Page 36

Chapter 36

Andy

“T hat’s everything I can think of. Everything on the list has been secured,” Bella said in a tired voice. She was still adjusting to being alive again—or as close as she’d ever get. And she was also struggling with being a magicless witch. She’d been playing the role of servant around here since she was reanimated. I think she was trying to make up for her “sins.”

Well, that and she was probably trying to convince us all that we were being overly cautious by stripping her magic and would one day relent and find a way to give it back to her.

Fat chance, after she woke up from her reanimation carrying on about how we needed to use this newfound Lovell superpower to accomplish all sorts of grandiose plans—plans that were too detailed for her to have come up with them on the spur of the moment.

Clearly, she had already spent time plotting how she could use me and my lovers if I ever gave in and became her little superhero. Stripping her magic had seemed harsh when I first thought of it. But after that little display, I was glad she was basically human, and alive only at the whims of a certain angel and necromancer duo.

She apologized afterward, of course. Said that she wasn’t in her right mind after losing Junaid, and the whole dying and being brought back to life thing… but still. I’d be watching her. We all would.

“Do you have the artifacts stashed somewhere secure?” her tone of voice was innocent as she plopped down into the overstuffed chair by the workbench and started brushing dust off her pants. We’d had her running around all over the Lovell House of Horrors securing things that might go flying around when we performed our little move. Even though we had cleaned up and started using a large portion of the house, there were still rooms that hadn’t been used since my parents died. I’d gone through most of them scanning for boobytraps a few times, but that was about it. It was no wonder she was covered in grime from head to toe.

She’d clearly done a thorough job battening down the hatches. But then again… maybe she wasn’t just securing the place, maybe she’d been looking for something… “Like I told Jacki and her SA cronies, and the angels—the artifacts were both destroyed in the fight with the cult. The leader tried to grab them, and Aahil overreacted. You know jinn fire burns hotter than any magic ever created. They’re toast, Bella. Long gone.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “I’m not stupid, Oleander Lovell. We might have a lot of things to work through, and I don’t expect you to fully trust me, not yet. But I do have eyes in my head, and a good idea how my clever little sister works.”

I arched a brow at her. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Maybe go shower? You reek.”

She frowned at me and gave herself a sniff. “Do I really? Is it just sweat, or…?”

I rolled my eyes at her. It seemed my big, bad, sometimes slightly evil sister had developed a new phobia. “Dust and sweat,” I told her flatly. “Dyre’s way more talented than you give him credit for.” As if my necromancer would ever tolerate spellwork so shoddy that it allowed decomposition. Perish the thought.

I pushed down a shudder on the heels of that thought, and thanked the Goddess that Dyre was not only powerful, but also slightly anal retentive when it came to magic.

Bella wasn’t actually a corpse anymore. Elijah had fully restored her soul. But given the ramifications if anyone were ever to find out he could do that… well, we were letting Bella think it was all Dyre’s doing and she was a revenant like the angel, just minus her magic.

Bella shook her head at me when I refused to rise to her bait about the artefacts. “Whatever,” she said with a sigh, standing again. “I’m going to go shower. I’ll meet you all in the entry hall in a couple of hours. Are you sure you trust them? Those interdimensional entity…things? How do you know we will survive the relocation?”

I waved away her concern and went back to boxing up the last of the loose objects that had been on the bookshelf behind the worktable. “It’ll be fine.” It wasn’t like we had a choice. But somewhere deep inside I did trust them. Though I couldn’t even begin to explain why.

I looked up again when I realized Bella was hesitating in the threshold between the workroom and the hallway. “What’s up?”

Her throat worked, and it seemed to take some real effort for her to get the words out. “You won’t…leave without me, will you? You’ll wait?”

I stared into her gray eyes—the same as my own. The same eyes as our mother, who had been legitimately horrible to both of us. I didn’t see a scheming, power-hungry witch or a powerful rebel leader with a grudge who had probably gone off the deep end with grief. Instead I saw a young girl who had always been alone in the world—except for her jinn companion—and who had, as much as I hated to admit it, been just as traumatized by the past as I was. While I had been ostracized by the witch community and self-isolated with the humans after our parents’ execution, Bella had become… invisible. She’d had to pretend she didn’t exist.

Rounding the table, I crossed the room and took her by her upper arms, my eyes locked on hers, riveted there by the vulnerability I saw. “I won’t leave you, idiot. We’re family. That has to count for something.”

She snorted. “With our family? I don’t think it counts for anything good.”

But there was a faint smile on her face as she pulled away and swiped at her eyes before heading off to go get ready for the move.

I sent out my magical senses, touching on the house, and my newly-strengthened sense of it. I traced the lines of wood and stone, of magical protections that had been etched into the foundations for centuries. And I located the place deep within the mansion, where the nullifier and amplifier were safely nestled away, under enough magical locks and protections to make them completely inaccessible to anyone but me.

I’d deny their existence to my dying breath to keep the artifacts out of the wrong hands. The world was healing. The threat to me and everyone I loved had been stamped out. But, well, it never hurt to play it safe.

Two hours later, at the scheduled time, I stood in the grand entryway of the Lovell mansion, surrounded by my lovers and my sister. Dyre and Hasumi each held one of the twins, who were utterly silent as they watched us all with wide eyes. The poor kids. They’d been through so much. We’d promised them they’d be safe with us, but that wasn’t really a promise we could keep. Not fully. Not all the time.

If this move went badly, we could all die, hurled into the void between realms or devoured by the cleaners. But there really wasn’t any other choice. I felt so guilty. Maybe I should have forced them to go back to Magea and live with their great uncle what’s-his-face after all. But it was too late now.

I could feel the interdimensional beings hovering just beyond the barrier of the pocket world. Bis huffed a little muted peep of anxiety, and I reached up to pat his soft little head. “I know, dude,” I breathed softly. “I know.”

Then the colossal beings of energy and light began to hum, their power and presence swelling as they made good on the first part of their demands—removing the mansion and everyone inside it from the unnatural pocket world I had built to shelter us.