“Don’t let Wanda die,” Libby said before turning on one heel. A few seconds later, she was out the door in a whirl of skirts.

  “She’s right,” I whispered. “This is all my fault.”

  “It’s not,” Poppy started, but I shook my head as I looked up at her.

  “Maverick is a warlock. And I should have known better than to trust him.”

  “He ist also your brozer,” Olga said as she placed her hand on my shoulder, smiling down at me until she reminded me of some sweet grandmother… well, sweet witchly grandmother.

  “It’s difficult to look objectively at the people we love,” Lorcan added.

  His gaze roved over Wanda’s face as he said the words, his expression tender. Wanda would never believe it, but beneath the façade of the handsome, smarmy dentist was an absolute romantic. I couldn’t help but think Wanda would have hexed that look right off his face if she’d been awake. Or would she have? I’d noticed she’d been softening towards Lorcan lately, and softening in general. She said it was Poppy’s influence that was making her go ‘soft’ but I suspected it was more than that—it was Poppy, yes, but it was also Lorcan and Haven Hollow and me and Darla and Libby… it was all of us.

  ***

  An hour or so later, a thick silence fell over the house as we held our vigil.

  Darla and Libby had left a while ago to try to hunt Maverick down. Poppy had phoned Marty to tell him what was going on and he’d said he was happy to remain with Finn while Poppy stayed here with me. She and Olga, in an attempt to try to calm me down, had made brownies and hot chocolate.

  I hadn’t touched the hot chocolate, and I’d only eaten a brownie out of obligation. It tasted like paper and congealed like glue on the way down.

  “Do you think Wanda’s going to die?” I had to ask, but I was terrified of the answer.

  Lorcan’s eyes shifted out of focus for a second, fixed on a point just above the mantle. His teeth worried his lower lip, and I was afraid the points of his fangs would slice through his lip, sending blood pouring down his chin. I wasn’t sure if I could deal with the sight of blood at the moment. It just… it was too reminiscent of what Wanda was going to become. I was okay with Wanda completing her vampire metamorphosis in the abstract, and I even liked Lorcan a lot, but blood… I just couldn’t handle it yet.

  Thankfully, Lorcan’s fangs didn’t split his lip, and his eyes came back into focus a moment later.

  “First of all, I will not allow her a true death,” he started.

  “You know what I mean,” I interrupted. “Is she becoming an undead?”

  He was quiet as he considered the question. “The... feel of her, for lack of a better word, is stable. She’s alive, and I believe she shall remain that way. Her conscious mind has drawn away from her body, though.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It means it’s az if zee’s in a vaking dream,” Olga answered.

  “But, you don’t think she’s turning… into a vampire?” I asked them both.

  Lorcan shook his head. “If she were turning, her consciousness would no longer be there. She would die, just like a human dies, and her consciousness would return once she’d transitioned into the vampire.”

  “So she’d die a normal death before she was reborn a vampire?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Such is probably nature’s way of saving us eternal trauma.”

  “Huh?”

  “If you could feel your body going through the change, you would probably require decades of psychotherapy.”

  “Oh.”

  He nodded as he looked down at Wanda once again. “The fact that our witch is still in there is quite promising.”

  “So, if she’s not going through the full change, what do you think the Regression Oil is doing to her?”

  “A nightmare,” Olga answered, nodding. “I can zee the nightmare shadow upon her back.”

  I couldn’t see any shadows on Wanda’s back, but I took Olga’s word for it.

  Lorcan nodded as he looked up at me then. “The prick who masquerades as your brother must have merely cursed Wanda to a nightmare hellscape in order to salve his wounded pride. She did best him quite handily.”

  He sounded cheerful about that fact. Any other day I might have laughed and asked Lorcan to tell me the full story about the time Wanda and Maverick had dueled, because it had happened before I’d arrived in Haven Hollow. Yet, right now, I couldn’t even summon a smile, let alone a laugh.

  As to my brother, I didn’t usually possess the temperament to curse someone, but if my brother had been standing here, right in front of me, I’d have slammed him into the ground so hard, he’d feel the ache into his next life.

  “You’ll stay with us, right?” I whispered to Lorcan as Poppy and Olga both looked at me with concern in their eyes.

  “As long as I am able… until sunrise,” Lorcan promised.

  “And zee dawn of a new day should veaken zee effectiveness of zee nightmare spell,” Olga added.

  “But what if it’s not a nightmare?” I asked her, shaking my head. “What if... what if Wanda doesn’t wake up after dawn?”

  Lorcan was silent, and that was answer enough.

  If Wanda didn’t wake up after the dawn, she wasn’t going to wake up. Period.

  Chapter Eight

  I nuzzled into my pillow, groaning when a weak shaft of sunlight fell across my face.

  Daylight.

  I wanted to roll over, pull the drapes shut, and sleep for another six or seven hours. I was just so tired.

  And then I remembered the reason why I was exhausted, and terror jolted me awake. I opened my eyes and realized I’d passed out on the couch. As I looked out the window, I found the sun in full control of the sky and my heart started to pound.

  It was morning and that meant…

  No! Goddess! No!

  I jumped off the couch and immediately searched the living room, looking for any sign of Wanda, but she wasn’t here. Last night, we’d placed her on the couch and I’d taken the opposite side, where I’d eventually fallen asleep. And now? Now, where was she?

  Because of the fact that she wasn’t here, could that mean?

  No.

  Could it mean? My thoughts insisted. That she’s dead?

  If I were the reason for Wanda’s death…

  No, it was too much to think about, too much to consider. Just… too much.

  If Wanda was dead because of me, I would never forgive myself or Maverick. But, myself most of all.

  I bruised my shin on the coffee table, but I didn’t care. I was on autopilot, sprinting for the hallway, heart lodged firmly in my throat. Maybe Lorcan had moved Wanda to her bedroom after I’d passed out?

  Please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead, oh please, please, please don’t be dead.

  Lorcan was nowhere to be seen, though I suspected he’d holed up in one of the steamer trunks in the basement, so he’d be nearby if we needed him. Moving around in daylight was difficult for vampires, but not impossible.

  I reached Wanda’s bedroom and my heart, already squeezed tight in my throat, tried to climb out my mouth and run screaming for the door. She wasn’t there.

  Had she died during the night and Poppy had made sure to remove her body so I wouldn’t see it? Or, goddess forbid, did Wanda’s half-vampire status spontaneously turn her into one of the undead at the moment when her heart stopped beating? Had she staggered downstairs to find another steamer trunk to take shelter in?

  I was half-turned toward the hallway and the door leading to the basement when I heard a soft humming from the kitchen. It was definitely a woman’s voice, and she was humming the theme to I Dream of Jeanie. She almost sounded... cheerful.

  And that meant it couldn’t be Wanda.

  I mean, after what I’d done, if Wanda had survived, I expected to wake up upside down and unable to unglue my toes from the ceiling. Of course, I’d never seen anyone manage that particular hex in real life, but if anyone could manage it, it would have been a pissed off Blood Witch.

  Maybe it was just Libby or Darla? I could only hope it was one or the other or both of them because if Libby was still undead and Darla was still corporeal, both puttering around the house, that meant Wanda couldn’t be dead.

  Libby would probably fling whatever she was cooking at me if I showed my face, but an eye full of egg yolk was worth finding out I hadn’t somehow killed Wanda, so I tiptoed to the kitchen and peered inside.

  A woman with long, waist-length black hair was leaning over the microwave, squinting at the readout.

  Wanda.

  I breathed out a huge sigh of relief and just watched her for a few seconds, as if to be sure it really was her standing in front of me and not some hallucination caused by wishful thinking.

  There was a ‘TI-82’ readout where the numbers and defrost options should have been on the microwave. It’d come as a bit of a surprise to learn that most of Wanda’s thrift-store appliances had been repaired by the Hollow’s resident technomage, Henner Tayir, the grandson of Witch Tayir.

  Magic mostly manifested in women, so Henner would never be a major magical talent. Still, he had a knack for creating and repairing technology... in new and interesting ways. Everything he made worked, after a fashion, but you never really got used to how strange those things looked.

  After the night she’d had, I couldn’t blame Wanda for staring, bleary-eyed, at the readout. It was hard enough to parse when you weren’t suffering a magic hangover. Not that any of that mattered. I was just so completely relieved and happy to see her, and from the looks of it, she was okay. I figured Wanda being okay was also the reason no one else was in the house this morning—when Wanda woke up, Poppy, Olga and the others had probably returned home.

  “Just type the time in seconds, remember?” I said in a mouse voice. “Probably thirty seconds to reheat a piece of pizza.”

  I gestured helplessly at the cold pepperoni pizza she’d slapped onto a paper plate. The stack of pizzas that had arrived just prior to Wanda’s incident had remained untouched by the rest of the Black Cat Cocktail Club, and for good reason.

  As it now stood, we’d have cold pizza for days... that is, if Wanda allowed me to stay. After what I’d done, I couldn’t blame her if she wanted to toss me out on my useless, gullible ass.

  Where would I go if she kicked me out? Would I be able to stay at Poppy’s, or would all the club ladies turn their backs on me in disgust? I knew I couldn’t beg Maverick for a place to live. Aside from the fact that he was a total troll scrotum, he’d also tricked me and I’d never forgive him for that. No, I’d sooner sleep under an overpass before I asked him for help ever again.

  Wanda’s head whipped up at the sound of my voice, and a scowl creased her face. I cringed away from her accusing stare. There was just… something in her eyes. Hatred maybe?

  I swallowed hard as I realized she had every right to hate me. Maybe I should have crawled out the front door and hitched a ride with the first person who’d take me to Portland. That was probably a good way to get myself killed (at least according to urban legend), but staying here might accomplish the same thing. Wanda could get damn creative when someone pissed her off, and with her Blood Witch powers fouling things up... well, who knew what would happen to me?

  “What,” she began, voice clipped. “Did you think you were doing, spiking my drink like that?”

  I took a sudden and fierce interest in the kitchen cabinets, unable to meet her eyes. “I... I’m so sorry, Wanda,” I whispered, tears plaguing me all over again. “I wasn’t... I didn’t mean... it was supposed to be a surprise.”

  “A surprise?” She shook her head and glared at me. “Well, you surprised me all right.”

  “I wanted to show you how much I’ve learned and I wanted to give you the best Samhain gift I could think of… I wanted you to be proud of me.”

  She planted a fist firmly on one hip and frowned at me. She was wearing a skimpy black nightie, totally inappropriate for the weather, but it looked stunning nonetheless. It was one of her newer pieces and it was slightly odd that she was wearing it now—in general, Wanda didn’t wear skimpy stuff at home. Especially when it was just the two of us.

  “Poppy came over this morning and explained everything that happened, since I was clearly… out of my mind last night.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Listening to Maverick, Astrid? How could you be so… naïve?”

  “I wasn’t naïve, I was stupid.”

  Tears burned in the corners of my eyes and I blinked fast, trying not to let them fall. Wanda had been nothing but kind to me: she’d taken me in, and given me a roof over my head and food on my plate. She’d clothed me, sent me to school, acted the part of my mother. And this is how I’d repaid her? The fact I hadn’t meant to hex her wasn’t a good excuse. The damage was done and no amount of apologies would make it better.

  “Do I... should I go?” I whispered, throat tight. “I can pack tonight. I have a little money saved up, enough that I could find a place to stay… at least for a little while.”

  She continued to glare at me. “Where would you go?”

  “I don’t know, but I could figure that out.”

  “You should… you should return to the coven,” she said as my heart dropped down to my toes. Didn’t she know I couldn’t go back to the coven?

  “The coven?”

  “If you beg, I imagine Mother and Tabitha would allow you to return.” Before I could open my mouth to say anything more, she walked past me. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a blinding headache and only an hour to treat it before my shop opens.”

  Wanda swept past me in a swirl of something that smelled like jasmine, musk and rose, her hair slapping the side of my face as she passed. The rose overwhelmed the jasmine and musk and perfumed the air long after she’d left the room. It was a scent I hadn’t smelled in a long time. In fact, I hadn’t actually smelled it since childhood. Wanda had stopped wearing it after learning Maverick was obsessed with her—in his obsession, he’d written lurid love poems about her that listed, among other things, the rose scent of her hair.

  Hmm, that was odd that she’d wear it now.

  Not that it mattered. All that did matter at the moment was that I was being kicked out and… what if I was forced to return to the coven? I mean, where else would I go? There was nowhere else I could go.

  Maybe to Lorcan?

  My eyes burned, and I had to bite down on my bottom lip to contain a sob. Wanda was right to hate me, as she obviously now did. The potion had been Maverick’s fault, true, but trusting him for even an instant had been mine. I’d find a way to live on my own... somehow. Maybe, if I begged, I could get some of Poppy’s recipes and sell potions to passersby when I arrived in Portland?

  Or maybe I could bargain for safety in faerie. I’d heard the Autumn Prince, Reynard, was a decent guy. Faerie wasn’t ideal since mortals, even long-lived ones like witches, were treated as second-class citizens. Still, it had to beat homeless shelters or, Goddess forbid, living on the street. Even considering any of this made me nauseous. I felt a little numb. Wanda was kicking me out. It didn’t seem real.

  A few minutes later, Wanda re-emerged from her room and she was dressed in a slim-fitted, black pencil skirt and an emerald angora sweater. The keys to the Escalade jangled in her hand as she strode for the door, and I finally found my voice. I had to do something, say something, promise anything to make her understand how sorry I was. I couldn’t lose my newest not-quite-coven. Any punishment had to be better than losing the only family who’d have me, the only family who truly cared about me.

  “Wanda, please,” I gasped, urging my wobbling legs to move faster. I felt a little zombie-like as I staggered toward her.

  Her lower lip curled as she watched me hobble forward. The tears finally brimmed over, and I couldn’t see straight. I tried to launch myself at her waist, cage her in a hug, and try to convince her just how apologetic and regretful I was. I wanted to tell her how lonely these last few months had been without having any friends my age, without the coven to protect me, with my own mother turning her back on me. I wanted Wanda to understand how hard it was for me, even now, to realize that Maverick only valued me for how much I could further his plans.

  I didn’t get a chance to say anything, though. With an almost contemptuous flick of her wrist, Wanda sent me sprawling. I hit the ground on my side, and the hex carried me across the floorboards at such speed, I could feel the wind against my face. The momentum carried me into the hall, where I collided painfully with the wall.

  Wanda had hexed me!

  It wasn’t so much the pain that brought the tears hard and fast (though colliding with the wall did hurt.) Wanda had hurt me. On purpose.

  “Don’t act like you didn’t deserve this, Astrid,” she said coolly. “Pack your things and get out. I want you out of the Hollow by the end of Samhain.”

  “I understand,” I whispered, ducking my head so the tears dripped onto my shirt. I couldn’t help a sob when Wanda banged out of the house, leaving the door shuddering in its frame.

  I tugged my knees up to my chest and hugged them. I wasn’t sure how long it took me to cry myself out, but the sun had shifted a little by the time I found the energy to splash a little water on my face and peer out the bathroom window.

  Mid-morning, at least. Maybe nine or ten?

  A rap at the door made me yelp. Then my heart started beating double-time. Was Wanda back? And if so, was she here to accept my apology, or was she going to hex me again? I tiptoed to the door, hesitating before I unlocked it and reached for the knob.

  But when I flung the door open, it wasn’t Wanda at all.

  “Maverick!” I shrieked.

  Then I went for his eyes.

  Chapter Nine

  Maverick caught me by the hands before I could rake his eyes out with my nails.

  His superior reach put an effective kibosh on my attack, and I even ended up half-dangling from his grasp, flailing and cursing. I tried to kick him, but he twisted out of the way. Not that my bare foot would probably have made much of an impression on his abs, but it would have been something.