Page 41 of Blood & Ice

“I’ll think about it,” I said at last. “But that’s not why you wanted to see me, was it?”

Lucretia shook her head with enough force to make her inky ponytail bob. “No. I wanted to talk to you about the knife.”

Tension sang through my veins. Had they found it? Could they destroy it? Would breaking down the magic do more damage than good? I didn’t know. I wasn’t the one who’d grown up learning about mystical weapons. If you wanted trivia like that, you asked Meredith. She might be a white witch, but she was practically Wikipedia if you wanted to learn about evil relics.

“Did Aurea still have it?”

Lucretia shook her head again, face screwing up like the words tasted bad. “It’s still out there. We believe Morgana took it as an insurance policy.”

That was disappointing, but not exactly surprising. Morgana had been playing us all off one another. Killing Vivian had made Aurea irrational. All Morgana had to do was sit back and watch what the headmistress was capable of when grief stole all her decorum.

“Janara will be hunting Aurea down soon,” I muttered, more to myself than Lucretia. “She’s not going to give that advantage up if she can help it.”

“Indeed not,” Lucretia said dryly. “But it does make the need to chase her less pressing. Aurea’s blackmail scheme has earned her at least a year or two in my custody, I believe.”

“And Headmaster Thorne?” I asked.

I couldn’t help it. Once again, the words rolled off my tongue without checking in with my brain. I didn’t want to ask after Headmaster Thorne. What he’d done was wrong. He’d known better. And yet...

Yet, he was still Rook’s father. He’d been kind to me. It washard to squint past the genial face to see the monstrous thing he’d done. It would be doubly hard for Rook. I needed to know, if only for his sake.

“Also in custody,” she said coolly. “Your coven may find blooding without consent more permissible than mine, but it’s time it became a crime. Morgana Grimsbane would not, in any way, have willingly become what she became.” She paused a moment. “Do you have a problem with that, Depraysie?”

I wasn’t sure she was right about that. Morgana had been filled with so much blind hatred that she might have embraced the power sooner if she’d known it existed. Arguing the point would only earn me a hex, though, so I kept quiet.

“No, Sheriff. I don’t have a problem with that at all.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Tally

The last time I’d gotten an icepick migraine, I’d been a newlywed mundane and had cried myself to sleep after learning Jonathan was cheating.

That had been the first I knew of, but definitely not the only indiscretion up to that point. As an incubus, he’d probably turned my head with magic more times than I could count.

It turned out that faeries could get migraines. It just took ridiculously dark magic to hurt or put me down for any time at all. In some ways, that was reassuring. I was harder to hurt. On the other hand, if Astrid paced the room one more time, letting the light glint off her coppery hair, I was going to snatch her by it and force her to sit still.

I rubbed the pounding pulse in my temples, wondering for the umpteenth time how my metabolism worked. It would probably absorb drugs quickly. Too quickly to do me any good? I wasn’t sure. I hoped not. I doubted this was the last time I’d be cursed during my exceptionally long life span. Aspirin had been my best friend for years. I preferred over-the-counter magic to brews of unknown origin.

“What do you mean, Maverick is gone?”

That had been the most difficult thing to digest. Not that I’d been cursed into a week-long sleep alongside my boys while a Blood Witch ran amok at Blood Rose, trying to kill everyone in the establishment before they could discover she was alive. Then Meredith Boline had brought her mother in after Rook and Astrid failed to make scheduled contact. And as I understood it, Abraham and Aurea were in jail for what they’d done and this was all before I’d even cracked an eyelid open.

No, it was the fact that Maverick was gone—that was the fact that was sticking with me. As Astrid explained it, he’devaporated into thin air. No one had seen him for the last few days. There were no phone calls. No texts. He’d ghosted all of us in a very literal sense. It took effort not to curl into a ball, feeling hideously empty. What he’d done was supposed to be impossible, magically speaking. He’d accomplished it with what amounted to the help of a demigod. Or maybe, a demon. Astrid seemed to think this Knox character was close enough to both.

“I mean, he’s gone,” she said quietly. “Whatever had Morgana had him too. I could feel that before he went poof.”

Astrid motioned vaguely at her head, face screwing into a pinched expression. Her features were almost vulpine. When she was unhappy, she resembled her Uncle Fox. I couldn’t blame her for it, but it didn’t help my mood. Or my poor aching gray matter.

“Mav was reading your thoughts?” I checked.

Astrid shrugged, making another circuit of the room. I closed my eyes, rather than let the firelight from the grate reflect off her hair and stab straight into my retinas.

“Yeah. Apparently, the really old vampires were just as magical as witches. Maybe more so, since they could break conventional rules. It’s sort of... anti-magic. The goddess literally invented new magic and then tried to stomp out any trace of it. It’s too dangerous. It’s why witches always burn the taint from the line.”

“I won’t let them burn him,” I said, half-rising from the plush armchair. The coven house was always a comfortable place to be. I avoided it only because I was not sexually liberated to survive in casual conversations with these women.

Astrid gave me a ‘duh’ look. I wasn’t sure how she managed to convey the meaning without the sound, but like many teens, she managed. “I won’t either. I don’t care if the big dolt has gotten himself into something stupid. We’ll drag him out of it.”

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