Raven Cursed: A Jane Yellowrock Novel (25 page)

Half an hour later I was warm and mostly dry, my hair braided and wrapped in a towel. I had looked at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and decided not to do that again. I looked as if I had lost ten pounds, and as if I hadn’t slept in weeks. My eyes had dark circles, my cheeks were sunken. The half-shift had taken a lot out of me.
Better than dead cat,
Beast thought at me. She had a point. In the common area of the suite, I sat down at a small table and dug into the food, eating with a steady precision more suited to a robot than a hungry human. The twins watched me with hooded eyes, nearly as still as a vamp, except for the whole needs-to-breathe thing.

When I was done, Brandon said, “You look like something the cat dragged in.”

I grinned. Beast hacked deep inside, amused. “Yeah.” I picked up my cell, keys, a leather jacket, and the scarf I’d taken from Evangelina. “I’ll be back in a bit. I have to see a witch about a problem.”

“Does this problem have to do with the parley?”

“Yeah.” I left the room, calling for the SUV on the way down.

I drove into Molly’s driveway and parked in the false dusk of the storm. It was still raining, but now there were breaks in the downpour, moments when sprinkles pattered down, moments when it stopped altogether. The sky was variegated, darker to the east where the storm was fleeing, the clouds piled on top of each other as they rushed from the cold front. I turned off the engine and sat.

Molly’s house was different since I’d been here last. Big Evan and Mol had added on a garage with a man-den over it, enclosed the old carport, added a bathroom and a master bedroom out back. The addition had doubled the size of the house, but they had maintained the quaint 1920s mountain style of peaked gables and arched windows.

I hadn’t been invited over since I’d been back. Not once. I remembered a time when Mol, Evan, Angie Baby, and I had dinner here several times a week. But the invitations had stopped when Molly had been put in danger on my watch, when Angie and Little Evan had been kidnapped. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that I had become persona non grata in Big Evan’s eyes. His car was in the drive; there would be no slipping in and out without him knowing. I had no idea if I’d be welcomed or told to leave, especially once I reminded them of that recent danger. I hadn’t finished my jobs by killing off all the werewolves, and destroying the blood-diamond, bringing danger back to haunt them again. My insides felt hollow, despite the proteins, fats, and starches I’d eaten.

The house sat on the crest of a mountain at the top of the world, and the views were spectacular. The front yard was lush with fall plants, mums of all colors and sizes, a burgundy-leaved Japanese maple as centerpiece; maple varieties were grouped everywhere, some whose outermost leaves had begun to go salmon or yellow in the chill. The backyard would rival any garden anywhere, with fruits and veggies so tasty and big they looked like mutants. Mol’s an earth witch and her gift is herbs and growing things, healing bodies, restoring balance to nature.

Legs like lead weights, I got out of the SUV, pocketed the keys, and moved up the paved drive. On the chill breeze, I caught a whiff of werewolves, but the scent was faint, distant, and quickly gone as if it had never been. But it was real, not a figment of my imagination or fear.

The new door in the middle of the old carport opened and a small whirlwind flew through. “Aunt Jane! Aunt Jane! Aunt Jane!” she squealed, the high pitch nearly bursting my eardrums. I stooped to catch her and Angie Baby threw
herself into my arms with enough force to make me stagger. Her arms went around my neck, choking, her strawberry-blond-streaked hair whipping in the gusty wind. I smoothed it down with one hand and looped the other arm under her bottom to support her weight as I carried her toward the house. “I missed you,” she said.

My heart melted into a big puddle of goo. “I’ve missed you, Angie Baby.” I batted away tears that gathered any time I was near her. “You’ve grown two inches, at least.”

“I’m a big girl now.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, “Daddy’s at the door and he’s mad. Why is he mad at you?”

I didn’t lower my voice when I answered, but spoke in a normal tone, my booted feet bringing me closer to the glowering man, knowing he could hear me. “Because I let the Big Bad Ugly vampire witches steal you and nearly kill you. Because I put your mama in danger.” Big Evan’s glower turned uglier, colder. I thought about werewolves in the mountains near this house, killing people. “Because he loves you all so much that he’d fight anything to protect you. Your daddy’s doing the right thing, Angelina. He is.” I handed her to him.

The big man took her in gentle hands and set her down behind him, his body a barrier between us. I thought my heart would break. “Go back to the movie, Pun’kin,” he said.

“Okay, Daddy.” Her footsteps tapped away.

There weren’t many men who made me feel little, but Big Evan was one of them. He stood six feet six, and weighed over three hundred pounds, mostly muscle. He had red hair, a full red beard, and brown eyes so hard they could cut stone. He crossed his arms and braced his feet. Waiting. I pulled the damp lavender scarf out of my pocket
and held it out to him. “Tell me what you smell. If you think it’s important, we need to talk. You, Molly, and me.”

Evan took the scarf and held it to his nose. He breathed in. Evan is a sorcerer, one of the few alive anywhere, and still in the witch closet, to protect his kids from unwanted attention. His eyes flew down to mine. Widened. He inhaled again. “I smell Evangelina and blood magic.”

I nodded. Evan knew about the witches in New Orleans and the diamond. Of course, he thought it was still safe and
in
New Orleans. “She stole the pink diamond from my weapons safe,” I said. “She’s been using it on vamps, blood-servants, and me. She’s using it to grow younger and prettier. Though she has the right to draw on her sisters’ magics, they haven’t noticed the changes in her. Which means she’s not just drawing on them as coven leader, she’s spelling them too.”

“That bitch is spelling
my wife
?” he snarled. Evan’s eyes narrowed, calculating, putting together what he might do to stop it. When he reached the end of his ruminations, he said something vile under his breath. “And I can’t interrupt the spell without serious consequences. Why didn’t you destroy the relic?”

“How?” I asked. “How do you destroy something that absorbed the energies of dying witches for hundreds of years? Drop it in the ocean? In a volcano? What happens to the energies in any of those cases? They don’t just wink out, poof, it’s gone.”

“You’ve brought nothing but evil to this house in years. I don’t want you here.”

Tears burned in my eyes, but he’d never see them. “Fine. You figure out how to handle it.” I yanked the scarf away, swiveled on a heel, and stalked back to the SUV.

“She lost some weight.” It sounded like the words were dragged out of him. I stopped, staring out at the curve of the world. The sky was bright, a patch of blue showing in the west. “Evangelina has. And”—he blew out a breath that sounded like a small storm—“at least fifteen years.”

I clenched my hands and turned back. “Her hair is silky as a child’s,” I said, “something adults’ hair loses by the time they’re forty or so. If her skin glowed any more we
wouldn’t need lights. She let a vampire feed from her. I saw the wounds. When I accused her of it in front of her sisters, I don’t think they even heard the words.”

“This is your fault.”

“Accepted.”

“You better come in.”

I took a breath to steady my nerves and entered the house. The new door opened into a great room. The former carport’s back brick wall was now a fireplace with merrily burning gas logs and a hidden laundry room. Bump-out windows were on the western side, Molly’s orchids on display. Some were in bloom, including a heavenly vanilla. Big Evan stood still, mentally checking the house wards, eyeing the locks. “No opening the doors, Angie,” he said.

She nodded without looking at us. A kiddie film was on the TV screen, and her attention was fastened on a princess and a pony, her small body curled into the seat cushion of an Evan-sized, leather couch. She yawned and pulled an afghan over her, looking sleepy.

Little Evan was standing in the door to the kitchen, bare-chested, wearing footie jammie bottoms. He stared at me, eyes wide. I patted him on the head as I climbed the steps into the kitchen. The small intimate space had been expanded into the old family room and now housed a larger table, a pantry, and a central island as well as skylights for Mol’s herbs, growing in a bay window. But the heart of the kitchen was still the old Aga stove with bread baking in the oven, beef stew bubbling on top, the teapot on perpetual simmer, and copper pots hanging over it all.

Molly was leaning against the counter when I came in, wearing a denim smock and dark red blouse. Her hair was up in a ponytail, and she wore garnet earrings. She clutched a fist between her breasts and her eyes were hesitant, sliding back and forth between Evan and me, nervous. “What’s wrong?” she asked. I cringed to know that, when my best friend saw me, the first thing she thought was trouble.

“Evangelina,” Evan said, “is dabbling in black magic.”

Molly’s eyes seemed to lose focus for a moment; then she smiled brightly. “I have hot chai on the stove. Evan, would you get the mugs?”

Evan looked like he’d been poleaxed. He had expected Molly to agree or deny or get angry, not act as if the words had never been spoken. His eyes on his wife, he opened the new glass-fronted china hutch and hooked fingers through three teal mugs. Molly took them and started setting up for tea. Evan said, “Evangelina is practicing black magic.”

“I have homemade gingersnaps and snickerdoodle cookies. And I know Jane wants whipped cream in her tea.” She opened the fridge and Evan took the spray can from her. He closed the door, cupped her head in his huge hands and tilted her face up, in what was the most tender gesture I had ever seen. He smiled down at his wife and she smiled back. I heard mumbled words, likely some form of Gaelic, saw his lips purse and heard him breathe out as he blew at Molly’s face.

I thought for a moment he had broken the spell on Molly. But she jerked back, strong emotion flushing through her, so hot I could feel it across the room. She whirled to me, pain and hurt on her face. “You never liked Evangelina,” she said. “But you don’t have to make up things about her.”

“Make up—”

“You never liked my sister. I tried to give you time to get to know each other, to become friends. And instead, when she met a man she liked, you took him away. How could you do that?”

Bruiser. She was talking about Bruiser. “She used a love spell on him, Molly. That’s wrong.”

“A love spell?” Evan asked. I nodded and he released his wife’s arms, stepping back, his shoulders drawing together. He was watching her the way a doctor watched a patient he was diagnosing. I just felt sick to my stomach.

“All I did was tell him he’d been spelled. I didn’t take him away,” I said gently.

“You always treated her like she was less than you, unworthy of you!” Mol said, as if neither of us had spoken. As she slipped past Evan, he made a circular motion with one hand, indicting that I was supposed to keep Molly talking. I didn’t think that would be hard to do.

“I’m scared to death of her. Doesn’t mean I hate her,” I said, “or look down on her.”

Tears gathered in Molly’s eyes. “My sister has suffered more than any woman should ever suffer, and all because of
them
,” she nearly spat, “the
things
you
work
for now.” She advanced on me, one finger pointing, her arm out straight like a wand or a staff, a weapon of destruction. Tears coursed down her face. “They took her
family
!”

Oh crap.
A vamp turned Evangelina’s family?
I vaguely remembered she had been married long before I met Molly, but thought the hubby divorced her and got custody of their daughter. But then, I hadn’t been friends with all of them until just before Carmen’s baby was born, and I didn’t know much family gossip about Evil Evie. Behind Mol, Evan looked confused, as if he’d never heard that vamps took Evangelina’s family. With a tiny head-shake, he put that bit of news away for the moment and blew up a pink balloon. The sight of the big, bearded man blowing up a girly balloon was comical, but then it hit me. Evan was an air witch. He was using what he had on hand to construct a spell on the fly. “Why did Evangelina come home from New Orleans?” I asked, trying to guide Mol to safer topics.

Molly hesitated, “To get away from the vampires. The things you’re helping to—”

“She’s dating a vampire,” I said. “I saw the bite marks on her—”

“No. That’s a lie,” she said. Behind her, I saw Evan pause in the balloon blowing and sip something from a flask. He then blew the fluid into the balloon, the liquid a mist coating the inside. “You never liked my sister. I tried to give you time to get to know each other, to become friends. And instead, when she met a man she liked, you took him away. How could you do that?” She had just repeated herself, word for word. The phrases were part of the spell on her.

“Evangelina is using the blood-diamond, the relic I took from the vampires, Molly. It’s powerful, made with the unwilling sacrifice of witch children. She spelled you.”

“You never liked my sister. I tried to give you two time
to get to know each other, to become friends. And instead, when she met a man she liked, you took him away.” Molly was caught in a continuous loop of suggestion and I had no idea how to help her break free.

“Mol?” Evan placed one hand on her shoulder. Molly stopped. Turned. And Big Evan popped the balloon. The sound was loud in the confined space. Molly inhaled quickly, a gasp of surprise. Instantly her eyes closed and she slumped. Evan caught her as if she weighed less than Angelina. He carried her out of the kitchen back to the new master bedroom, leaving me alone.

I looked around the kitchen, at loose ends. Should I let myself out? What if that set off the wards? I didn’t cook but I checked the bread in the oven. There were six loaves, all golden brown. I found the knob that said OVEN and turned it off, then found a cloth and removed the loaves, setting them on the counter, totally out of my comfort zone. I turned off the stew.