“Please, Ms. Bristol, she has to go with me,” the stranger said, his eyes tight. He clutched the arms of the recliner. “My chief gift is that of sight as it pertains to danger. Penny must go with me. It is the safest option.”

“For you, or for her?” my mother said, her fists digging stubbornly into her hips.

“For both of us, but I don’t know specifics. I just know what situation will cause me damage, and leaving without her will. I mean, in this case, it will cause us damage, obviously.”

“Yes. Obviously.” My mother motioned him up.

He stood and clenched his fists, his arms rippling with muscle. “You would let your daughter die from your own ignorance?”

My mother shifted and a challenge sparkled in her eyes. “My ignorance? You are a hotheaded young man with a vendetta against a large, corrupt organization and a half-baked plan to bullheadedly sprint at danger with nothing more than a natural gift you don’t have the life experience to truly master. My husband was not as powerful as some, but with his training and experience, he often rose above his more powerful counterparts. Still they took him down. Your brother was a natural, yet they took him down. You’ve willfully ignored all of that, and yet you wish to challenge my ignorance? You would do better not to confuse ego with intelligence.”

The stranger’s brow furrowed, and he shook his head. “I’m missing something. The scene changes little by little, but it always ends the same. Even if I force her to come, we’ll both die. If I stay here, we’ll both die. There is something…missing. Something that needs to happen to change our fate…”

“If only I had a real crystal ball, huh?” I asked, the tension so high that I’d fallen out the other side and gone numb. I didn’t know what the best solution was; I just wanted to get on with it. Running at danger or hiding from it both sounded just fine, if we could just keep the talk away from dead loved ones and corrupt organizations I alone knew nothing about. “Mother, you could always give tarot a try. You actually know what the cards mean.”

A puzzled expression crossed the stranger’s face right before his eyes brightened. “A powerful mage in the guild wouldn’t normally settle for a lesser-powered mage unless she had extraordinary talents elsewhere. Is that it, then? Tarot focuses your true magic?”

“I’ll have you know that I was a knockout back in the day,” my mother said, straightening her back in indignation. “I didn’t need power. I had sex appeal.”

“No.” I put up my hand. “No more of that. Move that topic along, please.”

“I chose my husband, not the other way around. I could’ve had—”

“Stop right there,” I insisted.

“—my pick. I had plenty of offers, powerful or not. A swing of the hips—”

“You’re forgetting the situation.”

“—brought the boys to my yard.”

“Those aren’t even the right lyrics.” I groaned. “Ma, you have to stop.”

My mother rounded on me, apparently forgetting the stranger in our midst and the fact that there was one less ward protecting us from what waited outside. “Why, because I’m old and fat, I’m not allowed to talk about my past?”

“No. Because you’re my mother!”

“You aren’t old and fat,” the stranger said. “You look great.”

My mother put up a finger. “Don’t you try to flatter me, boy.” She stared at the door, her brow lowered. “It’s a waste of time.”

“You get set up, and I’ll put up another ward,” the stranger said, taking a step toward the door. “I had planned to, anyway. No time will be lost.”

“Why are you so interested in hearing my premonition when you have your own?” My mother’s fists were back on her hips.

“In this case, I’m open to suggestions.” He walked out of the room, his step sure despite the inquisition he’d just endured.

“He believes what he says,” I told my mother as she stared after him. “You can see it.”

“There are two types of fools. The one who delivers the message, and the one who believes it.” She stalked away, muttering to herself. I heard the word “fool” at least two more times.

My feet were carrying me after the stranger before I knew I wanted to follow him. I stopped at the front door, sweeping the street with my gaze.

He turned enough to glance over his shoulder. “I’m Emery, by the way.” I nodded, but he’d already turned back and raised his hands, fingers spread. “Can you see the elements in the world around us?”

I frowned and looked at the sky, finally starting to clear after that recent rainstorm. “Like the water, you mean? Rain?”

“No, the…” He pointed at the grass. “Do you see little…tags sticking out of the world around you? The elements making themselves known to you?”

I looked where he pointed, trying to see what he meant. Carefully tended deep green blades stretched toward the well-trimmed hedges along the sides. “No.”

“Hmm.” Without warning, something tugged on my ribs and streams of magic rose from the ground. “Can you see it now?”

“Yes. Did you check for watchers?”

“Of course. The one I found…is out of commission. They’ll think it’s heart failure.”

The shock that would normally run through me at such a blasé acknowledgement of death was strangely absent. That probably wasn’t good.

He wiggled his fingers as the streams reached them, and an expertly woven spell came out the other side. “Do you see how I’ve formed the elements into a spell? Excuse me—the properties into a spell?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What else do you know about what I’m doing?”

I shifted my gaze away from his fingers and let it rest on his broad back. Muscles worked under his thin T-shirt, bunching and rippling. He was thicker than fighters I’d seen on TV or YouTube, a bit bulkier. Yet he wasn’t so big as a power lifter. Whatever he did in his off time was strenuous, but it required more movement than simply lifting things. Which would make sense if he was on the run.

I scanned his clothing, which was worn and dirty. My mother had been right—he did look like he had woken up on the street that day. His blonde-brown hair, a little long and shaggy, probably looked as wild as mine did right now, but somehow it suited him. A pocket flap was upturned on his butt pocket, and a misshapen item rested against his round cheek. Maybe a grouping of items. I wondered if they pertained to magic.

“Penny?” he prompted.

I looked at the weave again, clustering into a ball in front of him. Defense pulsed from it. Protection. I got the impression of impregnable walls and iron studs.

“I know that you are doing as you said—building something that will keep this house safe.” I tried to run my fingers through my hair. They tangled immediately. Which was, of course, the exact moment he turned to glance at me.

I ripped my hand away. My head jerked with the effort. A clump of hair separated from my scalp, but the rest held fast, trapping my hand.

“I didn’t have time to brush it,” I said with a flaming face before ripping my hand again. More hair pulled out, but my fingers came away.

His gaze landed on my hair for a moment, as if he somehow hadn’t noticed my wrestling match with it, before he shifted his focus back to the spell. “Do you have any training at all?”

“No. Though…I do know how to make women into zombies.” I settled for patting my hair this time, trying to get it to flatten.

“You know how…to make women…into zombies,” he said in bursts, like he was digging into a suitcase and pulling each cluster of words out at a time. “Uh-huh. And where did you learn that?”

“It was a retreat gone bad. In New Orleans. I just read the directions and the coven copied me. I mean, you know, they repeated the directions after me.”

“You read…the directions…on how to make women…into zombies. Mhm. And the coven was okay with you joining them so that they might turn into flesh-eating creatures?”

The way he said it, blasé and light, had me shaking with silent laughter. “I’m not sure they knew what it did. I took over because it seemed out of their league.”

“‘They’ being the witches, I presume?”

“Yes.”

“And you knew what the potion did?”

“No! I would never have participated if I’d known. There wasn’t a title or description or anything. But it just…called to me. I took over for the leader of the coven without meaning to. Then I just started to read it, and it felt right.”

He pushed his hands out and up, and the ball of magic he’d been knitting into existence drifted into a lumpy, sloppy plane before disappearing from sight.

“How come I can’t see it anymore?” I asked, taking a step forward.

He lifted his hands again, and more streams of magic rose from around him, an entirely different set than before. “The power is spread too thin. Wards aren’t spells. They are called into reality the same way, but they exist in nature differently. I’ll teach you more later. Now, let’s get back to your slumber party with a group of zombies. I’m not quite done with my line of questioning.”

I bit my lip to keep a smile away. The situation had been dark and horrible, so much more serious than what he was portraying. I felt bad for laughing.

“This coven had a leader?” he asked.

“I don’t really know, but she was taking charge.”

“Until you, an untrained mage who’d never worked a potion before, relieved her of her duty?”

“Yes.”

“Mhm. And how did you come to be at this…retreat, did you say? Magical retreat?”

I told him about the whole sorry situation, which spilled into a story of the potion, and how I’d hidden from the zombies in the closet. By the end, he was laughing helplessly and his magical work was completely stalled. He shook his head when he was through and layered the new spell onto the ward.

“You are something, Penny Bristol. Of all the decisions a person could make in their lifetime, you make the oddest ones, and put them together even more strangely.”

“Yeah. Well.” I didn’t really know what else to say to that. It was true, after all.

“And the other night. Why did you run over those bodies?”

I choked on my spit as he turned and strode back toward me. He stopped in front of me and looked down onto my face. Confusion seeped into his expression.

“No reason,” I said, about-facing and marching into the house. “Will we be protected?”

“Your mother will, yes. Hopefully you won’t be here.”

“She won’t let me go if she thinks I’ll come to harm.”

“I gathered that, yes. So let’s hope she convinces herself. I think that is the missing ingredient. I hope that is the missing ingredient. I don’t have any other ideas.”

“For a so-called powerful natural mage, you certainly don’t have all the answers,” I teased.

“I never claimed to have all the answers. Or a well-thought-out strategy, as your mother has so kindly pointed out.”

My humor dried up as I caught sight of my mother, sitting stone-faced at the dining room table, worry in her eyes. Emery’s confidence and know-how made it so easy for me to forget the danger I was in. But if he and my mother were to be believed, soon things wouldn’t be this quiet. Soon the guild, whoever they were, wouldn’t be watching—they’d be attacking.

“Sit,” my mother barked.

Both Emery and I took chairs dutifully, and I saw that his humor had dried up as well. He was deadly, knowledgeable, and powerful, but that didn’t mean squat when it came to taking orders from my mother.

Her gaze fell on Emery. “I assume you know how tarot works? That you will need to focus?”

He was looking at her worn and beat-up deck, one of her very first, which she only brought out for heavy decision-making. I had seen that deck a few times, including just after my father had died. Unlike when I “read” for paying customers, she did not take these readings lightly.

“I know how it works, and I know what the cards mean,” he said in a heavy voice.

“The cards don’t always mean what you might imagine,” she replied, her attention shifting to her deck.

Her fingers worked in practiced movements, shuffling so fast that I was amazed a card didn’t break free from the pack and fly across the room. Her eyes lost focus, staring into nothingness. I’d always thought this was when the real magic started. But now, as I experienced it with new eyes, I knew this was when the real magic started.

Energy rose and moved through the room, hovering around us. An electrical current ran along my arms and stood small hairs on end. My stomach dropped, like the first plunge from a high rollercoaster.

A large, rough hand covered mine, and I started with the contact. Emery was staring at me, his eyes slightly rounded and his gaze deep.

“What?” I mouthed, careful not to interrupt my mother.

His little head tilt made it seem like he was asking, “What do you mean, what?” But whatever he saw on my face or in my eyes changed his expression to incredulous confusion, and he pulled his hand away from mine.

“The question has been asked,” my mother said in a haunting, faraway voice.

She must’ve asked it internally, which she sometimes did. Just because she said she was going to read for you, didn’t mean she planned to do a reading of you. I’d learned that the hard way a few times over.

She reached the card deck across the table to Emery before setting it down. Her gaze focused on him. “Cut.”

He took half and placed it to the side of the deck. She took the untouched group of cards and placed it on the group Emery had set down. She was about to lay them in a pattern on the table when she paused. Her brow furrowed.

She looked at me for a moment before shifting the deck over to me. “Cut.”

I stared at her for a moment. That wasn’t right. One person cut.

My mother’s glower kept my argument trapped within the cage of my teeth.

I followed Emery’s example.

She slapped the cards down in front of her, the configuration not one you’d see in any books, just like the description of what she was looking for wasn’t in any how-to blogs. If Emery was taken aback by that, it didn’t show.

Silence descended, thick and syrupy. Her eyes darted from one card to the other. Back again. In zigzags and patterns that she probably couldn’t have explained if she’d tried. When she was done, she leaned back in her chair, sagging heavily.

The pressure in the room popped, and with it, my ears. Expectation rose.

“You must go, Penelope,” she said into the silence. “He was right. To stay would be disastrous. If you go, you at least have a slice of a chance. Any way I read it, that’s the result. I would never have believed it. Had I read the cards after he’d left, it would’ve been too late.” Her troubled, sorrowful gaze came up and hit Emery. “If you go, you must use your friends. You will know which ones when the time comes. You won’t want to, but you must. It will be the difference between loss and a life fully lived. For both you and my daughter.”

He stared at her for a moment, something passing between them. He nodded solemnly. “I won’t let you down.”

She wiped her face and gathered up her cards. “You need to put a ward on her friend Veronica’s house. Mine won’t hold up.”

“Of course.” He shifted, watching the cards go back into their deck. “The ward is still a warning, but I layered it with a spell that will make the eyes slippery. They should glide right past your house. I didn’t have time to figure out how to limit that to just a magical person. I’m not even sure it can be done. But you’ll have a little more protection, at any rate.”

“That’s not important,” she said, worry etching her face and fear ringing in her tone. She didn’t look at me. “My little girl is about to head into battle with no preparation or training. The last thing in the world I care about right now is myself.”