a pause, and then to my surprise, Maven let out a begrudging chuckle. “You know what, you’re right, I didn’t. I will not be making that mistake again. Ever.”
“Katia came here to help me,” I told Maven. “I needed the backup.”
“All right,” Maven acknowledged. “Now, will you explain what’s going on?”
“Morgan Pellar was at the witch meeting,” I began. “She’s trying to . . .” I trailed off and looked at my aunt, realizing I was fuzzy on Morgan’s actual plan. “Wait, what were you saying about poaching?”
“She wants all the witches in Colorado to move to Wyoming,” Katia said bluntly. “She’s offering them access to their apex magic, plus financial assistance to help find housing and jobs. She plans to declare herself the witch queen of Wyoming and establish the state as a safe haven for witches.”
There was a moment of silence, and I could practically feel Quinn and Maven looking at each other. That was a huge move—and an unwieldy one. Making herself the leader of Wyoming did sound like Morgan, but asking everyone to move? All the witch clans had deep roots in Colorado—they would look at every available option before they considered pulling them up. Besides, where would Morgan get the money to offer financial assistance?
“I don’t think that’s what she’s really doing,” I said after a moment of thought. “I left the meeting early, and on the way out I was attacked by a werewolf. She didn’t actually recognize me. I was just the first one to come out of the building.”
“Are you injured?” Quinn broke in.
“Katia got there in time to save me. I’ve just got a few scrapes.” And a throbbing cheekbone from being punched, but it wasn’t like it was my first time. “Although I did leave Opal’s car there, with a dead body in the trunk, so maybe someone could get that?”
“Yes, we’ll take care of it,” Maven said quickly. “Go on.”
“Right. Anyway, the werewolf came at me with a knife, and she had a bunch of heavy-duty ziplock bags with her.”
“What time was this?” Maven said sharply. She had made the same connection I had—only a lot faster.
“Just after the sun went down, before it was really dark. She said she was early, and her friends were coming to help.”
Katia’s brow furrowed. I was about to explain, but Maven got there first. “She’s trying to frame me for murder.”
Chapter 25
I had reached the same conclusion. If whoever had hired the werewolves just wanted to kill witches, the woman would have attacked in wolf form. Most vampires now carried a small blade to cut, rather than bite, their victims. The baggies suggested the wolf had planned to bleed me to death, then carry the blood away to make it look like a vampire attack. It would appear as though Maven had sent her people into Wyoming to break up the meeting. Violently. As plans go, it was smart as hell—and that scared me.
“All right, Lex,” Maven said next. “You’ve got all the pieces of this thing. Walk us through her plan.”
What she was really saying was convince me you get this. Katia shot me a look of sympathy, and I took a deep breath. “Okay. Morgan knows there are only three years left before the treaty between you and the witches is over, which means you’ll be negotiating a new one soon. You said yourself that you’ve sort of already started, by grooming the Cheyenne pack to come into the state. That—the weekend pass—gave her a way in. She made sure the werewolves were killed in a big, public way—so there was no chance it wouldn’t make the news. That sent all the witches in the state to Hazel Pellar’s door, and I’m guessing Morgan still has people loyal to her.”
I paused, then added, “I also think she got one of them to goad Lily until she used her apex magic.” I hadn’t wanted to reveal Lily’s slip, but Maven needed to understand the scale of this thing. I wished I could see her face, to gauge if she was upset with Lily, but all she said over the phone was, “Go on.”
So I did. “While Hazel was distracted and off-balance, Morgan got the witches to come to Wyoming so she could persuade them that she’d been the victim all along. I think the moving offer is a sham. During and after the meeting, the werewolves were supposed to kill the witches and make it look like a vampire attack, a sentence I never thought I’d say out loud.” The Colorado witches were already distrustful of Maven, and anyone who didn’t understand vampire politics and resources would find it perfectly believable that Maven would send her people into Wyoming—hell, I had believed she could do that, before she’d explained it to me.
“And what would she accomplish by framing me?” Maven’s voice was calm, and I figured I was doing okay, but now we were getting to the guessing part.
“If the werewolves had succeeded in killing witches, Morgan would have had someone in Clan Pellar propose a change in leadership in Colorado rather than a move to Wyoming.” Morgan wouldn’t make the suggestion herself—that might put suspicion on her, or at least make it look like she was taking advantage of the hypothetical murders. But if someone else suggested it, and all the witches in Colorado believed it . . .
And they probably would. After all, in their eyes, Maven had already broken the witches’ arrangement with her by letting werewolves into the state. They didn’t know that Hazel had agreed to the weekend pass in order to save Morgan’s life.
The whole plan was infuriating, but that was the part that bothered me most. Morgan had backed Hazel into an impossible position, forcing her to choose between professional compromise or her child’s life. Hazel had chosen to save Morgan, and her daughter had repaid her by using it against her.