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“I think Heidi saw something.” Santiago had his hands in his pockets and was rocking back and forth on his heels, his attention fully focused on the petite blonde. “I think she’s just afraid to tell us what it is.”
She glanced up at him again, her face pale and expression wan. I figured I’d be the first one here to puke, but now it looked like she might beat me to the punch.
“Nothing else can hurt you. We’re here now, you’re safe.” When had I gotten so good at telling these comforting lies? And what happened if I couldn’t protect them? Would my promise come back to haunt me?
In this case, literally.
Heidi chewed on her lower lip until I thought she might have nothing left, then she grabbed Laura’s hand for support. “It was Tansy.” I wasn’t sure if she was saying this to me or explaining it to Laura, but I found myself leaning closer anyway. Wilder had to take a step to account for the moving weight of my body. “Tansy came to see us.”
Laura’s mouth hung open, and she fidgeted with her hair, like the tangled red waves might help her make sense of what she was hearing. “What are you saying? We never saw Tansy.”
Heidi paused, and then the story fell out of her like bees leaving a hive. “She came when we were asleep. I thought you woke up when you heard her, but you didn’t. She knew we were in there, Laura. She came up to the mirror one night and said she was sorry. She said she hadn’t meant for us to be involved.”
I dug my fingers into the back of Wilder’s shirt, my vision going foggy for a second before refocusing. Hopefully my heightened healing abilities would kick in soon, because I wasn’t enjoying this whole helpless-victim thing. It was making it very difficult for me to listen to what Heidi was saying, and I needed to know what part Tansy played in this whole mess.
I had to know how much danger Cash was in.
Cash.
Shit, he’d be on his way to Fort Pike by now. If Tansy was behind all this and she’d tagged along, I’d just sent them to the most idyllic place to hide a body in the entire city.
“What did she mean?” I asked. “What was she sorry about?”
“I don’t know, she just kept saying how sorry she was and that she hadn’t meant for anyone to get hurt. And then, I…then she…she said something else.”
When she didn’t say anything else for several seconds, Santiago asked, “What did she say?”
Heidi looked up, her eyes locked on my face, her hand still holding Laura’s. “She said if I saw her again, not to trust her. If she came for me and Laura, it wasn’t going to be to help us.”
I swallowed hard, thinking about the girl at the party with the floral-print dress who looked exactly like Tansy only all wrong somehow.
Heidi continued to stare at me, unflinching. “She said if anyone who looked like her set foot in our room again, we’d be better off killing ourselves because what it would do to us was so much worse.”
I considered Tansy’s doppelganger, and Cash saying Tansy was with him. I pictured the girl in the alley who had killed the man and stolen the instrument of his death. My head swam.
I’d thought of a dozen different ways to explain how there were two identical girls, but until now I hadn’t been able to make any of those explanations fit.
“Santiago.” My body went leaden, and I sank to the ground. Wilder and the witch were both at my side immediately. “The blood in the salt…it wasn’t Alexandra’s.”
“What do you mean?” Santiago was leaning close, so close I could smell the cinnamon gum he was chewing.
“The second line. I thought the salt was mixed with Alexandra’s blood. I thought it was to keep the demon in.”
“Yes. It looked like a binding ward.”
I shook my head so vigorously it made me dizzy. I braced myself with one hand on Wilder’s leg, the other on the grass next to me. “It wasn’t. The salt was the ward. The blood is Tansy’s.”
His expression was vacant, not getting it, so I inhaled sharply through my nose and said, “I wasn’t sure which one it was inside. Her, her possessed, whatever. But it was Gamigan pretending to be her, I’m sure of it. It used her to get out, and now it’s taking her form.”
Santiago was quiet for a moment, then got to his feet. “Girls, get to my car please. Go, go.” He pushed Laura ahead, then ushered Heidi after her. “Lock the doors.”
Wilder was still crouching next to me, waiting for me to make the final connection for him. He hadn’t been in the basement; he didn’t know how this kind of magic worked. To be honest, it was pretty new to me, and to Santiago as well, it seemed.
I squeezed his thigh. “I thought there was a ward keeping the demon trapped.”
“Right, you’d sealed the door with a protection spell.”
“I did, but that’s not what I mean. There was something in the basement, and I thought because the lines weren’t broken the demon was trapped.”
