Page 146 of Cold Curses

The sword shuddered in my hand.

Now I had a weapon.

* * *

I opened the armory door with the sword in hand, and found my parents in the hallway outside, along with half a dozen guards. So much for keeping their distance.

They watched carefully as we walked out, eyes widening as they realized the source of the buzzing magic was me.

“Sorry about the shaking,” I said. “That was…me, I guess.”

Mom walked toward me, her eyes on mine. Then she reached out, put a hand on my cheek. Her pale blue eyes went wide.

“I don’t think Amit is the strongest vampire in the world any longer,” she said.

She was smiling, but I saw the shadows in her eyes. Where there was a strongest vampire, there was someone who wasn’t…and wanted to be.

Dad moved forward next. He glanced behind me at the open armory, assuring himself that everything was copacetic. “An adjustment?”

“It had a little more effect than I thought,” Lulu said with a smile. “Everything’s fine now.”

I nodded, looked down at the sword in my hand, and felt the sword’s answering grin. “I think I need to use the sword. For a while.”

Mom looked down at the sword, one she’d tempered with her own blood and wielded for years before the Egregore had been bound into it.

I extended the sword to her. “Do you want it?”

She looked at it for a moment, and I wondered at the memories that passed behind her eyes. Times that she’d fought with the sword, that they’d been joint combatants in awful fights, including against the Egregore.

She held out a hand, and the motion actually had the sword moving away from her, like magnets repelling each other.

“Whoa,” Aunt Mallory said. “I don’t think that’s your sword anymore.”

Mom’s eyes cleared, and she grinned at me. “No, it’s not. It’s chosen you. And it’s feeling very strongly about that sentiment.” She embraced me, kissed my temple. “Be careful with each other.”

TWENTY-THREE

Theo, Petra, and Roger watched me carefully as I walked in, Lulu and Connor behind me. They all glanced down at my vermilion scabbard, which wasn’t an accessory I’d carried before.

“You look different,” Theo said, rising from his office chair.

“You are glowing,” Petra added, rushing toward me. “And not in some metaphorical way. Like your energy is intense.”

“So, it’s kind of a long story,” I began, but then told them the entire thing anyway. And included jazz hands at the end. Because even though they were also my family, even I wasn’t used to who I was.

“You did that,” Petra said with such awe in her voice, I wasn’t sure how to take it. “The pulse.”

“One of us did,” I said, and put my hand on the pommel. “I’m not sure which.”

“You had your radioactive spider,” Theo said.

“Pretty much,” Connor agreed, which saved me the trouble of trying to figure out which comic book or gaming character Theo meant. Probably an arachnid one?

Roger scratched his head. “Should we salute you or something?”

“I tripped on the sidewalk on the way in here,” I said, and that was enough to put them all at ease. Omnipotence weirded humans out.

Roger gestured toward the sword. “You’re sure it’s safe?”