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No one. I couldn't get anyone else hurt here. I was alone.
But for how long? The familiar bulge of a cell phone in my rear pocket was gone. Had they disabled it before Adam could get coordinates?
What if Adam came? What if he got killed--?
A door behind me squeaked open. Light flooded in. I resisted the urge to look over my shoulder and instead took stock of my surroundings to see what I could use in a fight. Not a damned thing, unless I could play lion tamer with my chair.
"Savannah?"
My hackles rose at that voice.
Roni walked in front of me, circling wide as if I might lunge and bite her. Tempting.
"I'm sorry it had to be this way."
I spat. Sadly, I missed.
"It's your own fault," she said, her mouth going rigid. "All you had to do was come and help me when I asked. That's what you're supposed to do, isn't it? Help people? The others said it wouldn't work, because you aren't like Paige and Lucas. I insisted on trying. That's ironic, isn't it? A witch-hunter championing the goodness of a witch? But you proved me wrong." Disappointment leached into her voice. "They aren't very happy with me now, especially after you killed Maddie and now it looks like Tyler might die, too. Your werewolf friend hurt him pretty bad."
Tyler must have been the man who went after Elena. I remembered what Roni had said before I passed out, about my "half-demon and werewolf" friends coming after me. So Elena was fine. Like Adam said she'd be.
I relaxed. "That's what Tyler gets for taking on a werewolf. And if Maddie was the woman in the parking garage, I didn't kill her. She swallowed poison."
"Because of you. So as far as they're concerned, you killed her."
"That wasn't your aunt, was it?"
"No, just a group member who kind of looked like me."
It took a moment for me to process what that meant. Roni's family had never been chasing her. She'd pretended they were, with the help of these people. A setup to convince me that she was in trouble.
"So no one from your family was involved in this. They knew nothing about it. You're the witch-hunter and you killed your cousin because she tried to stop you."
"I had nothing to do with Amy's death. She had her own problems."
A lie. I was sure of it. Had Amy found out Roni was mixed up in something? Had Amy threatened to tell their family. Did Roni kill her? Or did these people, when Roni told them? It didn't matter. Not now.
"So your aunt was right--they stopped hunting witches and you didn't. You went rogue."
A smug smile. "I went more rogue than they could ever imagine. I'm not a witch-hunter anymore. I'm a witch."
I laughed. She didn't like that.
"If they're promising to make you a witch, you slept through part of your witch-hunter training," I said. "We're born, not made."
"That's what you think. They're making me one by injecting me with witches' blood."
I sighed. "If it was that easy, don't you think every freaking supernatural would do it? Add spellcasting to his repertoire? Hell, why not just take the rest, too, while you're at it--some half-demon blood, sorcerer, shaman, necromancer . . . The only supernatural power that can be transferred is a werewolf's, through saliva. Your chances of surviving that are one in a hundred. And, no offense, Roni, but you aren't strong enough to be in that one percent."
"You think I'm not becoming a witch? Then explain this."
She took a piece of chalk from her pocket, drew a symbol on the floor, and laid a leathery scrap on it. She lit the scrap on fire, recited an incantation, and a tiny fireball, no bigger than a firefly, exploded above it.
When I laughed, her face darkened. "I'm just starting. It will take lots of practice and months of blood therapy, but someday I'll be a real witch."
"Um, no. You won't. Do you remember when you came to my hospital room, and I knocked you flat on your ass? No chalk symbols. No bits of dried flesh. No matches. Hell, I wasn't even awake. What you've done here is a parlor trick. Friends of mine found a cult of humans doing magic like that a few years ago."
"They were the first," Roni said. "Our methods have much improved since then."
