Speaking of sasquatches, it was maybe another few seconds before Roy appeared behind Poppy and growling the fiercest of growls, he charged one of the monsters, taking it in the stomach and forcing it backwards. Stanley was quick behind Roy, in his centaur form, and at the howling of a werewolf, I figured Louisa had also arrived.

  Poppy stood her ground and it was then that I realized she was trying to protect Franz. She pulled out one of Finn’s water guns which we’d loaded with Get Away Oil and took aim at the remaining monsters, splashing the five nearest her.

  “I order you to leave!” she bellowed. “Go back where you came from!”

  As soon as the potion hit them, the fiends wavered, became transparent, and vaporized in a puff of mist. Franz peeped in surprise, but Poppy wasn’t finished. She turned the water gun and sprayed the same potion over the remaining monsters as the werewolf and centaur ran past her, advancing onto the battlefield. Poppy followed them, looking like a one-woman army with a raccoon clinging to the back of one of her legs.

  I turned to face the cabin again. These monsters were simply round one of whatever the coven had up their sleeves. The coven, itself, had yet to arrive. I had no way of knowing how long they’d take to answer the alarm, nor how many of them would show (given the fact that Mother wanted to keep Olga’s whereabouts on the down low) but I didn’t want to stick around to find out. Instead, I got to my feet and waved my hand across the scene as I closed my eyes and called to my death magic, to the magic of the night, the magic of the vampire blood within me. When I could feel that dark magic come to the surface of my being, I opened my eyes again.

  “Magic of the night, reveal all your secrets to my sight.”

  The scene changed before my eyes so I could see every booby trap and hex—they glowed in an unnatural bright green, highlighted against the black night. The traps covered most of the territory between the cabin and me. In fact, the coven had left not one inch of ground unprotected, though they’d warded the cabin itself most of all. I had to admit, I was impressed.

  I took a deep breath and charged. I fired hexes in all directions. They blasted off the wards and triggered the booby traps, exploding them far away from me. I dodged left and skidded under another monster apparition that came out of nowhere, this one appearing to be some sort of uber zombie, standing over ten feet high with flesh dripping off its face. I tripped and almost fell victim to a protection spell. When I set it off, it shot a fountain of razor ice shards at me.

  I held up my hand and blocked every last one of them. Blood magic flowed from me with no trouble now, overcoming all my senses and my understanding of the world around me. It covered everything in a haze of red, still highlighting the booby traps in bright green. As I turned to face each one in the vicinity, my magic overcame every ward and tripped the traps as I focused on them. Once each trap was spent, it simply disappeared from sight, dissolving into the earth below as if it had never been.

  I dashed onto the crumbling front porch of the cabin and stopped to catch my breath. Plastering my back against the ancient and rotted boards, I thought fast. Wards hemmed in Poppy and Lorcan some fifty feet away. That meant they couldn’t get near the cabin. Roy and Stanley were fighting creatures off to my right and I could hear Louisa’s howl from the left. There was no sign of Fifi and I had to wonder if she’d made it. Regardless, I was now facing a concerning dilemma—I would have to go after Olga alone. Dammit.

  I ran my hand along the cabin wall. The wards impregnated the wood and even the house’s very framework. No one could get inside—not a witch anyway.

  I inched toward the door. The strongest wards covered it. Mother herself must have woven these—I could feel as much in the wards, themselves. They bore her magical signature. But, unlike the wards I’d woven to protect my store, Mother had strengthened these wards in a way that only she could get past them. Whereas my wards were specific to my bloodline, hers were specific only to her. Double dammit.

  But, then something occurred to me and I grinned maliciously. If this was a battle against Mother and me, I would turn the tables. I would make this a contest between my magic and hers. Ordinarily, Mother’s magic would best anyone who came up against her—there was a reason she was the head witch of the Crescent Circle Coven—she was that powerful.

  There was one thing she hadn’t counted on, though… She’d designed these protections to defend the cabin against a witch or warlock… or some other magical creature. But, she hadn’t counted on my blood magic. Probably because she didn’t know how to account for it. Blood Witches were few and far between so our powers weren’t readily known. And I could use that little tidbit to my advantage.

  Fires of anger began to burn me from within as the weight of everything Mother had attempted rained down on me. She’d tried all her dirty tricks to wreck my life and she’d thought I’d just roll over and do her bidding. She’d thought she could wear me down and I’d eventually give in, that I wasn’t strong enough to stand on my own two feet, that I wasn’t strong enough to beat her.

  I stepped off the porch and summoned every crumb of blood magic I could muster. Feeling the hum of Lorcan’s blood working in tandem with my own, I took a deep breath and vaulted off the ground. Channeling every drop of vampire power into my legs, I jumped as high as the roof.

  The cabin’s lopsided gable whizzed downward past my eyes. For a second, I hovered, suspended over the house with the black sky spread above me. Then I willed myself forward and smashed down through the chimney.

  And when I encountered Mother’s wards, they fizzed against me for a second or so, burning into my skin and threatening to light my blood on fire but my blood fought back. And as the anger exploded out of me, I could feel myself growing hotter, stronger, angrier. I gripped the wards in my hands and while they were invisible to the naked eye, I could feel them in my grip. I yanked against them, pulling one after another into my grip until the fire of their power began to double and then triple. It felt like I was holding a raging inferno in the palm of my hand. As I glanced down, I could see the blue of Mother’s magical fire burning, scorching my skin. So I brought my other hand forth and watched as a black fire erupted from it, glittering with an inky reflection against the night sky. I slammed the black fire over the blue and watched as it ate through Mother’s power, reducing the blue to smoldering coals before the coals went out completely.

  The brick of the chimney gave way and the mortar crumbled. The whole chimney imploded and I dropped through a shower of rubble. Someone screamed from inside the house as I landed hard on the floor.

  The cabin’s interior looked as dingy and destitute as the exterior. There wasn’t one stick of furniture to be seen anywhere. The only thing within the room was Olga Fischer, who stood across the bare main room, gawking at me. She had to have been at least three hundred years old because she looked as if she were in her late sixties. Witches aged very slowly (I was one hundred forty but I only looked to be in my early forties). Olga’s long white hair was twisted into a knot on top of her head and she wore a gown of deep royal blue that graced the floorboards. She would have been beautiful except for the puffy dark circles under her eyes.

  The bricks scattered at my feet and a gust of night air blew through the hole in the roof. Olga gaped at me and her hand flew to her heart.

  “Olga Fischer, I presume?” I asked, thinking it was a good enough line to make it into Mission Impossible or Indiana Jones.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Vandellmelia Depraysie?” Olga asked, still keeping her distance.

  “Call me Wanda.”

  “Vanda!”

  Or, ‘Vanda’, as the case may be.

  A huge smile lit her face. “Franz zaid you vere coming, but I didn’t vant to believe it! And now I zee zat it ist true!”

  “Yep, it’s true and it’s also true that we’ve gotta go.”

  She flung out her hand. “Stop!”

  But, she was too late as I ran face first into a wall of magical power erected around her. I bounced off the invisible fortress and fell down hard on the ground, right on my round and shapely rump, stumbling over a few bricks in the process. I cursed through gritted teeth as I figured I’d just sprained an ankle and I’d probably have a sizable bruise on one cheek.

  “Zee whole houz ist rigged,” Olga blurted out, shaking her head as her blue eyes widened until they appeared to be perfect circles. “You can’t come near me. No one can except Franz.”

  I pulled myself up, still fuming and in pain. “Who cast the spells?” But, I already knew.

  “Zelestine herself. She zaid she would never lift zem until I redeemed myzelf with zee coven.”

  “Oh, she did, did she? Well, we’ll see about that.”

  Hobbling forward, I advanced on the ward that had knocked me over. This was Mother’s doing, which meant this was now also the moment of truth, the moment when Celestine’s power met mine—the moment when I was going to find out just how powerful I was. Or wasn’t, as the case may be.

  I extended my hands and energy pricked my fingers. I felt Mother through the vibrations and couldn’t wait to put my power to the test against hers. I dug deep, but instead of finding my witchly magical power, I again tapped into the vampire blood in my veins—Lorcan’s blood. All these months, the vampire within me had gathered strength as it lay dormant. Now that strength flowed through my veins, but it still wasn’t enough. I had to blend the vampire with the witch who had always lived within me, the witch who was me. As I closed my eyes and concentrated, I called to these two halves of myself.

  “As there is yin, so is there yang… now I call both goddesses within… that of vampire and that of witch, to bond together in single stitch.”

  And something blossomed within me, a new sense of power that flowed through me, like nothing I’d ever experienced before. The two halves of the whole were now blended, bonded together to no longer form black and white, but shades of gray. I channeled this combined power to the energy field imprisoning Olga. Mother’s magic cycled higher to combat the threat.

  The more the field resisted, the higher my magic built. It throbbed against the barricades holding it under my control until I released the power in a torrent of unbridled magic, aiming to break the field barrier.

  But, I hadn’t released enough, and the power I had freed simply sizzled against Mother’s fortress and blipped into nothing. Meanwhile, I felt the combined witch and vampire magic rising within me yet again, building and building upon itself, until it felt like it was rising to catastrophic proportions, filling me past the brim.

  I released the power again and this time, it blasted out of me in a tsunami of sheer rampant energy. It thumped into Mother’s force field and I felt the wards weaken. But Mother’s magic stepped up to the fore and began fighting my influence in earnest. Angered even more than before, I clenched my eyes shut and tightened my jaw as I summoned as much of my magic as I could. Feeling the energy filling my hands, flowing up to my elbows and beyond, I flung my magic at the barrier and the field ripped out of the way as a blast of energy boomed through the house, feeling like we were suddenly stuck in a tornado. All the windows blew out of the house, crashing to the ground in a cacophony.

  A second later and all was still. It was done.

  Olga sprang to my side, grinning from ear to ear. “You did it, Vanda! You broke zee vard!”

  She leaned down over me and it was then that I realized I’d collapsed when I’d taken Mother’s wards down. I pushed up to my knees and Olga helped me to my feet.

  “There’s no time for celebrating!” I grabbed her by the wrist. “We have to go!”

  I lunged for the door and collided with a wall of solid granite… except it wasn’t a wall. It was a person. As I looked up, I took in a tall, thin woman in a tailored dress suit. The ivory-white skin, vacant eyes, and cruel features were those of a vampire.

  And not just any vampire.

  She was Genevieve, a member of Rupert’s family in Seattle. So… what was she doing here?

  “Time’s up, Blood Witch.”

  She slammed both hands into my chest and sent me flying over backwards. I must have done three somersaults in midair before I landed, stumbling over the bricks on the floor and coming up hard against the far side of the cabin wall. I staggered to my feet and then felt someone’s ice-cold and rock-hard hand grip onto my shoulder, yanking me upward and into a different vampire who was standing behind me. Unfortunately, I recognized this one, too. He wasn’t as tall as Genevieve, but his broad shoulders and sturdy frame told me who he was before he spoke in that unmistakable Cockney accent.

  “Lorcan hasn’t done his duty to the family,” Joseph spat out.

  “What duty?” I demanded, glaring at him.

  “Lorcan ain’t turned you the way Rupert ordered, so you’ll have to be killed.” Then he grinned, wide and long. “So sorry.”

  He seized my shoulders and sent me spinning back to Genevieve who grabbed me by the arm and then whipped me around to face her as she leered at me and her fangs extended.

  “I can’t say I’m sorry,” she managed.

  As I was getting ready to fire a hex at her, I caught the image of Olga standing in the far corner of the cabin. She held her hands out in front of her and a bright light danced from her extended fingers as she fired a hex at Genevieve.

  “Undead, be gone!”

  The spell lashed around Genevieve as if it were a pair of invisible arms wrapping around her middle and ripping her away from me. She flew back against the wall and slammed her head into the wooden logs. At that same moment, Joseph charged Olga. Catching her with his vampire speed, he clamped his hands around her neck.

  Newly freed, I fired a blood bolt at him, but Genevieve’s attack had confounded me and I missed him. The bolt whistled past Joseph’s head, but managed to clip his temple. He rounded on me with a bellow but Genevieve reached me first.

  In a blur I couldn’t see, she attacked me from behind and locked her elbow around my neck. Dragging me to the other side of the cabin, I tried to aim another blood bolt at her, but she grabbed my wrist. Twisting my arm behind my back, she disabled me from doing any more magic.

  “You had your month of fun, witch,” she hissed in my ear. “And you failed to break the blood bond with your sire. Just as we all knew you would.” Then she laughed and it was an acidic, ugly sound. “You sobbed out all your hopes and dreams at Rupert’s feet, but you still failed. How terribly sad.”

  “The month isn’t over yet,” I choked. “I still have three more days.”

  “Your time is over,” she nearly interrupted, glaring at me.

  “Rupert agreed…” I started.

  “Rupert never wanted to suffer you to live in the first place, abomination. He said what he did as a favor to Lorcan. But, Lorcan is soft and he won’t turn you. So… just imagine how pleased Rupert will be when we return with your dead body to show our loyalty.”

  I skimmed the room for something with which to defend myself, but there was nothing. And as I watched, Joseph released Olga and she dropped to the ground, still and unmoving. There was a single line of blood that led from two holes in her neck. I felt my stomach drop.

  Meanwhile, my own blood pounded in my ears and I struggled to breathe through Genevieve’s unbreakable grip. I tried to fight against her but it was like trying to fight a straightjacket.

  Suddenly, a tide of noise sounded in my ears—crashes, curses, hexes, spells, and roars all occurring at the same time. With Genevieve dragging me farther away, I couldn’t see where the sounds were coming from. I fought to free my arm, but Genevieve almost dislocated my shoulder in her fight to keep me immobile.

  She dragged me towards the door. My vision started to blur from the lack of oxygen but I fought to stay awake and keep my wits. I had to get away from her! I hadn’t come this far to die at the hands of two upstart vampires. The very thought absolutely offended me.

  Genevieve didn’t go out the front door. She turned to one side and started backing into a different room. I’d been too occupied with freeing Olga to notice the room when I’d first entered the cabin. And given that it had been such a long time since I’d visited this cabin, I couldn’t say I was very aware of the layout to begin with.

  I wrenched my neck sideways, trying to catch another glimpse of Olga as I hoped upon hope that she was still alive. When I finally did see her, my heart sank. She wasn’t moving. Joseph still stood over her, blood staining his mouth and running down his chin. He grinned in maniacal fury, extending his fangs. He then bent over, seized her by the hair, and wrenched her head back for the killing bite.

  At that moment, a whirling missile plummeted through the hole in the roof. When the missile stilled, I recognized it as Lorcan. A split second later, he streaked toward me. Thrusting both arms past me, he grabbed Genevieve around the throat.

  At the same instant, another cannonball of screeching ferocity soared through the hole in the roof. Franz landed on Joseph’s head and started shredding him with raccoon claws and teeth. Joseph yelled as he fought to free himself from the little creature, but Franz wouldn’t be dislodged.

  Lorcan ripped Genevieve’s arm off my throat and blessed air rushed into my lungs as I collapsed against the wall and fought to get my breath. As I inhaled, stars swam before my eyes. Once I had my wits, I looked up to see Lorcan facing off with Genevieve. He made a sound I’d never heard before—a roar deep within his throat. In that noise there was intense hatred, anger, and fear. As I watched, Lorcan seemed to transform into a bellowing demon straight out of Hell Itself.

  He dove for Genevieve, looking like he wanted to rip her in half, but in that second, Joseph yanked Franz off his head. Bellowing with his own rage, Joseph flung the raccoon across the room. The creature somersaulted through the air, shrieking to the skies, and landed square against Lorcan’s back.