Page 39 of Demon Loved (The Witches of Mingus Mountain #5)

The prima didn’t look too deterred, though. There was a martial spirit in her brilliant green eyes, and Brianna had the feeling she was royally pissed off about the way the Collector had sent someone to attack a member of the McAllister clan right on their home turf.

“We’ve got plenty of advantages of our own,” she said.

“We have you, Levi, and we have Hayley to bolster the powers of anyone who would be of help in this fight. And now we have Brianna, too. If the Collector or his lackeys try to use any sort of dimensional magic against us, she should be able to neutralize it.”

Bree thought that was a pretty big “should.” After all, she’d only used those powers once, and it had all been pure reaction. There hadn’t been anything calculated or thoughtful about the way she’d jumped in to save Belshegar.

No, she’d only done what needed to be done because she couldn’t bear to consider the alternative.

“I don’t know,” she said, not bothering to hide the doubt in her tone.

“We’re working with a lot of big ‘if’s here.

We don’t know if my powers will manifest the same way during a second attack, and we have absolutely no idea what kind of magical objects the Collector might be working with.

It sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. ”

Angela’s lips pursed, and she looked over at her husband. It seemed pretty clear she wasn’t happy about being contradicted like this…even as she probably realized they were working with far too many unknowns for any of them to be certain about how this all might shake out.

But then Connor said, “I know this isn’t a sure thing.

On the other hand, do we want to spend the rest of our lives — or even the next few months or years — always looking over our shoulders, never sure when the Collector or his servants might show up?

Because I don’t think that would be very much fun… do you?”

No, probably not. On the other hand, Bree thought an extra level of vigilance might be better than a magical confrontation that could get someone hurt or worse, or maybe cause enough havoc in their small town that the civilians would be sure to notice something very wrong was happening in Jerome.

So far, they’d managed to keep their magical conflicts hidden from the general public, but if the Collector had the enchanted equivalent of an atom bomb or something, that might be a little more difficult.

“What are you proposing?” Belshegar asked. His tone was so neutral that Bree got the feeling he wasn’t entirely happy about any of this, either, but he must have still wanted to hear what the primus had to say.

“A trap,” Connor replied at once. “It’s pretty clear that what the Collector wants most of all is to grab those two artifacts we have in the safe.

So we make it so he thinks they’d be easy to obtain — maybe we let the wards slack a little, something that would give him an opening.

And when he swoops in to get them, we capture him. ”

“And then what?” Tricia said, her voice openly skeptical. “We’re just going to keep this guy prisoner indefinitely?”

“And that doesn’t even take into account that it could be another servant of his who shows up to take the artifacts rather than the man himself,” Bree added before Connor could respond, glad that not everyone seemed to be on board with the primus’s plan.

While it would be great to get rid of the threat the Collector presented, there did seem to be the very real possibility that they wouldn’t even be dealing with their real target when they sprang their trap.

Once he found out they’d been lying in wait for him, he probably wouldn’t be too thrilled with the McAllister clan.

Connor’s jade-hued eyes narrowed, and she could tell he was thinking over her words, even if he wasn’t very happy to be contradicted like that. Most of the time, he was just as chill as his wife, but every once in a while, some of the Wilcox stubbornness would pop up to make things difficult.

“Maybe it’s not about trapping the Collector,” Allegra said in her wispy voice, and everyone turned to look at her.

“What do you mean?” Angela asked. Her tone was noticeably gentler now, and Bree could tell the prima was doing her best to show the oldest elder the proper deference.

Allegra sat up a little straighter. Most of the time, Brianna found her almost a figure of fun, with her wispy, flyaway buns and layers of long skirts and tops, all of which served to make her look a little like an ambulatory pile of clothes from a thrift store.

Now, though, there was almost something stern about the way she lifted her chin, reminding Bree that this woman had been a McAllister elder for more than fifty years, had been alive to work with Angela’s Great-Aunt Ruby during the dark days when the clan had still been involved in a cold war with the Wilcoxes.

Her age and wisdom shouldn’t be discounted, not when she’d seen and experienced so much.

“Tricia and Brianna are right,” she said. “Holding a being as powerful as the Collector indefinitely isn’t a practical solution to our problem. It would be much better to make sure we’re so well protected that he gives up and goes to collect his magical items elsewhere.”

“Well, yes, that would be the best outcome,” Angela agreed. She crossed her legs and wrapped her fingers around her knee, all the while fixing Allegra with a direct stare. “But I thought we were already doing that.”

“No,” Tricia cut in, nodding slightly, as if she’d suddenly understood what Allegra had been getting at.

“We’ve been setting the wards and doing what we can on that front, but it clearly hasn’t been enough, not when the Collector’s servant was able to break into your house, even if he wasn’t able to remove the safe with the amulets.

That was probably enough to embolden him and make him realize he could be successful if he kept at it. But now we have Brianna.”

Everyone’s gaze fixed on Bree then, and she found herself shifting uncomfortably as she sat on the couch next to Belshegar.

Funny how she was already just fine with thinking of him by his real name.

“Her gift,” Angela said softly. “The way she seems to be able to weave harmonies across dimensions. If she could use that power as we create the wards, their strength will be bound not just to this world, but to many others. I doubt even the Collector or his minions would be able to get past something like that.”

Everyone nodded, although Bree couldn’t help thinking they were placing a lot of trust in something they didn’t even know would work. She’d only used these strange new powers of hers once. How could they all be so sure that they’d activate at the proper time?

But Belshegar seemed to be on board with the idea, because he said, “This is true. The Collector wields powers we don’t entirely understand — mainly because none of us knows exactly which magical items he has in his arsenal — but for now, it does seem as if he’s mostly operating on this plane.

By drawing in energies from other dimensions, we should be able to create a barrier that he can’t penetrate. ”

“He hasn’t been working entirely on this plane,” Brianna argued as a thought occurred to her. “I mean, unless the place where you spoke with him was somewhere in this world, too.”

Belshegar’s brows drew together, and she could tell he was pondering what she had just said.

But then his expression cleared and he replied, “I can’t say for sure.

It was a place of mist where there didn’t seem to be any discernible landmarks or anything that might have identified exactly where we were.

Of course I assumed we were on the plane where the Council gathers, but it’s entirely possible that we were instead someplace in this world, with the Collector doing everything he could to make me think otherwise. ”

Bree thought she could see why that might be possible.

Belshegar clearly had his own gifts, but he wasn’t some omnipotent being, couldn’t completely control his environment.

Because of that, she supposed the Collector might have been able to trick him into believing they had met in an impossibly alien dimension when in fact they might have been standing on a sound stage in L.A. or something.

“How would we even do something like this?” she asked, and her father sent her a reassuring smile.

“Connor and Angela and we elders will take care of the mechanics,” he told her.

“All you’ll have to do is add your power at the right time, and the wards we’ll create will be completely different from what we’ve been using so far.

Like Angela said, those protective spells will have energy that extends far beyond this plane, and the Collector will have a much more difficult time getting past them. ”

He’d said “difficult,” but not impossible. Since none of them knew what sorts of relics the Collector already had in his possession, it would also be very hard to know for sure whether he had an artifact that could rip through their newly constructed wards like fingernails through parachute silk.

And yet, despite all these worries, Brianna knew this plan was the one that would serve them best. Capturing the Collector might solve their immediate problem, but they were witches and warlocks, not jailers. Holding him indefinitely would only stir up a whole host of other issues.

Much better to create an environment so hostile that he would take his treasure-hunting activities elsewhere.

“All right,” she said, then lifted her chin.

“Just tell me what I need to do.”