CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
From the moment I woke up and read the time, I knew my sleeping cycle was well and truly screwed. It was early afternoon, the morning birds had long since stopped chirping, and Jared was asleep next to me, his chest gently swelling and dipping. I rubbed my eyes and propped myself up on one elbow, pulling the sheet up to my neck before gently shaking Jared awake. He stirred after a time, then opened his eyes and looked up at me, smiling a sleepy smile.
“Morning,” he said.
“Afternoon, actually,” I said.
“Really?” He checked his phone. “Damn. Did it again, huh?”
“Yeah, this could turn into a nasty habit.”
“Or a great one.”
“No, a nasty one—and if it does, I’m blaming you.”
“Me? Why me?”
He sat up, and I leaned forward to kiss him lightly on the lips. “Because you’re the one who kept us up.”
“You would have kept us up longer. I acted decisively.”
I shoved his shoulder and turned my face away to mask the reddening of my cheeks. He was right. I had kept us both up, and I wasn’t sorry. The best part was, I wasn’t feeling tired. I almost felt like I could get up and run laps around the building.
“Are you working tonight?” I asked.
“Yeah, I am.”
“That sucks.”
“I know, but I get off at around nine. Maybe we can… hang out?”
I picked my phone up from the nightstand. “Yeah… that actually sounds really good.”
“You got any plans?”
“Wait a second…” I said.
“What is it?”
It was a message from Nicole. The preview on my phone’s lock-screen read ‘I have something for you. A letter. It arrived this morning. Thought you might...’
“Nicole wants me to go over to her place,” I said. “Says she has mail for me.”
“Your mail came to her place?”
“That’s weird. I haven’t forwarded anything to her house. Could be something that needed to be signed for, and they dropped it off at her place… but that doesn’t seem right.”
“Do you think she’s just trying to get you to come over so you can talk?”
I swept across the screen and read the message in full. It didn’t say much more than the preview had displayed. She thought I might have wanted to go and pick it up, and wanted to let me know she would be at her house today.
“She could be…” I said.
“You guys are close,” he said, “If you go over there to talk to her, I know she’ll talk to you. Maybe you can change her mind, or at least find out exactly what she’s thinking by siding with Tamara. She isn’t a hateful person. I know she wouldn’t suddenly start hunting vampires down.”
“She hung me out to dry. I know she’s not going to go after Jean Luc with a torch and pitchfork, but leaving me hanging like that was totally not cool.” I got up from the bed. “I don’t know what she really wants, but I’ll go and talk to her.”
Jared offered to drive me to Nicole’s and back, but I didn’t want him waiting around for me, so I let him drive me over and promised I would make my own way back later. Steeling my resolve, I went through the gate, walked up the short stone path, up the steps, and rang the doorbell. The seconds passed, and passed, and passed. Birds chirped. A wind chime tinkled in the breeze. I was beginning to think no one was home, but then Nicole unlocked the door and opened it.
She peered out from around the door, her face serious and cold, but also a little pale and tired. “You came,” she said, her voice flat and devoid of sympathy or compassion.
Hearing her voice brought more anger bubbling to the surface than I would have liked. I tried to keep it all bottled in. “You said you had something for me,” I said.
“I do.”
An awkward silence hung in the air. I had expected her to say something else after that, but she hadn’t. “So?” I asked, “Are you going to give it to me, or just look at me like that?”
Nicole opened the door fully to let me in. I stepped through, a little apprehensively, and immediately noticed the place was a little duller than I was used to. Jeanette usually kept the place sparkling, and the smell of fresh pine was never far from your nose. Now it was as if all the sparkle had been sucked out of the house, and all that remained was a stale, dusty shell.
She led me into the living room and sat down on one of the sofas there. I sat down on the armchair and looked at her. “I wasn’t sure I was going to come,” I said. “I didn’t think you had anything for me.”
“You thought I was just trying to get you over here to talk?”
“Why else?”
“I think I would have just told you if I wanted to talk.”
“So, you don’t want to go over what the hell happened the other night, at the party?”
“I don’t think I have to.”
“Someone shut and locked the bathroom door,” I said. “I was locked in that room and had to listen to everything go down, powerless to do anything about it. I couldn’t use my magick. If I hadn’t broken the toilet tank cover on the handle, I may have never gotten out.”
“None of us could use our magick.”
“Exactly. People are only talking about the vampires, but no one’s talking about the reason why we couldn’t use our magick. How the hell could they have done that to us?”
“We’re talking about it.”
I swallowed. “We?”
“The witches,” she said, matter-of-factly. “We’re trying to figure out why it was none of us could use our magick when we needed to.”
I was all too familiar with Nicole’s intuitive abilities. Even though she seemed tired and spent, I knew she could read my emotional state, and maybe even my thoughts sometimes. I didn’t want to let on just how much it hurt to hear the witches of New Orleans were excluding me from their conversations, so I recalled the catchiest song I could think of and kept repeating it in my head.
“And have you?” I asked, looking down at my own hands.
Nicole paused. “No,” she said. “Best we can determine, a witch must have been helping those vampires.”
“A witch? Someone inside our community?”
“Not necessarily.”
“But we’re talking about inhibiting the power of a mansion full of witches. I can’t even begin to speculate what kind of spell that was, but only someone with immense experience and strength in magick could have done that.”
“Someone like Tamara?”
The way she was looking at me, with her head tilted a little low and her eyes trained on mine, I knew she was listening for my thoughts, or any sudden burst of emotion. I wasn’t a stone. I couldn’t keep everything away from her, and I knew it. Especially anger. Anger was such a raw, explosive emotion. Nicole had pushed my buttons, and it had worked.
“I didn’t say Tamara.”
“No, but that’s what you think, isn’t it? She’s a new face in the city, she’s got experience on us, and she dislikes you.”
“You disliked her when she first rolled into town too, remember? Or have you forgotten?”
“I haven’t forgotten. All I know is, thanks to your event, my mom and a half-dozen other witches almost died that night. One of them did die.”
The anger wasn’t just bubbling; it was coming to a boil. “My event?” I asked, “We organized it together. We thought of it together. And now it’s my event? Has she turned you against me that much already?”
“No one’s done anything to me, Madison. Tamara has just shown me the truth about vampires—they’re killers, and they hold grudges. These people are going to stop at nothing and no one; they’ll slaughter every last witch in New Orleans if we let them.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said, looking up at her, boring the weight of my anger into her through my gaze. “They’ll kill every last vampire, too, because they’re monsters driven by one purpose alone.”
Nicole clenched her jaw. “Vampires aren’t our concern,” she said, “Witches are our concern. Can’t you see that?”
“Only the witches, huh? What about the humans, or Jared, or the imps? I guess they’re not as important to you either?”
“That’s not what I said.”
I stood bolt-upright and stared her down from where I was. “You didn’t have to say it,” I said. “Ever since you’ve started talking, its Tamara’s voice I’ve been hearing. This Nicole isn’t the Nicole I made a pact with—she isn’t my kind, generous, caring sister. It’s Tamara wearing a different suit.”
She stood as well and locked her eyes with mine. “Watch it,” she said, pointing an index finger at me.
“Or what, Nicole? Are you going to kill me because I’ve sided with unity instead of with Tamara?”
“I’m not going to kill you, but you can’t say whatever you want and hope to get away with it.”
I stepped up to her, and she backed away like a feral cat, circling the sofa and putting her arm out as if to stop me from hurting her. Seeing that kind of reaction twisted my insides in a bad way. Tears stung my eyes. She was my sister, and I couldn’t even get close to her, let alone get through to her. We had been through so much together, and now Tamara had turned her against me.
Against our coven.
“These vampires,” I said, praying my voice wouldn’t falter, “The ones who killed Remy… I faced one of them last night. They’re vicious and brutal. What they did the other night, they’ll do again, and when they do, we need to be together. You and me. If anyone can figure out how to beat them, it’s us.”
Nicole fell silent, and I thought maybe she could hear my frustration, my desperation, my anger. I thought maybe, if my voice and my argument couldn’t sway her, maybe my emotions could. But she drew a breath and her expression hardened again.
“You chose your side,” she said, “And I chose mine. There’s nothing for us to discuss.”
I swallowed the catch building in my throat. “So… if I protect Jean Luc and his family from Tamara, what are you going to do?”
There was a pause. “I will do whatever I have to do to keep me and my family safe.”
I could feel my pulse racing, blood rushing through me at a dizzying speed. My lips pressed together, and before I could say another word, I started to leave. I had tried my best with Nicole, but she didn’t want to hear me out. But what hurt the most was her refusal to reassure me she would sooner remain neutral than protect me. Hadn’t we been through the exact same ordeal together? Couldn’t she see this was exactly what happened to Eliza? She wanted to protect innocent vampires, and her own witches turned on her.
I left Azure House in a hurry, and kept walking down the street until my house and Nicole’s were completely out of view before catching a ride back to Jared’s place, realizing only when I arrived that I never collected whatever mail Nicole had waiting for me at her house. I didn’t call anyone, didn’t stop to get something to eat or drink, all I wanted to do was go back to the apartment and tend to my emotional wounds.
But I wouldn’t get that chance, because on the doorstep to Jared’s place, sitting there like a piece of discarded mail, was an envelope with my name on it.
The envelope vibrated in my hands and was cool to the touch, refreshingly so. I looked around the landing, wondering if the person who had delivered it was still around, but I remembered once having received a letter almost exactly like this one, in almost exactly the same hand, but it had been sent to me by Remy.
I ripped the letter open, hoping against hope that somehow, by some miracle, Remy was still alive—that he had found another way to cheat death and wanted to work with me to figure this whole mess out. I wouldn’t have put it past him, a man of his magickal aptitude. But the hope turned to bile in my stomach as I read the contents of the letter, and the bile turned to dread when I saw the signature.
The letter wasn’t from Remy; it was from Tamara.