“Snowbell? As in the flower?” I asked, brow creasing as I tried to picture flowers flowing over a ward, setting it off. That was more of a Spring power than a Winter one.

  Meredith rolled her eyes and blew out a breath as if that was the stupidest thing she’d ever had the misfortune to hear. “Of course not.”

  “Oh,” I answered, sounding dejected. “I don’t know what that is then.”

  She nodded and gave me a little smile, as if she were apologizing for her reaction earlier. “They’re miniature faeries native to Japan. They’re an invasive species down here after well-meaning arborists brought Japanese trees over and put them in nurseries. We haven’t been able to get rid of them. They’re harmless unless they swarm you, which isn’t common. They don’t really listen to anyone, but the High Sidhe and Graupel has restraints put on his power. We know he isn’t sending them. They’re just attracted to the ambient energy of the prison. Mother thought I could do pest control, at least, but I’m not even good at setting traps to zap them.”

  “You should try brewing Faerie Enchantment,” I said, mulling her words over. Something sounded off about the alarms, but I didn’t have enough information to puzzle out just what. “It’s not a black magic potion, so you should be able to pull it off without much trouble. It attracts minor fae. If it’s the dark stuff that’s tripping you up, you should try thinking outside the box.” And I was pretty sure that dark magic wasn’t Meredith’s natural calling. Maybe that was why her hair wasn’t raven black but more of a dark chestnut color. Maybe she wasn’t dying it, after all.

  Meredith gave me a suspicious look out of the corner of one eye. “You’re awfully well-informed about witch customs for a changeling.”

  Whoops. I’d fallen into lecture mode, like when I was teaching Finn about magic in general. It had become kind of a habit, but it was going to expose me to a too clever witch if I didn’t think up a plausible explanation, and fast.

  I opened my mouth, casting around for something to say to that, but was saved the effort when every ward on Meredith’s wall lit up like Christmas lights, flashing a deep crimson over the surroundings. The light show was accompanied by a piercing pain in my ears. I sprang to my feet in an instant, hands over my ears, trying to locate the source of the threat.

  “What’s going on?” I shouted, barely able to hear my own voice over the throb of sound. It sounded like a siren wailing next to my head, like metal scraping over bone. It felt like my eyes were going to start bleeding if it didn’t stop. But weirdly, Meredith seemed unbothered by it. Damn my new vampire ears. It was probably the equivalent of a dog whistle, ready to deafen anything with superior hearing.

  Meredith came to her feet seconds later, eyes round. “It’s my defense system. It’s only good for warning me of an attack. And that means something is actively aiming magic at us. We need to–”

  But that was as far as she got. A fierce wave of cold wafted through the open window of the treehouse, chilling even my new, vampire body to the marrow. Frost formed on every exposed inch of the wooden room and, one by one, each of the Elder Futhark sigils winked out, extinguished like a candle in high winds. The wailing finally stopped, which was sweet freaking relief. Too bad it also left me able to hear what happened next in terrifying clarity.

  The tree trunk beneath us groaned, a sound of agony, as its branches began to crack, falling to the ground with a sound like thunder, splitting on impact on the forest floor. The tree house slanted alarmingly as the tree listed to one side. Meredith tumbled toward the window. I acted on instinct, not giving myself time to think about it. I followed her out of the gap, seizing her hand in both of mine so I could yank her close. Then, with every ounce of strength in my new body, I kicked off, using the window sill to get us clear of the doomed treehouse. We tumbled in midair for seconds that seemed like a lot longer, and I barely managed to position myself in time, taking the brunt of the impact on my spine, rather than landing on top of Meredith. The landing rattled my teeth, and brilliant white stars flashed across my vision, but at least I’d survive. Meredith would have crunched like a bag of chips.

  I caught a glimpse of the tree before it impacted the ground with bone-shaking force. It was covered in rime from the roots up, but more alarmingly, a javelin made of sparkling ice jutted from its middle.

  Something with Winter magic had just tried to kill us.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Come on,” I said, jerking Meredith to her feet as soon as my head stopped ringing like a struck bell. “We need to go.”

  My skull felt thicker than ever before. But I’d live... unlive through it.

  “Go where?”

  “Away from here. Whoever just attacked us isn’t going to stop.”

  “How do you know?”

  I turned to look at her and frowned. Were we really having this conversation right now? “Because once they realize they’ve failed to kill us, they’ll be back.” I paused, thinking the more direct approach might work better. “Do you really want an ice spear in your guts?”

  Meredith darted a wide-eyed glance over her shoulder, and then back at me, lingering overlong on my shoulders. I realized after a belated moment that a dull, aching pain had settled near my collarbone and the warm, delectable aroma of blood was perfuming the air around us. When I turned my head, I found a shard of ice around the size of my forearm jutting from my shoulder. A few inches down and it would have impaled me right through the heart. Confirmation that this assassination attempt was for me, then. Sometimes it was rough, being so dang popular. I grabbed the end of the icicle and willed a trickle of magic into my hand. The icicle collapsed into chilly water after a moment of concentration.

  “Y-you...” she began, stuttering as the realization hit home. “You saved my life.” She seemed confused. “W-why...?”

  “Come on,” I growled, jerking her off her feet when she refused to move. A few months ago, her weight would have been difficult to manage, even as petite as she was. Now she was as easy to handle as a sack of potatoes. Awkwardly shaped and prone to inconvenient movement, sure, but not heavy. “What part of ‘ice in your guts’ didn’t you get?”

  I didn’t wait for her stuttered response. A cold front was moving in from the north, fat globules of snow wafting to the ground around us. The sudden, unseasonable weather change could only mean one thing—the enemy was nearby and they were whipping up a blizzard. If I waited to move, we’d be a foot deep in snow before we knew it.

  All around us, green leaves faded to brown as the cold sucked the life out of the forest. The singing of the crickets went silent, and the birds and animals fled in front of the creeping ice like it was a monster to be escaped.

  I sucked in a breath and stumbled as something dawned on me: the clearing in the woods. It hadn’t been a blight curse, or a bit of dark magic gone wrong. It had been a circle. A Winter circle. The damp had come from ice and snow melting in the heat. How long had the enemy been in town, watching me like Meredith had been? And why were they only making their move now? Was it because I was poking around, or did they have all their pieces in place?

  Too bad standing around and thinking about it was probably going to get me impaled on an icicle, because I sure would have loved to know what the spell was going on in Jinx Junction. There wasn’t any time for that at the moment, though. I needed to get myself, and Meredith, out of the line of danger before we ended up on permafrost.

  I raked my hand through the air, my fingers crooked like claws, and parted the veil between this section of the world and that of Faerie, making a path into Autumn. It was harder to do than it should have been, as if the air had congealed, adopting the consistency of pudding. The temperature dipped with every passing second and, judging by Meredith’s labored gasps, the cold was physically painful to mortal lungs. If I didn’t get her out of here soon, it wouldn’t matter that she’d dodged the icicle of death. She’d be as lifeless as me, but without half the animation and charisma. Then I’d only have two choices. Let her die, or turn her. I knew which she’d prefer.

  “Option C, Astrid,” I muttered. “Make an option C.”

  It was easier said than done. Something was preventing me from going through the portal into Faerie. And in the end, I couldn’t manage it. Between the blood loss and Meredith’s labored gasps, I knew I wouldn’t have the power or control to make it to the other side without getting one or both of us killed. So, I ran. I ran like my life depended on it, aiming for the edge of town. Or at least, the area where I thought the edge of town should be. It was difficult to tell with roiling gray clouds amassing overhead, blotting out the limited light of the moon and stars.

  I knew when I’d reached town, because I encountered one of the freaking tumbleweeds. One second, I was moving forward as fast as I possibly could with a witch draped over my back like a tired toddler and the wind in my hair, and the next, I hit the ground face first, inhaling dirt. At least I had the reflexes to roll, so I didn’t squish Meredith. Hitting the ground wasn’t panic-inducing the way it would have been if I’d still needed to breathe, but it was still uncomfortable.

  I sat up, my everything smarting, trying to cough the damn stuff out. Meredith rolled off my back, coming to a stop when she hit the corner of the nearest building. The air left her lungs in a painful whoosh, and I winced in sympathy as she curled into a tight ball.

  I heard pounding footsteps and looked up in time to see four pairs of shoes running in our direction. I recognized two of the pairs. The shiny dress shoes belonged to Lorcan, a gift from Wanda for his last birthday. She’d selected them to go with a suit she’d fashioned for him. A suit that had ended up puddled in the hallway while she did unspeakably loud things to him in the room next to mine. The sensible hiking boots belonged to Uncle Fox and had a small groove for storing spare knives near the heel. He didn’t need knives or guns to be dangerous, but kept them on his person anyway to keep up his alter ego—Fox Aspen, a member of the Hunter Guild of America, reporting back to Jonathan Moses, the bane of monsters everywhere.

  The other two pairs of shoes weren’t familiar, but I could guess who they belonged to. The cowboy boots were different colors, one with spurs that jangled and one without. Other than that, the outfits the two women wore were identical. Dark slacks, quarter-sleeved black blouses with their insignia and rank embroidered on one pocket. Their black hair was pulled away from their faces, leaving them stark and unamused.

  Or in Lucretia Boline’s case, furious. She outpaced Uncle Fox and Lorcan, using her superior stride to reach me in seconds, an aura of writhing black magic coalescing around her hands as she took in my bloodied shirt and her daughter’s terrified expression. The High Witch of Jinx Junction bore down on me like an out-of-control freight train, madness glinting in the depths of her eyes as she drew her own conclusions about what had happened in the forest.

  “I told you to stay away from my daughter!” she hissed, raising a clenched fist to the bleak Winter-controlled sky. “And now you attacked her? Big mistake. Your very last mistake, leech!”

  And before Uncle Fox, Lorcan, or her own deputy could reach us, she loosed a hex straight at my face.

  Time goes funny, when you realize you’re going to die. Like for real die.

  The fact that it had happened to me enough that I had a decent sample size to judge by was a little depressing, but still.

  Everything slowed down, enough that I could see the dark miasma of furious, deadly power that Sherrif Lucretia Boline was in the process of launching at me. The magic might have been pretty, all purple black, like a storm cloud in miniature, if it weren’t one of the nastiest bits of magic I’d ever seen in my life.

  It was also a very familiar scene. It was the one I’d witnessed in Jenny Greenteeth’s divination bowl, the one I’d been obsessing over ever since. In that endless moment before the spell hit, I was able to flick my eyes around, take in the details that matched what I’d seen. I felt a little silly to realize it hadn’t been ash in the vision. The fluffy pale clumps floating down from the sky were, in fact, snow.

  Then the hex burned closer, and I didn’t have any time left to notice much of anything else.

  It would have been the ignoble end of Astrid Depraysie if Meredith hadn’t thrown herself across the space between us, interposing her body between mine and Lucretia’s. One second, I was kneeling on the ground, staring my certain (and final) death in the face, and the next she’d leaped into the path of her mother’s spell, hands upraised. I expected the force of it to take her off her feet and launch her through the wall of the apothecary up the road.

  Instead, the air around her arms lit with a flash of incandescent light, forming a barrier between us and her mother. Anywhere the dark, slithering miasma of Lucretia’s spell touched the light, it sizzled and burned away until the power was spent. When I blinked the spots from my eyes, I found Lucretia staring down at her daughter in unflattering shock, fists still raised. A second later, Uncle Fox reached her side and jerked that fist away from both of us, as though disarming a dangerous criminal. To her credit, Lucretia didn’t struggle.

  “Meredith...” she said softly. “What… was that?”

  Meredith stared at her outstretched hands as though she’d never seen them before. Glimmers of white-gold power still danced over her fingertips, fading slowly in the light lamps that lined the street. It hadn’t been faerie magic. I would have recognized it by feel and scent, but whatever it was, it wasn’t witch magic. Was Meredith like me then, a half-breed with abilities that stymied her talent for hexing people?

  “I don’t know,” she admitted, shaking her head.

  “Move out of the way,” Lucretia said, sounding a little more sure of herself after she’d had a moment to process what had just happened, and apparently, still believed I needed to be exterminated.

  Lorcan reached my side and wrapped an arm around my waist, lifting me to my feet. He was hunched in such a way that another spell would take him on the shoulders, instead of hitting me directly in the face. I tried to shove him aside. Wanda would kill me if I got Lorcan hexed into oblivion for something so silly.

  “Don’t,” I whispered. “She’s not after you.”

  “What kind of backup sire would I be if I allowed the Scarlet O’Hara Terminator crossover to hex you?” he asked, an amused slant to his mouth. I didn’t see what was so funny about any of this, though. Didn’t he realize how much trouble I was in with an unknown assassin hiding in the woods and a pissed-off Hexus Ranger standing only a foot away?

  “Move,” Lucretia ordered again when Meredith didn’t scurry out of the way. Lucretia then tried to pry her wrist out of Uncle Fox’s but couldn’t budge him an inch. That seemed to shock her a little. Uncle Fox in his human guise wasn’t a small man, but he was built like a swimmer, all long lines and lean strength. And considering that his face was closed down and almost white with fury, his grip was probably about to bruise.

  “No,” Meredith said. “No, I’m not going to let you hurt her, Mother.”

  “She attacked you,” Lucretia bit out.

  Meredith shook her head. “The blood all over her is hers, not mine.” Lucretia’s furrowed brows released slightly as Meredith continued. “There was an attack on my lookout post, and Aster was near enough to hear it. If she hadn’t cushioned my fall, I’d be dead or dying. One second, I was there, and the next ice shattered the tree trunk, sending the whole thing crashing down. If you want to hex someone, hex me. I must have calibrated the wards wrong if something got through them.”

  It was stretching the truth almost past recognition. Meredith didn’t want her mom to know we’d been hanging out in her spelled treehouse. Because if she told that story, it would inevitably lead to someone spilling the beans about her botched spying attempt. Still, the half-truth had the desired effect. Lucretia’s stance became a fraction less militant, and she let her palms fall open, instead of holding them in a ready position. In witch society, it was the next best thing to sheathing a weapon. Uncle Fox still kept a grip on her wrist, just in case.

  “Is that true, vampire?” Lucretia asked, aiming an imperious look at me down her long, thin nose.

  “I have a name. Aster,” I shot back, eyes narrowing. “But yes, it’s true. I saw something or someone attack and I did what I could. I didn’t see who did it, but I have to assume it was a Winter faerie. Who else could produce a storm like this?”

  I waved a hand through the air, indicating the falling snow. It was coming down hard now, streaks of white that began to form small, powdery hillocks. The tumbleweeds had to actually gain a little speed before they could clear the tiny drifts. There were things in the snow too. Tiny, ivory blobs that I would have mistaken for snow or flower petals when I had a witch’s eyesight. With my new senses though, I could make out the difference. They were the size of marbles, with round faces and iridescent wings. They darted through my splayed fingers with ease, heading in the direction we’d come.

  And as to Uncle Fox being involved in springing a Winter prisoner—well, he wasn’t involved—not when he’d clearly been hanging out with Lorcan.

  “It explains the presence of a swarm of Snowbells,” Lucretia said darkly, exchanging a look with her deputy. “The damn things always flock when there’s Winter Royalty around.”

  Lucretia turned on one heel and stalked away from us then, making a curt gesture for the other witch to follow. It was Uncle Fox who kept up with her for a few paces. The look she gave him in reply could have withered an entire orchard.

  “I have business to attend to, Hunter. As illuminating as our earlier conversation was, I’m afraid I have a Winter Sidhe to track down and arrest and you’ll just be in the way.”

  Uncle Fox’s smile was impish. “Believe me, you’ll want my help doing it.”