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We finally got out of the car and walked up to the house. Damon slung his arm around my waist, knowing there’d be no staff around at this hour to notice. I didn’t expect anyone at all to be up, but when I opened the door I found the hall light on. A murmur of laughter carried from the sitting room.
Lesley, Imogen, and Thalia were sitting around the card table there, playing rummy from the look of the table, glasses of wine interspersed with the cards. My assorted witch guests glanced up at us with smiles that were a little tipsy, probably both from the alcohol and the late hour.
“You’re back!” Imogen said. “We waited up for you. To make sure you were okay and all.”
“We were prepared to rush to your rescue if need be,” Lesley informed us in an over-serious tone, and then giggled.
Thalia’s gaze was a little more solemn. “Nothing’s changed since you called? She’s still recovering?”
“It looks like she should be fine in a few days,” Damon said.
“And if you all want to be fine, I think you should get to bed after this hand,” I added, raising my eyebrows. But nothing could have stopped a grin from crossing my face. They looked like they belonged here. Like they were happy here. I’d accomplished something if I’d been able to give them that. Maybe I should remember to count my victories as often as my failures.
Damon trailed after me upstairs. He waited for his turn to wash up, leaning against the counter in the en-suite bathroom while I used the sink.
“I don’t know how you can be so sexy even when you’re brushing your teeth,” he said.
I waggled the toothbrush at him. “This is turning you on, is it?”
“I’ll turnyouon,” he muttered, tugging me to him. I turned to face him—and my gaze caught on a dark shape darting around the sink.
A spider. Black with long spindly legs. The shape of it triggered a reflexive flinch before I’d consciously identified it. What in all that was lit and warm was a black widow doing in mybathroom?
I jerked back, pulling Damon with me, and more of those black bodies raced across the floor, along the walls. A yelp burst from my throat.
They were everywhere. Dozens of them, everywhere I looked.
As I fled to the bedroom, a shriek carried from downstairs. It was the whole house. Spiders were scrambling all over the bedroom, not just on the walls and floor but across my mirror, over the sheets on the bed. A shudder rippled down my back.
As I spun around, trying to decide where to go, one dropped from the ceiling onto my arm. Before I could swat it off, its fangs dug into my skin with a jabbing pain.
Damon swore and kicked at the ones on the floor. Another scrambled up my pantleg. The bite on my arm burned. How long did I have before the major symptoms started?
Downstairs someone was babbling frantically, and someone else cried out. I sucked in a breath and threw all my focus into a spell.
A stomp of my feet. A whirl of my arms. The spark inside me sputtered and flared. I slammed my arms out straight from my sides with a force that rattled my bones and radiated through the entire house.
The spiders shot away from us as quickly as they’d appeared. Another jab seared through my calf where I must have been bitten without even noticing. Damon was clutching his shoulder where one had gotten him. A few more spiders skittered across the walls, and I hurled myself into the magicking one more time for good measure. Gone. We needed them all gone. Before—
Before they hurt anyone else? From the sobbing filtering through the floor below, I didn’t think I could hope for that anymore.
“Come on,” I said, grabbing Damon’s hand. “The others might need help.”
“Youneed help,” he protested, nodding to my arm.
“Not yet. I have to look after them first.” They’d come to me for shelter… and they’d gotten this instead. With a ragged breath, I ran for the stairs.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Rose
It killed me to let this latest attack slow me down, but the next afternoon my muscles were still throbbing, my head still aching dully, as I spun out one more piece of the protective spell around the front yard and the back gardens. The magicking that had normally taken me about an hour each morning had stretched almost to dinner time as I’d had to stop and rest after every few minutes of casting.
It didn’t help that I was adding another piece to dissuade any potentially dangerous creatures I could imagine the Frankfords sending toward us next. I wouldn’t put it past them to encourage a herd of rattlesnakes onto the property. Maybe some imported fire ants?
Under that grim humor, my anger continued to smolder. I had no idea how they’d gotten around the oath not to harm us this time, but they were getting closer and closer to me and the people I cared about most with each loophole they opened. The Hallowell estate wasminenow. And they’d dared to break even that boundary, to attack me and my guests in the one place I should have felt secure.
Thalia had managed to escape being bitten before I’d sent the black widows off, so she’d used whatever magic reserves she had left to stem the poison and ease its effects in those of us who hadn’t been so lucky. There’d only been so much she could do, though. Even more spiders had come through downstairs. Lesley had suffered two bites and Imogen three. They’d spent most of the day in bed, sleeping the effects off.
