Chapter 19

...

I woke up alone the next morning, still in yesterday's clothes. I really was a cheap whore. Laughing at myself, I was glad to find I didn't have to live out of my duffle bag anymore. I couldn't wait to do laundry. That's how you knew your life was messed up—laundry was not supposed to make you happy.

There were noises coming from downstairs, voices talking pleasantly. I was always a late riser and university had made me even more so. No doubt Savannah had been up for hours. Savannah Levine was the strongest person I knew, and last night had scared me. I silently promised her that if Bryce did tell Sean I would personally see that his intestines came out of his nose.

Savannah was crowing over a card game when I came down the stairs. Paulson groaned and threw down his cards. "You're cheating," he muttered.

"Prove it," Savannah demanded.

He pouted and then noticed me. "Good morning, Gillian."

"I made food," Savannah announced. "You have to eat it."

I plopped down on the couch beside her and stared at the burnt toast. As much as I hated food, I felt justified in turning that down. "Did this catch on fire?"

"There's fruit in the fridge," Paulson told me.

"God, he spends the night and already he thinks he owns the place." But she was smiling. It was her way of saying she found him tolerable. Savannah was actually the worst person on the planet for acting unimpressed when she really was. But that was another problem.

"There are eggs there too," he called after me.

Savannah told him, "Just for that, you've got to play another round."

His groan carried to the kitchen where I found the fruit he was talking about. Two pieces, to be precise. An apple and something I think had once been a pear. We weren't big on the food. I grabbed the apple and went looking for cereal—I didn't think that could rot.

The newspaper that Tia and I had been playing with on Saturday was still on the table. Oh god. But on top of that was a card of some sort, black with white ink. Glancing down, my eyes were immediately drawn to the picture.

Thomas Nast?

I almost choked on the apple. It took me all of five seconds to read and then almost a minute to comprehend. Thomas Nast was turning eight-five. Happy fucking birthday. The party was this Friday.

Grabbing the paper, I marched back into the living room. "What the hell is this?" I demanded.

"Bryce brought it over this morning," Savannah said, not looking up from the game—war, if I wasn't mistaken.

"He came over and I didn't wake up to shouting and death threats? I'm impressed." My anger temporary faded under my concern.

"Honestly, I think he just wanted a quickie before work." Savannah chuckled and didn't even dodge the blow I gave her. "Seriously, we cast a privacy spell so Paulie here wouldn't overhear. I totally did it better than he did, by the way."

She glanced up at me and gave me half a smile. So Bryce had come over and they were both still alive...her eyes didn't look puffy either. I felt a strange surge of pride. I'd like to think Kristof would have been pleased. Bryce had come by to make sure his sister—the she-devil, the girl who had ruined his life—Savannah Levine was doing all right. Despite the fact his grandfather would probably kill himself if he ever found out. It was adorable.

"That doesn't explain why he thought to bring this over."

"Oh. That."

Paulson won one of Savannah's kings and she groaned. She still hadn't looked me in the eye. "It's the invitation to the party you agreed to go to with him. He just wanted to make sure you knew the times."

He hadn't said it was for his grandfather. I could do a lot of things but being within a hundred feet of Thomas Nast was not one of them. I couldn't go near the man whose callousness had unleashed Dana's killer. "You knew! Kristof must have told you about it. How could you? You know I can't—not Thomas Nast, Savannah. I can't."

"You want to make him pay? This is your chance, Gillian. It's perfect. Nothing you could do to him would get him as pissed as showing up to his birthday party with his grandson."

She had a point there, but I was a little too angry with her to concede it. My aversion to Thomas Nast wasn't something that should just be ignored. It was a deep rooted fear that she shouldn't have pretended didn't exist.

"He's Satan, the bogey man and Freddy Krueger, all rolled into one. You cannot be suggesting I go talk to him."

Savannah sighed. "I told Bryce you'd have a problem with it. He offered to let you off the hook."

"Really? Good. That would be very good."

Savannah spoke slowly, like I was slow. "Not really. Bryce made it abundantly clear that would just put us in his debt again. And it's probably better for all of us if we get away from each other as soon as possible. Less chance he can change his mind and have me killed."

"He wouldn't do that." Savannah looked at me in disbelief, so I pointed out, "How would he explain that to Sean?"

"Gillian, you know I wouldn't ask you to do this if there wasn't a good reason—"

"Yes, you would. But I'll do it anyway," I relented. I was just too used to following her lead. And the promise of revenge had perked me up. "I should tell Paulson how you're cheating."

"At this point I just want to finish," he said wearily. Us witches cackled.

"It's no fun if you give up, Paulie," Savannah drawled. "Tell you what, you manage to win and Gillian will get you off afterwards."

"Why must I always be the whore?" I demanded, flopping onto the couch beside her.

"Hey, I'm still pissed that you fucked the evil half-brother before coming to visit me."

"It's called a joke, Savannah. Look it up. Plus, did you see how fast I got here? I didn't stop for sex along the way. Though now that you mention it, I probably should have. I think yesterday earned me a little fun."

"Little being the optimum word."

Savannah and I glanced at Paulson and then burst out laughing. Savannah even shot me a look. "Why can't you ever like someone like this?"

"He has dopey hair," I muttered. Paulson reached up to fix his hair instinctively and I winked. "Shut up, Savannah. At least your brother doesn't think I'm jailbait."

"He should," she muttered. And then: "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing," I smirked. "So what's the plan for the day?"

"Grab clean clothes, investigate the Coven that started this whole fucking mess and..." Savannah Levine blushed and when she spoke—reluctantly, because she had to know I would tease her mercilessly—she said, "Call Adam."

I giggled and she threw a pillow at me. I drove her absolutely nuts by never letting her forget she was hopelessly in love with Adam Vasic, who had grown up with Paige, which made him something like thirteen lucky years older. Everyone else knew she loved him—even Adam, I think—but they tried to ignore it. I didn't. It was the one thing on the planet Savannah was too scared to go for.

"Why do we need to talk to Adam? Besides your all-consuming desire to hear his voice?"

Savannah sighed and explained the plan properly. Bryce was enlisting the Nast Cabal to help figure out how a time tear appeared, when the they were supposed to be impossible. Since figuring out the time tear and whatever was going on with Nast communications was going to take up too many resources, Bryce said she could help by tracking down the witches she had fought in the first place. Savannah had agreed.

"How did you get him to agree to that?" I asked, surprised. Bryce always seemed to take safety seriously, whatever else he was doing. "He just said okay to let us going hunting for fun?"

Savannah shrugged. "Well, we have to take Paulie along with us. It took awhile for him to let me keep the cute one, but I wore him down in the end. And I have to call if anything terrible happens—honestly, he's worse than Paige." But she sounded so happy when she said it, that I knew she really didn't mind. "Oh, and I have to take you shopping."

"Shopping?" I couldn't help laughing. "What?"

"For that thing you have to go to. We have to get you properly decked out, unfortunately. It's very important you look nice. So I offered to take you. He gave me his credit card. Complete access to the Nast family fortune." That didn't seem safe at all. "Take that," Savannah laughed, taking Paulson's last card—a four—from his outstretched hand. She smirked. "Now you owe me."

Paulson gave her a long once over. "I suppose if Gillian offered to distract Mr. Nast..."

"Oh you deserve her," I snarled, getting up from the couch. They laughed and I couldn't help but grin. It was good to have Savannah back, even if she was a corrupting influence. Throwing out my apple, I heard Paulson promise to start the car and the door shut behind him.

Savannah walked into the kitchen and took out a box of orange juice. Drinking straight from the box, she watched me carefully as I played with the invitation. I could do this—it might even be fun. Making Thomas uncomfortable was the least I could do to the man.

"Gillian...about yesterday."

I blinked in surprise. It went against every rule we had, who we were to...we didn't talk about things. We simply, wordlessly, agreed to be there.

"Since we spent last night...talking about what we saw about me, I figure I should at least ask if you were okay. Those were some pretty shitty memories."

Talking? Is that what it was called? After Savannah cried we basically just lay there for the rest of the night. But whatever she wanted to call it.

"I think that was the point. But least they're only memoires," I dismissed them. I had to. Examining the past was for people braver than I was.

"Your sister...she was different than I expected."

"Different?" I found myself dangerously angry. "What do you mean?"

Savannah shrugged and put the orange juice away. "Just different. Not the way I pictured her from your descriptions."

"You were seeing her at the worst moments of her life," I snapped. "She wasn't always like that. She was kind and sweet and—"

"I didn't mean anything," Savannah interrupted. "Just different. Shit, I'm going about this all wrong, aren't I? I just wanted to...I got Bryce to promise you could pick out whatever the hell you liked."

I smiled and the two of us began walking to the door, arguing the best way to spend her brother's unlimited money. I didn't say 'you're welcome.' But we both understood, anyway.

Savannah climbed into the car and gave Paulson the directions to Penelope Yi's house like it was nothing. Her desire to drive—a Nast company car that Bryce had brought over that morning—had diminished the second she realized she could get a real live chauffer out of this deal. It felt sort of awkward, the two of us sitting in the back of a bullet proof car while Paulson sat alone in the front, but Savannah dismissed my worries easily. He could still hear us perfectly was her rational, and Paulson agreed with her. Outvoted, I still thought it was a stupid plan.

It might have seemed sort of naïve to think the Yi had stayed in place after her altercation with Savannah, but it didn't hurt to check. It was a place to start, anyway. Yi might even still be there. If the woman was stupid enough to boast about a highly desirable power she didn't actually have, I doubted she would realize that once you were on Savannah's radar, there was just no escape.

The house Paulson drove us to was in a well-to-do, though not obscenely wealthy like parts of L.A. could be. On the outskirts, it was fairly large, though Savannah assured us Yi didn't have any family. I decided to proceed cautiously anyway. Who knew what important detail Savannah had forgotten this time?

"Do you hear anything?" Savannah asked.

Paulson shook his head. "Nobody's home. Even the houses around us are pretty deserted. Next door there's someone in the backyard and on the other side there's some communal shower taking going on. I don't think anyone's going to notice if you walk on in."

"Excellent," Savannah Mr. Burns-ed and then distributed plastic gloves. Because even supernaturals had to be careful about fingerprints when breaking and entering. "Right. So does she have an alarm system?"

Paulson looked to me for an answer and then realized he was the one being asked. "How should I know? I'm a bodyguard, not some mid-level contract employee. I don't break and enter."

"God, don't have a cow. I'm sorry I offended your delicate sensibilities." Savannah turned to me, puzzled. "So how do we know if she has a security system?"

"You're the one who tracked her down before," I pointed out.

"And I didn't confront her in her house because I didn't know if she had a security system," Savannah snapped. "Great, what do we do now?"

I shrugged and got out of the car. "Hope she doesn't have one."

"And if she does...?" Paulson asked, trailing along behind the two of us, watching and listening for potential threats.

"The plan better not be run away quickly," Savannah sighed.

"I am able to do other things," I mentioned. "But no, the plan is not run away. The plan is..." Savannah muttered the unlocking spell and wretched open the door. No alarm sounded. Paulson shook his head, to tell us he hadn't heard anything go off that we couldn't. "...be really be glad I didn't have to think of a plan."

Savannah glared but walked into the house. I would have thought up something. I swear. But it was better all around that I didn't have to.

The house was just as modestly nice as the outside suggested. Nothing too opulent, but nothing cheap either. Glancing down at the shoes on the mat, I couldn't help but notice there were not only high heels, but black male loafers and a tiny pair of running shoes, the size three label slightly faded on the sole of each. I glared at Savannah.

"No family, huh?"

"It doesn't matter," she pointed out pragmatically. "You check the bedroom. I'll take the living room. Paulie, how does being on guard duty sound?"

"Like a plan."

I agreed and began walking down the hall in search of the bedroom. That's when I realized something wasn't as it should be. "Savannah? Why weren't their wards? Or trap spells?"

Savannah turned around at the end of the hall, trying to think. "Maybe she really did take off. We'll worry about that when we don't find anything."

"Dumb plan," I called after her as I began searching down the hallway. The first three doors were a closet, a bathroom and another closet, respectively. Closets were a perfect place to hide things as I well knew, so I stopped to look at them. That was why I was close enough to hear Savannah say:

"Well, fuck me sideways with a broomstick."

The imagery I could do without wasn't anything new, but I followed Paulson as we both went to see what she had found.

She whirled around when she saw us, her face paler than usual. "Gillian, you shouldn't—"

Too late. On the other side of the couch, sprawled out in some horrific tableau was Yi and her family. She lay parallel to the couch, her face up, showing off the damage it had sustained in some sort of fight. Her chest was gaping open—a red and black chasm—and blood coated the ground around her. On the table that separated her body from those of her husband and child lay a single heart.

Father and daughter had been killed quickly, only a few feet away. From the angle of their heads, I felt justified in guessing a single twist of the neck had killed them. It wasn't the heartless body of a fellow witch that made the apple in my stomach threaten to come tumbling out—it was the way the tiny little girl was still slumped in the corner. Dark hair still perfectly in place, shoes perfectly laced, she looked more like a tiny doll than a corpse. They had been dead long enough that any tears would have dried, but I bet she cried as she watched her mother fight to her death.

"At least they can't mad at us for breaking in," Savannah said. "Gillian, don't throw up."

My stomach heaved and I took deep breaths to try and calm it. It worked, but I didn't think that was a good thing. You weren't supposed to get used to things like this. They were supposed to break your heart every time. It didn't matter that she had tried to attack Savannah only days ago—if we all got what we deserved the world would be a much scarier place. And that little girl was innocent. But I wasn't surprised. The innocent got cut down first; the rest of us just picked up the pieces.

"I'm not going to," I assured Savannah, forcing confidence I didn't feel into the words.

"Good," she nodded. "I guess we shouldn't touch them."

"I don't think it's safe to stay here," Paulson said. "I don't do crime scenes, but that blood looks fresh. I don't want to take the chance whoever did this is going to come back."

I shivered but Savannah shook her head. "The whole family's here, so it must have been earlier in the morning, before anyone left for work or school or whatever. You create this kind of carnage, you want it to be found. No one's going to come back to clean up. And this is clearly supernatural. The Cabals will hush it up, later. They won't bother us."

I had to agree and Paulson relented, though he clearly did not like it.

We went back to work. I know it sounds callous, but we did need to figure out what Yi and those three others had been up to. I soothed my conscious by telling myself we might be able to find out who had killed the Yi family this way. It was the least we could do. Another torn out heart couldn't be a coincidence. And if it was...I was moving out of Los Angeles so fast.

The closets lacked secret compartments of any sort. I didn't find any in the bathroom either. I met up with Savannah in the master bedroom. We didn't say anything, just combed through looking for hidden treasure. Nothing.

Savannah took the office and I took the child's room—Olivia's room, the door declared. The floral wallpaper almost made me sick, but it had to be done. I let myself take thirty seconds to rest on the carpet, just to make sure I was in control.

The bottom shelf of the bookshelf wiggled gently as I brushed my hand over the books. Removing them—The Very Hungry Caterpillar, among others—took only an instant. The shelf came right off.

Nothing.

With a sigh, I replaced the books, glancing around the room one last time. How could she do this? How could you risk your own child? Wouldn't you get out? Wouldn't you turn down their money and promises in order to get home on time? How could she have ignored what she was doing to her daughter? What kind of parent did that? How bad would everything have to get before I did that?

I furious at this stranger, glad her heart had been ripped from her. She had led her own flesh and blood up to the alter and she hadn't given a flying fuck. I glanced around the room, hating the smiling pictures, hating the carefully hung decorations, hating all the little lies that made it that much easier for him to tell himself he was doing the right thing leaving us all the time...

"You find anything?" Savannah called down the hall.

"No," I shouted back. Hastily, I got back to work. I looked behind the bookcase, under the bed, in the dresser (ignoring the tiny clothes), inside the closet, behind the pictures on the wall...

"Jackpot," I cried.

Savannah came running and even Paulson came. Behind the picture of a family vacation that that didn't begin to make up for anything, there was a safe. Savannah frowned when she saw it, but her eyes lit up when Paulson came through the door.

"I know you said breaking and entering isn't your thing, but..." Savannah arched her eyebrow.

Paulson grinned. "I may know a few tricks. It's always better to stand out of the pack."

Savannah eagerly watched as Paulson set to work, already sensitive ears pressed against the cool metal. It wasn't anything extraordinary. All half-demons had their talents and if you were smart you used them properly. That's what Dad used to say, coming home and complaining about the new kid who had stupidly forgotten to use his powers at the opportune moment and had lost the sale. It was kind of neat seeing someone crack a safe.

"Got it," Paulson announced. But he made no move to open it. Smart man.

Savannah got to work muttering spells to counter-act whatever wards Penelope Yi might have put up. I recognized most, but there were a few near the end that were different than anything I had been taught. I wondered if Paige knew what her ward was learning. Finally, she announced Paulson could go ahead.

With a deft twist, Paulson opened the metal box. Nothing sprang out at us, which I took as a good sign. Savannah quickly reached inside.

"Empty," she announced. "What the fuck?"

Either they had stopped using it or...or someone had beat us to it. Savannah swore some more, but I wasn't paying attention. I bent back down to the bookshelves because The Very Hungry Caterpillar shouldn't have been quite that thick. It was an old trick, but one that most people thought was too juvenile to actually work in real life.

Once I was looking, it was easy enough to notice the other books with pages that were much older than they should be. I handed one of the books to Savannah who crowed out, "Score one for the good witches."

Savannah quickly sat on the floor and began skimming a grimoire. I kept flipping through the bookcase. I finally came across something that I first thought was a diary. All the handwritten notes suggested that. But then the medical terminology began to jump at me. Slowly it dawned on me it was a patient file. I was fairly certain doctors weren't allowed to take patient information home. There was no names, only initials. I settled down to read more, when Paulson interrupted.

"There's someone walking up the driveway."

We quickly gathered the papers together and stuffed them into the bag Savannah had brought. She complained, "I better not be stopping for the mail man."

"He's turning the door handle," Paulson whispered.

I glanced at Savannah and we realized neither of us had bothered to lock the door behind us. This was not good. Savannah began flexing her wrists, preparing to go into battle. Both our eyes were on Paulson as he silently mouthed what he could hear.

"Going through the kitchen, dining room, living room. Waiting for something."

You didn't go into a roomful of bodies and stayed there unless you knew to expect them. I could tell Savannah had made the same conclusion, for she handed me the bag. She fought, I carried the research. At least we had a system.

Paulson grabbed her wrist, but she was prepared for that. He was in a binding spell before he could blink. I mouthed "I'm sorry" as I quickly followed Savannah out of the room. She would let the binding spell break soon enough. Until then, I was going to watch her back.

We crept down the hall, Savannah getting ready to cast another binding spell. Spells were great and everything, but they did take a while to cast. In a fight, it was better to surprise your opponent. That way you could start the spell beforehand, like Savannah was doing now, and launch it before anyone could fight back.

She spun around the corner, ready to face off and cast the rest of the spell. I poked my head out to see what she had caught and couldn't believe my eyes.

Ken was still in town.