I pushed back and raised a hand, but before I could unleash another bolt of energy, a gruff voice said, “Drop low.”
I immediately pressed flat against the carpet, felt the wind of a leap high above me, saw Aiden land and lash out with a clenched fist, burying it deep in the stranger’s solar plexus. As the man gasped and doubled over, Aiden followed with an elbow to the head. The stranger dropped hard and didn’t move.
The woman made a garbled sobbing sort of sound and ran for her child. I quickly dismantled the shield so she could pick him up, then pushed into a sitting position.
Aiden squatted in front of me, his gaze sweeping my length and coming up relieved. “You’re okay.”
It was a statement rather than a question, and I smiled. “Yes, and so is the kid, thank God.”
“Yes.”
He rose, offered me a hand, and then hauled me upright.
“Where’s Monty?” I asked.
“Calling in reinforcements and an ambulance.” He brushed a finger down my cheek, as if in reassurance that I really was okay, and then turned to the woman. “Are you okay, Mrs. Lloyd?”
“Yes, but only thanks to the timely intervention of your witch, Aiden. If not for her—” She shuddered and hugged her son tighter. “Thank you. Thank you both.”
He nodded. “I’ll move your husband out of the room and send the paramedics in when the ambulance gets here, just to make sure you’re both okay. I’m afraid we will need a statement from you.”
She nodded and continued to make soft, soothing noises. The little boy had calmed down, though he continued to make hiccupping sounds that spoke of his distress.
Aiden pulled a zip-tie from his pocket, lashed the stranger’s wrists together, and then roughly hauled him from the room. I started to follow, then spotted the gun and moved across to pick it up.
“I can never repay what you’ve done for us,” Mrs. Lloyd said. “If you hadn’t intervened, if you hadn’t thrown that spell when you did, Robbie would be dead, just as that bastard wanted.”
“You’re able to see magic?” I said, surprised. There was certainly nothing in her aura or her energy output to suggest she was a witch of any kind, and we were generally the only ones who could see spell threads.
Fear and panic flashed through her expression and she said, the words tumbling out so quickly they practically ran into each other, “No, God no, I’m not a witch or anything like that.”
Which very much suggested that magic—or perhaps the suspicion of it—had in some way been responsible for what happened here today.
“I’m not implying you are, but just so you know, there is nothing wrong with being a witch or even magic sensitive. And they stopped burning us eons ago.”
She blinked, and then half laughed, though it came out more of a sob. “Not in Jim’s family, they didn’t.”
“Ah. I’m sorry.” And I couldn’t help wishing that I’d been a whole lot more brutal on the bastard; maybe it would have given him some inkling of what it meant to terrorize a real witch.
“No, no, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to react so badly. It’s just habit born out of necessity.” She shrugged and kissed her son’s forehead. “What I do isn’t magic, even if his family considered it so. It’s more a psychic ability—I can see energy, good and bad. In fact, it’s the sole reason I was even in Robbie’s room—I felt something very dark move past the house. If I hadn’t come in to check on my son, goodness knows what Jim might have done.”
Jim would have done exactly what he’d tried to do there at the end, and then would probably have tried to kill her for good measure.
“That darkness you sensed passing by the house,” I said. “I don’t suppose you have any idea which direction it was going?”
“It went through the side gate and was headed in a north-westerly direction. Beyond that, no. Sorry.” She hesitated. “Is that why you came in here? Because you were tracking that dark energy?”
“Yes, though it was your son’s screaming that brought us into the house. It didn’t sound right.”
“Then I thank the stars and good fortune darkness decided to walk past my house at that precise moment.”
I didn’t believe the stars or good fortune had anything to do with it. I really did believe that the hone-onna had sensed what was going on and had deliberately led us there.
Which was a weird thing to think about a creature of death, but a definite indicator that maternal instincts weren’t restricted to flesh-and-blood beings.
Two medics came into the room, so I said goodbye and followed the sound of Monty’s voice down the hall and into the kitchen.
He’d been talking on the phone, but hung up as I entered. His gaze swept me critically and came up … puzzled. “You’re looking surprisingly well, considering.”
I frowned at him. “Considering what?”
“Considering the force behind that bolt of energy you unleashed—you do know it was pure wild magic, don’t you?”
“It’s a part of my soul, Monty, so these days it’s a given that it’ll appear in any spell or energy I cast.” I walked over to the sink, then grabbed a cup and filled it up. The adrenaline of the moment was fading, leaving my throat parched and a deepening ache in my head. I had painkillers in my bag, but my bag was still in the truck. Water would have to do for the moment.
“It wasn’t your personal wild magic. It was the real deal.”
My gaze shot across to his. “Don’t be ridiculous—there has to be threads of the stuff nearby for that to happen, and there isn’t.”
But even as I said that, a soft glimmer caught my eye. A tiny thread of wild magic, lazily circling around the room, as if waiting for something.
Or someone.
Me, to be precise.
I held out a hand, and it immediately responded, wrapping lightly around my wrist. My skin tingled with power and awareness.
That awareness scared me, because it wasn’t coming from Katie. This thread of wildness wasn’t from her wellspring, but rather the main one.
Which could only mean it wasn’t her soul, her spirit, creating the growing cognizance in the main wellspring’s wild magic.
It was mine.
And it was all thanks to the magic in my DNA; it was forging an ever-deepening connection with the larger wellspring.
No wonder my psi senses had been warning that I’d never truly be able to leave this place. It wasn’t, as I’d been thinking, because I was Katie’s conduit to the people she loved, but the fact that, like her, I was becoming irrevocably linked to a wellspring. Perhaps not forever—not unless I wished it, an inner voice whispered, and I didn’t—but for as long as I lived, this place was now both my home and my prison. Leaving might have been possible in the earlier days of our arrival, but it wasn’t now.
“Liz, what’s wrong? You look … well, you look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” Monty said. “You’ve certainly gone as pale as one.”
“Sorry, just the aftereffect of using that much power.” I waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll be fine.”
His gaze narrowed, no doubt suspecting there was more to the story than what I was saying, but Aiden came back into the room, so he didn’t push the matter.