"Okay," I said. "Give me a call if you can get away."
"All right. I missed you today. And I'm worried about Hunter. I think he's psycho, and I was relieved when I thought he couldn't hurt either of us anymore."
I felt a sudden twinge of alarm. I hadn't even considered that I'd have to talk to Hunter and make sure he didn't try to go after Cal again. We'd have to find a way to straighten out all these—misunderstandings or whatever they were— without violence.
"I have to go. I'll see you soon." Cal made a kissing noise into the phone and hung up.
I sat on my bed, musing. When I talked to Cal, I hated the whole idea of Hunter. But today, when Hunter and I were doing the tath thing, he'd seemed okay.
I sighed. I felt like a weather vane, blowing this way and that, depending on the wind.
After dinner Mary K. and I were in the kitchen, cleaning up. Doing mundane things like working in the kitchen felt a little surreal after my conversation with Cal.
For the hundredth time I thought, Hunter is alive! I was so happy. Not that the world necessarily needed Hunter in it, but now I didn't have his death on my conscience. He was alive, and it felt like a thousand days of sunshine, which was bizarre, considering how I couldn't stand him.
"Any plans for tonight?" I asked Mary K.
"Bakker's picking me up," she answered. "We're going to Jaycee's." She made a face. "Can't you talk to Mom and Dad, Morgan? They still say that I can't go out on dates by myself, I mean, just me and Bakker. We always have to be with other people if it's at night."
"Hmmm," I said, thinking that it was probably a good idea.
"And my curfew! Ten o'clock! Bakker doesn't have to be home till midnight."
"Bakker's almost seventeen," I pointed out. "You're fourteen."
Her brows drew together, and she dropped a handful of silverware into the dishwasher with an angry crash.
"You hate Bakker," she grumbled. "You're not going to help."
Too right, I thought, but I said, "I just don't trust him after he tried to hurt you. I mean, he held my sister down and made her cry. I can't forget that."
"He's changed," Mary K. insisted.
I didn't say anything. After I'd scraped the last plate, I went up to my room. Twenty minutes later I picked up on Bakker's vibrations, and then the doorbell rang. I sighed, wishing I could protect Mary K. from afar.
Up in my room, I studied my book on the properties of different incenses, essential oils, and brews that one can make from them. After an hour I turned to Maeve's Book of Shadows once more, dreading what I would find out and yet compelled to keep reading. It was so full of sadness right now, of anguish over Ciaran. Even though he had concealed his marriage and proved ready to desert his wife and children, she still felt he was her muirn beatha dan. It was hard for me to understand how she could still love him after learning all that. It reminded me of Mary K. and Bakker. If someone had held me down and almost raped me, I knew there was no way I would ever forgive him or take him back.
Who's there? I looked up, my senses telling me that another person's energy was nearby. I scanned the house quickly. I did that so often and was so familiar with my family's patterns that it took only a second to know that my parents were in the living room, Mary K. was gone, and a stranger was in the yard. I flicked off my bedroom light and looked out my window.
I peered down into the darkest shadows behind the rhododendron bushes beneath my window, and my magesight picked out a glint of short, moonlight-colored hair. Hunter.
I ran downstairs and through the kitchen, grabbing my coat off the hook by the door. Boldly I crunched through the snow across the backyard, then down the side, where my bedroom window was. If I hadn't been looking for him, if I didn't have magesight, I never would have seen Hunter blending with the night's shadows, pressed against our house. Once again I got a strong physical sensation from his presence—an uncomfortable, heightened awareness, as if my system was being flooded with caffeine over and over.
Hands on hips, I said, "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Can you see in the dark?" he asked conversationally.
"Yes, of course. Can't every witch?"
"No," he said, stepping away from the house, dusting off his gloves. "Not every witch has magesight. No uninitiated witch does, except you, I suppose. And not even every full-blood witch has it. It does seem to run strongly in Woodbanes."
"Then you must have it," I said. "Since you're half Woodbane."
"Yes, I do," he said, ignoring the challenge in my voice. "In me it developed when I was about fifteen. I thought it had to do with puberty, like getting a beard."
"What are you doing here?"
"Redrawing the protection sigils on your house," he said, as if he was saying, Just neatening up these bushes. "I see Cal laid his own on top of them."
"He was protecting me from you," I said pointedly. "Who are you protecting me from?"
His grin was a flash of light in the darkness. "Him."
"You're not planning to try to bind him again, are you?" I asked. "To put the braigh on him? Because you know I won't let you hurt him."
"No fear, I'm not trying that again," Hunter said. He touched his neck gingerly. "I'm just watching—for now, anyway. Until I get proof of what he's up to. Which I will."
"This is great," I said, disgusted. "I'm tired of both of you. Why don't you two leave me out of whatever big picture you're playing out?"
"I wish I could, Morgan," said Hunter, sounding sober. "But I'm afraid you're part of the picture, whether you want to be or not."
"But why?" I cried, fed up.
"Because of who you are," he said. "Maeve was from Belwicket."
"So?" I rubbed my arms up and down my shoulders, feeling chilled.
"Belwicket was destroyed by a dark wave, people said, right?"
"Yes," I said. "In Maeve's Book of Shadows, she said a dark wave came and wiped out her coven. It killed people and destroyed buildings. My dad went to look at the town. He said there's hardly anything left."
"There isn't," said Hunter. "I've been there. The thing is, Belwicket wasn't the only coven destroyed by this so-called dark wave. I've found evidence of at least eight others, in Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales. And those are only the ones where it was obvious. This—force, whatever it is—could be responsible for much more damage, on a smaller scale."
"But what is it?" I whispered.
"I don't know," Hunter said, snapping a small branch in frustration. "I've been studying it for two years now, and I still don't know what the hell I'm dealing with. An evil force of some kind. It destroyed my parents' coven and made my parents go into hiding. I haven't seen them in almost eleven years."
"Are they still alive?"
"I don't know." He shrugged. "No one knows. My uncle said they went into hiding to protect me, my brother, my sister. No one's seen them since."
The parallels were clear. "My birth parents went into hiding, here in America," I said. "But they were killed two years later."
Hunter nodded. "I know. I'm sorry. But they're not the only ones who have died. I've counted over a hundred and forty-five deaths in the eight covens I know about."
"And no one knows what it is," I stated.
"Not yet." His frustration was palpable. "But I'll find out. I'll chase it till I know."
For a long minute we stood there, not speaking, each lost in our thoughts.
"What happened with Linden?" I asked.