It was how I’d explained it to him.
Eris said, “You know a lot for a wærewolf.”
“I’m not just any wærewolf.”
Todd thrust the paper at her and slapped three pens down in front of Eris. “Don’t try anything,” he growled at her. “The other witches here will know if your ‘supplies’ are accurate for your purpose.”
Eris’s look of surprise zeroed in on Nana. “I thought witches and wærewolves weren’t meant to mingle? How the hell did you end up with these guys?”
“If you’d had the guts to stick around, I might respect you enough to answer that.” Nana stood and shuffled away to the front room.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Eris finished her list, handed it to me, and lit another cigarette. The wærewolves had retreated to the corner and were whispering to themselves. Zhan leaned on the wall at the entrance to the hallway, arms crossed, and periodically glanced into the front area. Lance had given up on his ice pack, but seemed to be doing his best to be forgotten.
As I skimmed down the list, Eris said, “After you slammed the door … I thought I’d never have the chance to see you again.”
For three heartbeats we stared at each other, then I laid down the paper. I grabbed the cigarette from her, stubbed it out, then tossed the pack into the garbage. “If Johnny didn’t need you to do this—and what irony that it was you—then you wouldn’t be seeing me.” I sat and calmly resumed reading.
Or trying to read. My mind was still reeling from the knowledge that she, my deadbeat mother of all people, had been the one to magically dam up Johnny’s power.
She recrossed her legs the other way, and the bouncing resumed. “How does the vampire fit into this equation?”
“You’re in no position to press me for information.”
“But you’re Erus Veneficus to a Regional Quarter Lord—I saw it on the news, Pittsburgh is part of his domain—and you’re here with a wærewolf claiming to be the Domn Lup.”
I ignored her and assessed the list. Candles. Yellow, blue, red, silver, purple, green, black. Stones. Amber, moonstone, red jasper—
“You’ve accomplished so much.”
—aventurine, amethyst, jade, hematite. Herbs. Cinnamon and rosemary. Eucalyptus and myrrh. Basil and allspice. That wasn’t even half the list. I wagged the sheet in the air. “Do you have all of this somewhere or are we supposed to hit your local witch supply store in a shopping spree? This stuff needs to be consecrated and empowered and we’re in a waning moon phase.”
“The moon is new tomorrow—” She stopped herself, stood. “Shit.”
“What?”
“I told you: It took me a week to do this in the first place. If we’re going to attempt to undo it, we have to get going and I mean now.”
She had everyone’s attention now, and she thrived in the spotlight. “The moon will be new at nine minutes after five, tomorrow evening. The sun will set at five-ten. In order to best break the bonds put on you, I have to banish those bonds, and that’s best done under the sliver of a waning moon. There’ll be no moon tomorrow.”
“But that’s magic,” Johnny said. “This is sorcery.”
“The influence of the energies is still relevant.”
Johnny asked me for confirmation with a wordless glance. I nodded.
“So either we make this an all-nighter tonight,” Eris said, imbuing her words with the sense of having the advantage in the situation, “or we get the gang together again in a few weeks and take a more subtle one-per-night schedule.”
Johnny’s dark look reminded her that she hadn’t ever had the advantage here. “I don’t intend to leave until it is done.”
Eris tucked hair behind her ear, revealing three piercings in her earlobe and a tribal line tattoo behind and beneath her ear, along the hairline. “I have the supplies. Upstairs.”
Zhan drew the gun from her shoulder holster. “Then let’s go get them, shall we?”
Eris, Zhan, and I headed for the back door where Kirk still held his position. Zhan grabbed Eris’s arm to hold her back. “You go first,” she told me. To Eris, she said, “Don’t try anything stupid. You won’t outrun me or a bullet. I never miss.”
I noticed Kirk’s spine stiffen. “Never?” he asked.
“Never,” Zhan affirmed.
Kirk gave her the once-over like he’d never seen her before. While wæres are notoriously horny, they would rather spit on a vampire’s Offerling than look at one. But these two had a couple of things in common, for one, guns. Kirk was an ex-military sharpshooter. And they both were Asian.
“Keep your eyes in your head, fur-face,” Zhan snapped.
Kirk sneered. “Blood whore.”
In an instant, Zhan had released Eris and pressed the business end of her pistol against Kirk’s temple. “Mind your mouth, dog, or I’ll muzzle you permanently.”
Kirk held his hands up as if he were surrendering. He said nothing, but his expression was a billboard proclaiming his approval.
I opened the door and discovered a metal staircase leading up to a small landing. An older blue Corvette was parked under it; the Tahoe the other wæres had driven was beside it.
Eris took a set of keys from a peg by the door and followed me up the stairs, then unlocked it and led us inside. “Welcome to my home, Persephone. If I’d known you were going to drop by and bring friends, I’d have picked up.”
The dining area was right in front of us, the living room to the left. A pair of faux-distressed leather couches had an Aztec print area rug between them. One had a southwestern blanket crumpled at the far end, pillows with Aztec designs graced the other. A Pittsburgh Penguins jersey was draped on the back of one sofa. There was a TV on a table against the wall, DVD player underneath stacked with movies. I saw The Fast and the Furious and Tokyo Drift.
I took in the pizza boxes and empty two-liters perched on the corner of the glass-top dining table. A Steelers’ hoodie was draped over the arm of one chair.
Beyond the table was an opening to a hall. The bathroom opened off it and, since the hall stretched in both directions, I assumed there were bedrooms, too. To my right was a doorway to the kitchen, where a cereal box sat out, a cabinet door hung open, and two granola bar wrappers lay on the counter beside a half-empty glass of milk. The uncovered garbage can was overflowing.
Seeing that she lived in a normal apartment with normal house items made her seem like a normal person, not the mean, cruel woman I had imagined her to be.
“It isn’t grand, but it’s paid for,” she said proudly. “Magic stuff’s this way.” She led us through the kitchen to a black door in the back. Zhan inspected the bedrooms while I followed Eris. She took hold of the doorknob. “I call this the woogie room.”
“Woogie? You got Chewbacca in there?” I asked.
“Woogie. Not wookiee.” She frowned. “Nana doesn’t like space movies, does she?”
“No.”
“Don’t give up on her, Persephone, she apparently doesn’t hate wæres anymore. If that can change, anything can change.”
“She’s trying to quit smoking, too.”
“No way!”
Eris was trying to be chummy, as if we were merely catching up after a few weeks of absence. It irritated me and I let her see the proof.
She opened the black door and hit the light switch. The inside was lined with shelves and the kind of do-it-yourself cabinetry that usually left folks wondering if the instructions lost something important in the translation. “Supposed to be a pantry,” she said. “But we don’t eat that much so everything stores in the kitchen.”
“We?” I asked.
She spun around, cheeks flushing. “Don’t worry, he’s at work.”
Of course she had a man living here. “When will he be back?”
Her fists shoved into her pockets. “He’s a trucker. He’ll be gone until midweek.”