“Gladly,” Marie said, turning. “Oh, and give Jean Luc my regards. Tell him we’ll be seeing each other soon.”
Marie made her exit through the ballroom side door, and the other vampires followed like a silent congregation. I threw myself to my knees and checked for Jared’s pulse. It was there, but it was weak. Tears stung my eyes as I ran my fingers through his hair, kissing the side of his head. I needed Nicole; she would be able to heal him, but I still didn’t have a phone, and his phone was upstairs in the bedroom.
My eyes turned on Tamara, who lay on her side against a wall. Not wanting to waste another moment and risk Jared suffering any permanent damage, I stood and walked right over to where she was. I prodded her shoulder with my foot, and Tamara stirred, then sprang her eyes open and looked around the room wildly. She scrambled when she saw me, bucking her legs and feet, dragging herself to a sitting position against the wall.
She threw her hand up toward me, and I grasped it with magick and pinned it to the wall with a thud that induced a pained shriek to spill out of her.
“You should very carefully choose what you say and do from now on,” I said, as I stood above her.
“What are you going to do?” she asked, “Are you going to kill me?”
This was a question I hadn’t had a lot of time to think about. In truth, I hadn’t expected to be in this situation ever, let alone right now.
On the one hand, she had orchestrated a brutal attack on the witches of this city, leaving many injured and one dead. She had also lied to me, knocked me unconscious, and dragged me to a swamp as an offering to a pack of hungry vampires. As if that wasn’t enough, she had burned down my home, my sanctuary, and reduced it to a pile of smoldering rubble.
For what? To prove a point?
If the situation were reversed, she wouldn’t be hesitating to answer the question like I was. Heck, the situation had been reversed not long ago, and I’d been sure I was dead no matter what I did. She may have wanted the same thing I did—to unite people under the same banner and bring peace to New Orleans. But she wanted to do so at the exclusion of Jean Luc’s family, and she would have killed them, too, without hesitation.
But the fact remained, I wasn’t her. I shook my head. “No,” I said, “I’m going to give you a another chance to get the hell out of New Orleans and not come back.”
Tamara’s breathing was coming out in quick bursts. “You’ll… let me live?”
“You can live, just not here.” I squatted before her. “I don’t want you to ever come back, do you understand? New Orleans doesn’t want you. The witches here don’t want you. And once they find out what you did, they’ll want to do worse to you than kill you. So, you’re done here.”
She looked like she was going to speak, but she didn’t. Instead she struggled to stand, and when she was upright, she made a slow exit, picking up speed as she went until she was running—dashing for the door. But then she stopped and turned her head over her shoulder. I braced myself, thinking she was about to use magick, but she didn’t.
“You ever wonder how I did it?” she asked.
“Did what?” I asked, approaching. I wanted to put myself between her and Jared at least, but continued to walk until I had all but bridged the space between us.
“Stopped you and all the other witches from using magick.”
I had considered the question at length, but in the heat of the moment, hadn’t thought to ask. Maybe I didn’t want to know. “How did you do it?” I asked.
“I didn’t.”
A cold tremor ran through my body, penetrating my bones. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means what you think it means, girl.”
“There’s… another witch?”
A half-smile appeared on her face. “There’s always another witch, and I can’t tell you who because I’ve never seen them; their power exceeds any witch I’ve ever known, including Remy.”
I reached for her now, thrusting my hand out and grabbing her hair. She shrieked and grabbed my hand, but I couldn’t let go. My grip was vice-like and fueled by anger. “If I ever see your pathetic face again,” I said, “I promise you, I will mount your head up on that wall.”
I released her hair and pushed her at the same time. Tamara fled through the garden doors, leaving me with my heart banging hard inside my chest and more questions than answers. I considered chasing her and forcing her to tell me everything she knew, but she had a head start. More important than that, Jared was still lying on the floor unconscious, weak, and in need of medical attention.
I ran upstairs, found his phone, and called Nicole.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Almost a week had passed since the night Tamara made her hasty retreat, and so far, I hadn’t heard a single thing about her or Marie. As far as I or anyone else knew, they were both gone. During the last week, many witches had come to me, one by one, to apologize for the way they had acted toward me. Each one mentioned how they had noticed a certain clarity to their thoughts since the night Marie and her group left, as if there’d been a cloud hanging over them for the past week or so.
I was reminded of Bernarde, Jean Luc’s brother, and how he had displayed the power to confuse people. For a while I wondered if, maybe, Tamara and Marie had worked on some kind of spell together to make the witches of New Orleans more amenable to her, more likely to listen to her when she spoke, and rally to her side when she asked them to. It was possible, but then it could also have been trauma stemming from the night of the attack.
The magick school reopened, and I stood at the side of the ballroom, watching a pair of witches engage in a non-lethal duel. Nicole, dutiful as ever, was mediating, making sure the witches knew not only how to duel, but how to do so safely. And in the library, Lumière’s—and Eliza’s—legacy continued, as witches from all over the city came to read any number of the thousands of books in our possession.
All but one—Eliza’s spell book. I had brought it to this library for others to read, but after what had happened tonight, I almost started to feel protective about it; not only because Eliza had presented the book to me in the first place, but also because over the past couple of nights, she had visited my dreams relentlessly. At first, she was screaming, angry, and in a great deal of pain, but as time passed, her spirit began to settle.
It was the first time in a long while since I had made any lasting contact with her, and while she wasn’t the kind of spirit to make things go bump in the night or mess around with our furniture arrangements, I could feel her more closely, and hear her more clearly, than I ever could. Nevertheless, a cloud still hung over me; a cloud in the form of a question.