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He nodded. “I’ll get the paintings up while we’re waiting. If this was another magical attack, maybe they’ll help her until the paramedics get here.”
Right. They might even helpmorethan any doctor could, depending on what those witching assholes had done to her. I checked Mom over one more time and, seeing no change, scrambled up. “I’ll help you. You take the living room and I’ll put one in the bedroom.”
“This one would be good for that,” he said, shoving one of the paintings toward me. He handed me a couple of nails and braces. I grabbed a hammer from a drawer. One of the few tools Mom kept on hand.
In the bedroom, I tore the plastic wrapping off the painting as quickly as I could—and froze for a second staring at the image. It was a spray of lilies, so perfectly painted you could almost believe they were leaning out of the canvas. I couldn’t see where the enchanted glyphs were woven in even though I knew to look for them.
Mom was going to cry when she saw this, it was so nice. It must have taken Jin a while to pull that off.
I shook myself out of the momentary daze and picked a spot to mount the painting. When I came out, I found Jin hanging the other small one in the hall. That one matched the bedroom picture, but with orange lilies instead of purple.
I went around to the living room to check out the larger one and had to stop and stare again. It was a landscape, a meadow dotted with all kinds of flowers, the sun rising over treed hills in the distance.
Jin came to stand beside me. “You said she liked flowers, especially lilies, and peaceful landscapes,” he said. “I tried to hit that as dead on as I could.”
“You did an amazing job,” I said with bald honesty. I wasn’t any kind of an art connoisseur, but I knew a fantastic painting when I saw one. “She’s no critic, you know. She’d have been happy with something a lot more basic.”
Jin shrugged. “If you’re going to do a thing, might as well do it well. My signature is on these, you know.”
He winked at me, but there was a kindness in his smile that made me waver on my feet. I’d figured it was just a job to him, just busy work to make Rose happy since I mattered to her. But Jin looked honestly pleased that I appreciated the pictures. Hell, he and Ky had jumped in there the second they’d seen my mom was in trouble, as if she meant almost as much to them as she did to me.
“Her pulse is feeling steadier!” Ky hollered from the kitchen. “I think the protections must be helping.”
I hustled over to wait with Mom for the last couple minutes until the ambulance got here. My heart wrenched again, seeing her on the floor, but a weird sort of warmth had settled over me too.
Whatever had happened to her, it was awful. I wanted to tear those pricks like the Frankfords limb from limb. But if I had to, I wouldn’t be alone. The other guys would be right there with me. I was suddenly sure of that.
“Thanks,” I said as I brushed her hair back from her forehead. “For, well, everything.”
“Of course,” Ky said. “Do you want us to stick with you going to the hospital? I don’t mind. I don’t have any plans I can’t delay.”
I looked from him to Jin, who nodded to show the offer included him.
Fifteen minutes ago, I wouldn’t have thought I’d want any of the other guys’ company for something like this. But now… there was actually a little comfort in the idea. I didn’t have to wait it out alone.
For the first time since my dad had taken off all those years ago, I had more family than just Mom.
“Yeah,” I said, the words sticking in my throat before I forced them out. “If you could… I’d like that.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Rose
My hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles ached. I flexed my fingers, urging them to relax, but within a minute they’d clenched again.
We had a new moon tonight, the sky dim except for a smattering of stars. The country roads were so quiet it almost felt as if the two of us in the car were the last people in the world. Damon, hunched over in the seat next to me with his head resting on the window, let out a soft rasp of sleeping breath. Even asleep, the muscles in his arms looked coiled tight.
He’d tried to convince me that he should drive back, even though he’d run himself ragged pacing the halls while the doctors had worked on his mom and running around grabbing everything he could think of that would make her more comfortable once she was awake and in recovery. Despite himself, he’d nodded off within a few minutes of us leaving the hospital. I’d have to wake him up once we got back to the estate, but he deserved this rest.
It was those memories—of his mom, wan and trembling, and Damon, his face stark with fear—that kept tearing through me, jarring against my nerves. The Frankfords or their lackeys had been responsible for this. That was the only explanation that made sense. The doctors hadn’t found anything wrong with Mrs. Scarsi that would have caused her to collapse like that. They’d dismissed it as food poisoning, but she couldn’t think of anything she’d eaten that would have caused that.
And anyway, how huge of a coincidence would that be?
I had no idea how they’d twisted their magic around the oath this time, but they’d managed it before. They’d shown they could be creative.
After a while at the hospital, the other guys had left to find a pretense for hanging out with their parents for a while. Jin wanted to set up some sort of protections around his mother’s yard, and Lesley had offered to do the magicking while I was away. Jin was going to make more art for the twins’ dad’s hardware store and the café where their mom worked. But that still wasn’t enough.
I didn’t think the Frankfords would be satisfied unless we were all dead. And right now every inch of me was burning to pay them back in kind.
