Layla woke up in bed alone, which was only momentarily disappointing given the fact that it was clearly past being light out. And she felt even more relief when Damaris stuck her head in the door just a minute later. “Breakfast is ready.”

“Coming.” Layla took a quick shower and headed downstairs, feeling oddly self-conscious. She had an irrational fear that her coven would be able to tell what she and Hunter had done last night just by looking at her. Sure, she looked guilty as hell; Layla just hoped Hunter was better at hiding his feelings than she was.

Her heart nearly stopped when she found her four sisters sitting at the table with uncharacteristically solemn expressions. They know. What were they going to do? Kick her out of the house, the coven? How on earth was she going to explain herself?

“Layla, good, we were just talking about you,” Sophie said, gesturing for Layla to have a seat. She gulped and complied.

“What with everything that’s going on, we’ve decided that your training needs to be rushed.”

A beat of silence passed as Layla waited for the rest of what she’d expected a moment before. “Wait, what? That’s all?”

“It’s a serious matter,” Damaris told her sternly. “Being careful with a new witch’s powers is of the utmost importance. Rushing into things can be dangerous. However, we’ve decided that you need to know how to defend yourself.”

Layla breathed a sigh of relief as the feeling in her fingers started coming back. Clearly, she wasn’t made for keeping secrets. She glanced toward the demons, all of whom were gathered nearby in the kitchen, and thought she saw a hint of amusement in Hunter’s face; he’d known what she’d been expecting, maybe, even if nobody else had.

“Eat a good breakfast,” Rose advised her. “Magic can be tiring, especially at first—even for those of us without a stipulation like Sophie’s.”

Layla couldn’t help meeting Hunter’s eyes as she ate. She tried not to do it too often, because when he was looking at her, she found it almost impossible to look away. While she ate, Fisher helped Sophie and Damaris clear all the furniture from the living room, leaving a large empty working space. Once Layla had finished eating, the witches drew her into the living room and the demons all spread along the outside of the room—apparently both to guard the witches and observe.

“Okay, so you’ve started with some of the basics, but what we need to teach you is a lot more advanced,” Sophie said in a no-nonsense voice. “Stand over here,” she directed Layla. “Now, Rose is the best at wards, so she’ll be showing you those. Shields are a type of ward, which are invaluable in an attack situation.”

“The trick,” Rose added, “is keeping them up. Casting them is one thing, but you need to keep focused if you want them to stay up long enough for you to run away or call for help. There are shields you can put up that don’t require constant concentration, such as the ones I put on the house, but those take a lot longer and are way more advanced.

“The incantation for the simple one I’m showing you first is Clypeus defet. It takes force of mind to cast as well as to maintain. When you say the words, you need to imagine a large shield between you and your attacker. We all visualize differently, so what it looks like doesn’t really matter, but the thought behind it does. It’s there to defend you, to stop anything from getting to you. Like this.”

She turned to Damaris, who was ready and posed to throw a tennis ball at her. Rose stood still as the ball bounced off of her chest. “Now, watch. Clypeus defet!”

Nothing seemed to happen, except this time when Damaris threw the ball, it only got to within a foot of Rose before it bounced off of an invisible force.

“Come feel what I’m doing,” she told Layla, her eyes far away as she concentrated on holding the shield up.

Layla approached her slowly and could feel it when she met the shield. It pushed her back, almost like a person was pushing, and she stumbled. She put a hand on it. It felt weird. It looked like she had her hand up in midair, but it was in fact pressed against Rose’s impenetrable shield.

When it dropped suddenly, Layla narrowly avoided hitting Rose in the head.

“There are things you can do with it when you get more advanced,” Rose said. “You can make it opaque, so that you can run away without anyone seeing which direction you’re moving in. You can also add barbs to it, such as a small shock to anyone who touches it. It can vary in sizes, too, and when you get advanced enough, you’ll be able to wrap it around yourself like a bubble, but you’re a long way from there.”

“This is great!” Layla said enthusiastically, thinking how useful this would have been when her mother was drunkenly throwing things around the house.

“First we’ll try it without throwing anything at you. Say the words and visualize your shield.”

Layla did as she was told. Nothing felt different, and she wondered how she could know if it had worked or not. Rose answered the question without speaking. She tapped Layla on the shoulder, with no invisible barrier to stop her.

“No worries. Try again.”

Nothing happened until the fourth try. And on the fourth try, a vase in the kitchen exploded. The demons all jumped, but none of the witches seemed fazed. Sophie waved off Layla’s apologies and went to clean up the mess.

“Get used to it, because there’s going to be a lot more of that today,” Rose warned. “That’s one of the reasons we usually go slowly with new witches—too much power at once has a higher chance of causing accidents. Nothing to be done about that, though.”

“I thought there were wards to protect the house? I don’t want to destroy things…”

“Oh, there are,” Lizeth laughed. “The wards protected the table and all the chairs. This wouldn’t be the first time the whole dining room was blown up.”

Suddenly reluctant to try again, scared of what she might unleash, Layla only left her worry behind when she realized it didn’t matter how she felt about going forward; Rose wasn’t waiting for her. She tossed the tennis ball. Layla automatically moved to catch it, but Rose shook her head.

“No, don’t catch it. Focus on creating a shield, and you won’t need to catch it.”

Rose didn’t throw the ball hard, but Layla still felt pretty sure her skin would be covered in bruises by the time she managed to erect a shield. Hunter’s expression had been growing darker by the minute as Rose kept pressing her, throwing the damnable ball, and Layla got the feeling that if she didn’t get it right soon, he might snatch the ball out of Rose’s hand and hack it apart with the knife he’d been fingering.

She tried to send him a look saying ‘I’m fine’, but it was undermined by her wince as the ball hit her again.

“That was better!” Rose said happily. “You didn’t stop the ball, but you slowed it down. Your shield is coming up—you just need to make it stronger.”

Hunter came to stand closer to her, and Layla took strength from his presence. She could do this, she told herself. It only took five more tries until she could deflect the tennis ball, the third try resulting in a minor fire that Damaris put out with the fire extinguisher. Sophie opened a couple of windows to get the smell of singed material out and once more ignored Layla’s apologies.

“That’s great,” Rose encouraged her. “Ideally, your shield should be strong enough to bounce the ball right back, but you deflected it from hitting you, which in many cases will be enough.”

By the time the ball was bouncing back, Layla was exhausted. Sophie assured her that that was normal for a witch just coming into her powers, as were the accidents, and that neither exhaustion nor explosions would necessarily end up being her long-term limitations. No one seemed to know exactly when that would announce itself, but the waiting already made Layla nervous.

Layla had thought that the tennis ball routine might be the end of things, but apparently Rose’s small demonstration hadn’t had much effect on her, and all of the witches had every intention of Layla’s lessons continuing. After a break for lunch, Rose had her back at it. Once she’d mastered the shield to bounce back the tennis ball, she had to work on keeping it up. To her dismay, Rose brought out a whole basket of tennis balls and explained that she’d keep throwing them while Layla retreated to the other side of the room, all the while keeping her shield up.

At this promise, Hunter finally put his foot down. “No. Enough of this. You are not throwing any more balls at her! Can’t you see how she’s moving? She’s aching all over. If you have to throw something, you can crumple up a ball of paper and throw that. At least that won’t hurt when it hits.”

“You think we enjoy this?” Sophie snapped before Layla could respond. “Of course, we know she’s hurting—we all went through this. Believe me, this method has been tested many times. Conjuring a shield under attack is different from conjuring one when there’s no threat. Having a consequence, even a slight one like the pain of a ball hitting her, will teach Layla to conjure the shield under pressure.”

That made sense, though it didn’t stop Layla’s muscles from aching.

“I said no!” Hunter growled. Layla gasped as he yanked his knife out and threw the weapon. It flew across the room, piercing the tennis ball Rose was holding, wrenching it out of her grip and pinning it to the wall behind her.

In a moment’s time, Layla was sure he’d initiated a war. The witches looked posed to cast spells, and the demons had pulled out their weapons—they were all just waiting for someone to make an aggressive move to start things along, and the whole thing looked to be moments away from spiraling completely out of control.

Before that could happen, Layla shoved herself in between Hunter and Sophie, grabbing Hunter’s chin and staring into his eyes, ignoring the shocked faces of her sisters.

“Hunter, relax. I’m okay. I’d rather be sore now than dead later! You heard Sophie; this is the best way for me to practice.”

Perhaps from the sheer surprise of Layla throwing herself between the two parties’ leaders, everyone froze long enough for Layla to physically push Hunter a few steps back. “Let it go,” she insisted.

Finally, reason seemed to come back to the gathering, and everyone backed down as the tension lessened. Sophie looked more suspicious than ever but seemed to think it best to move past the incident. Hunter gave Rose a truly dangerous look, and she surreptitiously changed the tennis balls for ping pong balls, which were a lot lighter and hardly stung at all when they hit.

In fact, Layla was actually enjoying not getting hit painfully every few minutes when her phone started ringing. She never got calls; it wasn’t like she’d had any friends until now. Rose agreed to a break, and Layla emitted a quick murmur of surprise when she saw that it was her mom calling.

“Mom?” she asked hesitantly. She could feel Hunter’s eyes on her again.

“Layla, where are you?” her mom snapped.

Layla breathed a sigh of relief. Her mother was in a bad mood, but at least she didn’t sound drunk. “You kicked me out, remember?” she returned coldly, turning her back to the group in order to gain some small bit of privacy.

“Well, there’s no food in the house, and that’s your responsibility. Get your useless behind back here and make yourself useful; you can pick up groceries on your way.”

Layla laughed harshly. “Yeah, right.” Looking out the window, she shook her head—she should have known this would be the type of thing to force her mom into calling her again. “You know, I never knew what it was like to live with people who actually valued me, and I don’t think I want to go back to having you treat me like rubbish. You can sort out your own dinner.”

She could practically see her mom’s eyes bulging. Layla never spoke back like this.

“Have you ever been religious?” Layla asked before her mother could decide how to respond.

“What?” The question had clearly thrown her mom. It seemed unlikely she remembered Layla’s confrontation about witchcraft, though, and since the direct approach hadn’t worked, Layla had decided to go for the indirect approach. “Like, Wicca or one of the pagan religions?”

“No, Layla, what on earth does that have to do with anything?”

“What about back in the family? What kind of history do we have?”

Her mom sniffed disapprovingly. “Seriously, Layla? Jesus. Your grandmother was into weird new agey stuff and all that nonsense. Nothing else. Why are you asking?”

Layla paused but decided there was no telling when she’d have this chance to talk to her mother again while the woman was sober. Whether the group could hear her or not, she had to press for answers while she could. A glance over her shoulder told her they’d disappeared to give her some privacy, though; that made the next question easier.

“Did you ever hear from my father after he left?”

Her mom was definitely getting annoyed now. Usually, Layla did whatever she could to avoid conflict, and she wasn’t used to such bold questioning. Layla was a little surprised at herself, to be honest.

“I’ve told you about your deadbeat father, and I’m not going to go through this again. I told you to get groceries and come home; that’s all I had to say. Goodbye, Layla.” Her mother hung up abruptly.

Having had much worse endings to conversations with her, Layla shrugged it off and went to look for Hunter.

He and the other demons were in the backyard talking. Nervously, she approached. “Hunter, can I have a word?”

“Of course.”

He led her around the house to a small bench set in front of a few bushes. “Are you okay? What did your mom want?”

“What she always wants from me. Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I tried to ask her about witchcraft…”

Layla repeated her mom’s comments to Hunter, wondering if someone outside of the witches’ own culture might be able to translate whether they meant anything of importance.

“From what she said, I’d imagine that your grandmother was a witch, but for some reason, she rejected it and didn’t tell her daughter. Obviously, your mom isn’t a witch, or she would have realized it by now. She probably didn’t know.”

The thoughts echoed her own and made Layla feel a little better about her mother. Whatever else she had done, at least she hadn’t been keeping the secret of who she was from Layla, thereby adding to her list of crimes.

“What about my father? Sophie said he’s also an immortal, but she doesn’t know which type. Can you tell?”

“I don’t know either,” Hunter admitted. “Most immortals can tell when they’re looking at one of their own, but it’s a lot harder with halflings. Sophie’s right about him being an immortal, but as to who or what, I can only guess.”

“Do you think it would be possible to track him down with magic?”

“I don’t know enough to be sure, but I imagine something like that’s possible. It’ll have to wait, though. We first need to find this killer and make sure you’re all safe.”

Layla knew he was right and suspected Sophie would tell her the same thing if she were to ask. She’d gone eighteen years without knowing her father. She could go a few more weeks.

“Why do you think he’d leave me?” Layla hadn’t intended the question to come out so pitifully, or maybe she hadn’t meant to say it aloud at all. She couldn’t look at Hunter after she asked.

Hunter sighed and put an arm around her. “Immortals are people just like humans, and we’re far from perfect. There are good and bad humans, and there are good and bad immortals. Some parents leave. It’s not your fault. Not everyone is a good person.”

“But it might be something else,” Layla persisted. “Like, some kind of supernatural reason that forced him to leave?”

“It could be,” Hunter conceded. “Things between the magical races haven’t always gone smoothly. There’ve been fights over the years. If he was a well-known figure, it’s possible he left to protect you from his enemies. I don’t want you to get your hopes up, though. It’s equally likely that an awful man just happened to produce a wonderful daughter.”

Layla smiled and kissed him briefly. “You’re right. I suppose I’ll know soon enough anyway. I’m sure Sophie and the others will be willing to help me once the situation has calmed down.”

“Layla, where are you? Are you ready to get back to work?”

Layla grimaced and reluctantly got up. “I should go. Coming, Rose!”

They worked on shields for a bit more before Rose decided she’d done enough practice for one day. Relieved, Layla was just thinking of having a nap when Damaris stepped up.

“Now that you’ve got the basics of shields, I’m going to start teaching you how to throw a confusion spell at your enemy to disorient them long enough for you to get away.”