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My mother stared at her hands as if she were suddenly missing a few fingertips. She flicked them as if trying to spark a lighter. Nothing.
“No,” she spat. “No!”
Jane gasped, but before she could move, my mother had grabbed the athame from the ground. She lurched to her feet, swinging the blade directly at my stomach. A force from my left knocked me out of the way like a wrecking ball, throwing me into the ground so hard that I left a trench in the dirt. I removed my face from the forest floor, looking up to see a giant armadillo creature standing over me, a black enamel handle sticking out of its chest.
“NO!” I howled.
She’d stabbed Jed in the heart. His life was over. I couldn’t even feel his pain. Jed was going to die, and it was my fault. We would never have the chance to figure out the weird relationship between the two of us. I would lose the only man who had ever loved the real me. I would lose Jed.
As Jed stumbled back, I pushed to my feet, roaring, and head-butted my mother in the face, soccer-hooligan-style. My forehead collided with the bridge of her nose with a sickening crunch. She shrieked, her head slamming back against the trunk. She dropped like a stone at my feet, unconscious. And if the throbbing pain in my face was any indication, her nose was broken in several places.
Despite my mother’s unconscious state, Andrea swooped in to zip-tie her hands together. Dick was helping Armadillo Jed sit up, attempting to draw the blade out.
“No, wait, if it’s lodged in his heart, we’ll want to leave it until he can get to surgery.” I dropped to my knees in front of Jed, feeling his pulse at his wrist, his fast but incredibly steady pulse. I pressed my ear to the leathery gray flesh of his chest; his breathing was quick but untroubled. I peeled the shirt away from his chest and frowned. There wasn’t nearly enough blood flowing for a chest wound. “What the?”
Jed’s armadillo features squinched up as he concentrated on his form. The gray body armor faded away, and he slowly transformed back into human. And fortunately, what appeared to be the chest of an armadillo creature was only the shoulder of a shirtless man. The wound would hurt like hell, but he would live.
“You idiot!” I yelled, smacking his good arm. “You wonderful, stupid idiot!”
“Ow!” he yelped, protecting his injured shoulder. “I’m a wounded man, here!”
He cried out again as, together, Dick and I drew the knife from his shoulder. I placed my hands over the wound and concentrated hard. I visualized the tissue knitting itself back together into healthy muscle and skin. I could feel the warmth of the healing energy emanating from my palm. Dick grinned widely as Jed’s shoulder repaired itself.
“Impressive,” John Kerrigan murmured, before a stern Melinda elbowed him.
“You don’t get the actual form, remember? Just the appearance of it,” I said. “You do not, in fact, have natural body armor.”
“I forgot about that part. I just thought of the biggest, toughest shield possible, and there I was.”
“Aw, you picked a form, and you got it!” I said, smiling. “I’m so proud.”
“Yeah, well, I had to contribute somehow,” he grumbled, flexing his arm.
“I’m sorry my family is nuts,” I whispered. “My aunts and uncles are actually really nice people.”
“They’re not so bad. Wait until you meet my family. At Thanksgiving, we kill everything we can find, put it into a pot, and call it ‘holiday gumbo.’ ” He grinned down at me and kissed my forehead.
A bored but sullen voice called, “Pardon me, as fascinating as I find your vulgar backwoods canoodling, I would like to be untied.”
We broke apart, turning to see an irritated John Kerrigan staring us down. In fact, all of the Kerrigans were both irritated and staring us down. I had several Kerrigans under my control. What the hell was I going to do with them? I could hold them hostage for enough money to put a new roof on the clinic and restock our dispensary until doomsday. I could bind them for another hundred years and continue the family tradition. Or . . .
I squeezed Jed’s hand and knelt down in front of John and his wife.
“I give up,” I told him.
John clearly expected something else, because he frowned at me as if he’d heard wrong and said, “Beg pardon?”
“Aren’t you tired of this?” I asked. “This started as a policy debate who knows how long ago, and it’s still biting us on the collective arse. I think we can all agree that the ‘do no harm’ debate is settled. It’s a bad thing to remove parts of people using the power of your mind. If nothing else, it leaves behind a big mess to explain to the authorities. Let’s just split the objects. Two for you, two for us. That way, there’s a balance.”
“Do you think that’s fair?” Melinda demanded. “We’ve lived without our birthright for centuries, and you want us to just forget what you McGavocks did to us?”
“No,” I told her. “You’ve lived without your magic for forty years. And I am very sorry that happened to you as a result of our families’ troubles. But it didn’t start with us. We can’t let the decisions of people who lived centuries ago continue to control us. In a hundred years, your son’s great-grandchildren would be the ones in charge of protecting the objects. Is this what you want for them? Years of worrying about magical war and protecting your family from mine? Or would you rather they live out their years exploring the gifts that your family is blessed with?”
Melinda cast a sidelong look at her son, her lip trembling. “She makes a point,” she murmured to her husband.
“Our ancestors agreed years ago to the binding,” I said. “Now we can agree to abandon it. It doesn’t work anymore. Forcing you to give up your magic was wrong. And I am sorry.”
John and Melinda whispered in hushed tones, their exchange growing heated, until John seemed to relent. Finally, Melinda gave him a curt nod, and they both turned to me.
