My mood deflated instantly. I’d been so focused on finding out about her, about the wraiths, that I hadn’t even considered what we’d say to her loved ones.
The music stopped, and the door opened. A woman in her early fifties stood in the doorway. She had short gray hair, wore comfortable pants and a shirt. She put a hand on her chest when she looked at us. “You’re from the department? You’re here about Marla?”
Liam and I looked at each other. The department? Did she mean PCC?
“No, ma’am. We’re not from the department, but we would like to talk to you about your daughter, if you don’t mind. My name is Liam Quinn, and this my friend Claire Connolly.”
“I’m Lorene Salas. I’m Marla’s mother. My husband, Paul, is in the garden. Not a lot of produce this time of year, but you make do with what you can.”
“I’ve gotten some pretty good beets,” I said with a smile, trying to lighten the mood. And felt stupid for saying it.
She gave us one more appraising look. “Why don’t you come inside?”
The house was simple, but tidy. A couch, a chair, a hand-cranked record player. That explained where the music had come from. We sat down on the couch.
“Your daughter’s a Sensitive?” Liam asked.
Lorene looked around nervously. “Well, I suppose if you’re here you’d already know that. Yes, yes, she is. And a very good one. She’s actually helped out the PCC from time to time. That’s why you’re here, right? You’re following up?”
“Following up?” Liam asked.
She went a little wan. “With her disappearance. Some of her friends had worked at the PCC. We didn’t talk about it, of course, because her work with them was confidential. But they knew her.” Lorene swallowed, worked to keep her composure. “When they hadn’t seen her in a few days, they got worried. They came to me to ask questions, try to figure out where she was.”
So someone else was aware she was gone, was investigating it. And someone from PCC, to boot.
“Did they leave you a card, by chance? Or some way to get in touch with them?”
“Well, no. They just said they’d be in touch if they found anything out. So I thought that’s why you were here today.” She swallowed back obvious fear.
“Mrs. Salas, perhaps you’d like to have your husband come join you?”
She went pale as a ghost, moistened her lips. “My Paul has been dead for two years. I say he’s in the garden, because you don’t know who’ll come to the door, what they’ll want. It gives some protection. He’s not here.”
Oh, damn, I thought. She was alone.
Liam reached out, took her hand. “Mrs. Salas, I’m sorry to inform you that your daughter—well, she’s gotten ill from the magic. It’s hurt her.”
“Ill?” She looked back and forth between us. “What does that mean, ill?”
“It means the magic—the infection—overwhelmed her. She’s become a wraith.”
Knowledge bloomed horribly in her eyes. “No,” she said. “No. She was rigorous.” She lowered her voice. “She did the ‘clearing out.’ Kept her magic stable or whatever. She knew how to do that, because she’d worked with the department, you see. She’d never have let herself become—one of them.”
Maybe she didn’t have a choice, I thought. I could see Liam was thinking about that, too, but he didn’t voice it.
“You can’t be right,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Salas, but we are. We found her last night.” Liam’s shoulders tensed as he prepared himself. And then he put it out there. “We took her to Devil’s Isle.”
Fear changed to alarm, to anger. “You took her to prison?” She stood up. “How dare you! My baby should not be in prison.”
“Ma’am, she’ll hurt people. That’s what wraiths do. I’m sorry, but I imagine you know that’s true. There’s a clinic at Devil’s Isle where she’ll be kept safe, where she won’t be allowed to hurt herself or anyone else. That’s the best that can be done for her right now.”
She looked at Liam, lifted her chin. “I want to see my daughter.”
Liam’s expression softened. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“I want to see my daughter. She’s my daughter. She’ll be frightened. I don’t care what you say about what she is now. She’s still my daughter.” She sobbed, covered her mouth with a hand. “She’s still my daughter.”
• • •
Mrs. Salas declined Liam’s help in getting her into Devil’s Isle, said she’d do it on her own.
We climbed into the truck and sat there, both of us staring blankly out the windows, jolted by the scene in Mrs. Salas’s house. By the sadness—and the reality check.
Control was an illusion. Even if I managed to control my magic, even if I kept things balanced, something could still go wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.
Talking to Mrs. Salas had put distance between us again. I could feel Liam pulling away, probably as he imagined my potential future. I didn’t have any family left to crush. But there were still people I could hurt. People he’d have to inform.
I shook the melancholy away. That didn’t matter. We had to focus on what we could control. “You did what you had to do,” I said quietly.
“I don’t know if that makes it any better.”
“It’s not much consolation, but at least she’ll know where Marla is. She’ll have answers.”
“But not all of them.” Liam drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “And we don’t have them, either. We’re not the only ones who care about this. Someone from PCC is watching out for her, talking to her mother.”
“Is that good news or bad news?” I asked. “Do we want them involved?”
“I don’t know. Depends on why they were there. We’re going to find that out. And in the meantime, I’m going to have Nix come back to the store tonight. You can keep working on your magic. The best way to combat fear is to get to work.”
On that, we agreed.
• • •
At six o’clock, Liam arrived with both Gavin and Nix in tow. I was still with a customer—someone who’d tried to shop when I was closed and wasn’t thrilled about it—so the Quinns made themselves comfortable, Gavin at one end of the cypress table, Liam at the other. Both of them wore the apparent Quinn family uniform—jeans, dark T-shirts, boots.
Nix stood in front of a round vintage candy holder of metal bins around a central pole. I’d filled each one with mismatched odds and ends—spoons, crystal doorknobs, antique hinges. She wore a pale green sleeveless dress, her blond hair in complicated braids. As she spun the holder, checking each bin, it was easy to see her as a stranger in a strange land.
When he wasn’t stealing glances at Nix, Gavin looked over the New York Times section I’d salvaged from one of the convoy boxes—the pages had been crumpled around bars of soap.
When the last customer was gone, I flipped the sign and locked the door, then walked back to the table. “Please, make yourselves at home.”
“Done,” Gavin said, refolding the paper.
I put my hands on my hips, looked at the brothers. “I see you aren’t punching each other. Friends again?”
“We reached an understanding,” Gavin said.
“I’m glad to hear it.” I glanced at Nix. “What’s on tonight’s agenda?”
“Binding.”
“Do I need three people to teach me to bind magic?”
“You only need me,” Nix said. “But they like to watch.”
Her voice was utterly innocent, and I wasn’t honestly sure if she understood the implication. But the expression on Gavin’s face said he was very, very aware of it.
I guessed that was part of the brothers’ understanding—Gavin wouldn’t throw a fit about Nix helping if he could keep an eye on her during the training. Or that was what he told himself, anyway, for the chance to be near her again.
“I think your brother’s still in love with her,” I said quietly to Liam as we took the stairs to the second floor
.
“You’re nosy, you know that?” He grinned and shook his head, his mood seeming to thaw a little.
“I run a store that’s been in the French Quarter for more than a hundred years. I came by it honestly.”
“Be that as it may, it’s their story, and not mine to tell.”
Then, I’d have to convince one of them to tell it.
• • •
“Come,” Nix said, and sat on the floor on her knees, the skirt of her green dress spread around her. She looked very much like a fairy—I could imagine her in a bayou, moving among the cypresses, floating above the water, faintly glowing as her hair bobbed around her. “Sit down.”
I nodded, took a seat in front of her while Liam leaned against a bookshelf and Gavin sat down on the floor, back against the wall, arms atop his knees.
“I want you to go through the entire cycle,” Nix said. “First, I want you to move something,”
I looked around at the room and the labyrinth of antiques. “What do you want me to move?”
“It doesn’t matter. Pick something. Anything.”
I looked around, let my eyes pass the giant star sign, which was still propped against the wall. I mean, I wanted to move it on principle, since we’d started this journey together, but it was a big and lumbering thing. I didn’t especially want to impale Nix—especially with Gavin in the house.
I settled on a vintage produce crate with a gorgeous CREOLE LOUISIANA SWEET POTATOES sticker on one end. I could take or leave the crate, but the paper label could actually be worth a lot. Incentive not to bash it against anything hard—like Liam Quinn’s head.
“All right. You should probably all get out of the way.”
“Why?” Nix asked.
“Because my aim isn’t very good.” I held up a hand before they could complain. “Keep in mind the context and conditions. And keep an eye out.”
The crate sat on the top of a high shelf next to three others. I checked the path, imagined the string that would draw it to me. It would have to go around a chest of drawers with a mirror, then spin sharply back in the other direction to avoid getting snagged on a pink aluminum Christmas tree. Tricky. Not impossible, but tricky.
I blew out a breath, focused on the object. I imagined the room filled with energy, began to pull it together, like a spinning top of magic, of power.
“Good,” Nix approved quietly. “Good.”
Slowly, I lifted my gaze to the crate, trying to keep the magic together, contained, and began to pull the crate toward me. It bobbled, shook, lifted into the air with a lurch. Bounced against the tin ceiling, sending dust into the air.
“Focus,” Nix said. “Reel it smoothly.”
“If I could reel it smoothly, I wouldn’t need to practice reeling it smoothly,” I said through clenched teeth.
I guessed the angles, pulled it forward. It jerked three feet in the right direction, paused, shaking as it hovered in the air. I nodded at it, proud that it had mostly done what I’d asked it to do, and pulled again.
The crate zipped toward the mirror and, as I winced, paused right in front of the glass. The next bit would be trickier—back around the tree and straight toward home. I reached out a hand, imagined fingers grasping the string that connected it to me. I snapped it to the right, then pulled.
The crate zoomed past the Christmas tree, leaving the branches shaking, and whipped toward us like a wooden bullet.
“Shit,” Liam said, ducking as it whizzed over his head, only just missing the top of his dark crown of hair.
It flew toward me, and I flicked my fingers up, palm out, forcing it to a stop. It froze, shuddered, and dropped. About four feet from the spot I’d meant for it to.
I let the rest of the magic go, put my hands on my hips, and breathed through my nose, trying to get rid of the dizziness.
“That was not impressive,” Nix said.
“I got it here, didn’t I?”
Gavin came over, patted my back.
“And barely a concussion along the way.”
I glanced at Liam apologetically. “Sorry about that.”
“Job hazard,” he said.
“Technically, that’s not correct,” Gavin said. “You keep her from becoming a wraith, and you don’t have a job to do.”
And wasn’t that precisely the problem?
• • •
Nix made me immediately try casting again, “because magic isn’t always practiced under good conditions.”
And without good conditions, it took me twenty minutes to get a tiny dose of magic out of myself and into the box.
“You need to practice,” Nix said.
I sat back on my heels and wiped sweat from my brow. The heat had come back with a vengeance, and the second floor was even hotter than the first. I’d changed into loose cutoff jeans and a tank top, but that hardly helped. We’d opened the windows, but kept the curtains drawn just in case. Containment might not have been able to detect magic, but they’d certainly have been able to see it. Unfortunately, the curtains didn’t do much to help the already limp breeze outside.
“I’m not trying to avoid practicing,” I said. “It hasn’t exactly been a slow week. I haven’t had time.”
“She’s telling the truth there,” Liam said, glancing at me. “And she understands the consequences.”
“All right,” Nix said. “You have moved and cast. And now we bind.” She walked to the box, which sat on the floor.
“You’ve put magic into the box. But magic prefers to move. It prefers to live. You must bind the magic into the box, into the wood, or it will return to the world, only to be absorbed by you again.”
“Which would make all this work pointless.”
“Precisely,” she said.
“And how do I bind it?”
“You insist upon it.”
She stopped there, as if those four words completely explained the magical process she wanted me to try. Liam and Gavin watched with interest.
“I’m going to need more than ‘I ask it to.’”
“I didn’t say you asked it,” Nix said, walking around the box. “I said you insisted upon it.” She pounded a fist on the palm of her other hand. “You demand it.”
She reached out. “Give me your hand.”
I hesitated, then placed my hand in her palm. Her skin was cool, soft, and I smelled the green scent of new leaves as we made contact.
“Magic seeks a home. You only have to give it one.” She guided my hand to the box, pressed it there. “Feel what it wants to be, and send it home.”
I felt cool, lacquered wood . . . and I felt really, really silly about doing it under the stares of the Quinn brothers.
“You aren’t concentrating.”
“I feel like I’m in a fish tank right now. Lot of eyeballs, lot of pressure.”
“You want us to turn around?” Gavin asked with a grin. “We can do that.”
I glanced at Liam. “Can you please control your brother? He isn’t helping.”
He made a noise that didn’t sound especially agreeable. “I haven’t been able to control him before. I don’t see how I could start now.”
“And still, I get by just fine.”
“Yeah, we can all see that now, can’t we?”
Nix, her hands still in mine, chuckled as the argument heated. “If you hoped to distract them, that was probably the fastest way. Now,” she said, pressing my fingers harder against the box. Don’t feel the box. Feel what’s in the box. You can close your eyes if it helps with the distraction.”
I rolled my shoulders and tried to settle into my hips. I closed my eyes, made myself aware of my fingertips, the sensations of her cool fingers, the wooden box.
At first, there was nothing. It started slowly, a slow vibration beneath my fingers that felt like the humming of a machine. I thought it might be a nervous shake or some sort of trick of my nerves, something I should ignore while I reached for something deeper.
But the sensation only grew s
tronger, from a soft hum to a vibration that pulsed like a heartbeat.
“Good,” Nix whispered softly, like she was trying not to startle me, not to spook me like a nervous animal. “Good. You can feel the magic in the box, in the wood. To bind it, you must unite it. Use your magic to coax it. To push it.”
I wasn’t entirely sure how I was supposed to do that. So I opted for silent begging. Hey, little thread of magic. Do me a big favor and ooze your way into the wood, please?
I paused, hoped for a difference, but the vibrations were the same, and Nix hadn’t moved her hand. We weren’t done yet.
I assumed this was like trying to do back flips in the pool when I was younger, or like true love. I’d know it when it happened.
The Quinns were still bickering behind me, their words a low murmur of irritation. But that didn’t matter. They were not my concern. My concerns were this box, my magic, and my future. And those things were all tied together.
While Nix watched with mild curiosity, I looked down at the box, pressed my fingers against it again, closed my eyes until I could feel the box trembling again.
This time, I didn’t ask the magic to move. I made it. Not with words, really, but more like a wish. A really, really strong wish. A demand that it merge itself with the box in which I’d placed it, that they fuse together, be bound together because I ordered it.
The box grew instantly fire-hot.
Nix jerked her hand away, and I did the same, holding my fingers out of reach in case the lid snapped down.
The box shook like it had been electrified, which I guessed wasn’t far from the truth if magic was a form of energy. After a few seconds of shuddering, it settled onto the floor again with a heavy thud.
The room had gone silent. I glanced over my shoulder, found Gavin and Liam standing beside each other, hands on their hips, staring at the little box. They looked a little bit impressed, and a little bit afraid. That was probably the safest combination for anyone confronted with magic.
And it made me feel spectacular.
I looked back at Nix. “I did it?”
“You did. Not especially elegantly, but you did it.”