The one with the bloody face met them in the kitchen doorway. “Her friends are waiting in the driveway. We go out the back.” He glanced down at Dayna. “Don’t we just need a piece of her for the ceremony? Why don’t we just cut off a bit and go?” He grinned at the horrified look on Dayna’s face. Apparently he’d found bandages somewhere and had done a sloppy job of binding his wound, winding them around his face and neck so that he looked like a half-wrapped mummy. When his brother snorted at the sight of him he scowled.
“Shut up.”
“We’re not cutting off any bits yet,” the one called Dubh said. “We need her alive to bait the last ones on the list. Now get her in the car.”
The Callighans. She wasn’t the only one in danger.
Dayna stopped struggling, allowing herself to be dragged out the back door, toward a shiny black car parked on the narrow backstreet. Her mind was racing again, fear making her pulse flutter frantically in her throat.
Reagan and Yemi would only wait so long before bursting in. They would see Fiona Walsh on the floor, the open drawer, the spilled knives. They would know something had happened.
And it didn’t matter that they wouldn’t know where the men were taking her. Witches had ways of finding out. With Grandma King and the Callighans, there had to be a way to trace her.
Her coven would find her. They would tear these men apart to get to her.
She held on to this thought as the man shoved her into the car, forcing her to sit between him and the shaved-headed Olc, who told her in no uncertain terms what would happen if she tried to reach for the door. Dayna didn’t reply. She shut her eyes and breathed in deeply. In and out. Long and even.
She could wait.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
MEINER
Meiner’s phone rang again and she ignored it.
It was an easy thing to do, since the sound seemed to be distant and echoing. Nothing felt real. This was all some fucked-up dream.
She glanced down and realized she had blood splashed across her front, up her arm and shoulder. And her hand was still covered, a gore-encased glove. A wave of nausea ran over her. Grandma King had thought her too weak to lead the coven, and in the end maybe she was. She hadn’t been able to pledge herself to her grandmother’s god. Hadn’t been able to save her.
Cora had returned minutes later to find her sitting in the middle of the kitchen in a pool of blood, too shell-shocked to pick herself up off the floor. Once Meiner had told her what happened, the blond girl seemed to recover herself surprisingly fast. She’d lifted Grandma King onto the couch in the living room.
Seeing the still figure took Meiner’s breath away all over again, and she hunched forward, gasping, hand braced against the brick fireplace.
Grandma King was dead. It seemed impossible.
Cora disappeared into the hallway for a moment, leaving Meiner with the body, and in spite of the bile rising in her throat, she edged closer, frowning. One of her grandmother’s arms was up on her chest, and her loose blouse had been torn away at the shoulder. The edge was stained with blood, and there was a deep cut on her arm, not a jagged slash, but even and deliberate. She remembered suddenly, through the haze, seeing one of the brothers stoop over her gran briefly, before they left. She’d assumed they were checking to see if she was dead, but…
Had they taken blood?
Suddenly furious, she stalked forward, reaching out to pull up the old woman’s sleeve. Then she paused, startled. There was a mark above the cut, a black ink pattern etched into her grandmother’s weathered skin. It looked like a strange cross between a pentacle and a spiderweb, and Meiner squinted down at it, puzzled.
She didn’t remember her gran having any tattoos. But then, there was so much that her grandmother obviously hadn’t told her.
The silver box, for a start. Dayna had been right: her gran and the Butcher had met before. She was willing to bet he’d given her that scar.
“I guess we have to clean up the kitchen.”
Meiner jumped. Cora was in the doorway, looking pale and hollowed out with shock.
Meiner only nodded and turned back to Grandma King. “Did you know she had—” She cut herself off abruptly. The skin on her grandmother’s shoulder was bare. There was nothing but traces of blood showing through her tattered blouse now.
Meiner blinked.
Cora didn’t seem to be paying attention. She was staring at Gran, her eyes glittering. “We should go after those motherfuckers. Where did they go?”
“Newgrange.” Meiner couldn’t seem to take her eyes off the tear in her grandmother’s blouse. She knew something had been there.
It wasn’t like she was driven mad by grief. She hadn’t loved her grandmother. She hadn’t even liked her. Of course, the woman had raised her. Had been a constant presence in her life, as unwelcome as that may have been through the years. Mostly she didn’t know what to feel, so she just felt numb.
But she’d definitely seen something, and now it was gone. Another of her gran’s secrets.
Cora’s face was set in stubborn lines. “They’re going to keep trying to pick us off like this. We need to find them, and we need to kill them. It won’t be easy, but we can do it. I can do it.” Her eyes flicked over Meiner’s face, her voice holding an unspoken challenge. “She was going to pass the coven on to me, so it’s my call. I say we track them down.”
Any other time Meiner would have balked at this, but she felt too numb to argue. Cora was taking charge in an emergency, the perfect time to step in and take on the mantle of leadership.
Everything seemed so far away from reality that it hardly mattered.
“Sure,” she said, her voice hollow. “You do that.”
Cora’s brows knit together. She scowled at Meiner. “You can’t sit around and feel sorry for yourself, Meiner King. You think your grandmother would have done that? You think she would have wanted that?” Her face twisted, like she was about to say something else and then thought better of it.
Now it was Meiner’s turn to look at Cora, narrowing her eyes. “She never actually said she left you the cov—” Meiner started, and then jerked to a stop when there was the rattle and groan that signified the Callighans were coming up the driveway in the station wagon.
When Meiner and Cora went to the front door, the Callighans were in the garden staring up at the sigils on the front of the house, and Bronagh swept them over with a steely gaze. “What’s happened? It stinks of dark magic.”
Meiner only stared at her. Cora was the one to explain, while she retreated to the front room and sat down in front of the shoe racks, feeling like there was a physical weight on her chest.
She kept thinking about her grandmother’s last spell.
Balor, glacaim mé ort.
She had repledged herself, Meiner was sure of it, which meant she hadn’t been practicing black magic until the very end.
Not that it made anything better….
“You don’t want to know what the kitchen looks like,” Cora was saying.
“I can hazard a guess,” Bronagh grunted. Then she sighed. “Still calling on the same god who got her kicked out of Carman so many decades ago. The coven dissolved after that. Some of us quit after witnessing true dark magic for the first time.”