Chapter 25

Awareness returned slowly,as if I had to surface from a great depth.

I'd gone through so many torture sessions in my life that it had become second nature to play possum upon first waking. Feigning unconsciousness had worked in my favor more than once. I held perfectly still, breathed slowly and evenly, and tried to figure out what the hell was going on.

The first sensations I had were disorientation and tremendous pain. The latter seemed to be coming from the back of my head. Had I fallen? I tried to remember, but everything was fuzzy. I dimly recalled going to Natalie's house after someone broke her house wards. Blood on the floor in Betty's room. Malcolm trying to find her using their connection and failing. Driving back to my house. Then…nothing. The pain in my head indicated I'd been attacked.

That hypothesis was supported by the fact I was tied up and gagged. I felt a surge of fear when I realized I was splayed out on a hard surface. My left wrist and ankles were tied with rope, but my right wrist was fastened with a spell cuff. I reached for my magic, but it was dampened completely. It took everything I had to breathe slowly through the terror. It felt like I was back at the cabal, held in restraints for torture.

I had been basically rendered helpless, and the fear began to give way to rage.

I heard movement to my right. "You can open your eyes now."

The male voice was familiar, but I couldn't place it. I didn't react.

"Miss Worth, please. You've been awake for several minutes."

I finally recognized the voice: Peter Eppright. What the hell?

I opened my eyes and blinked, waiting for what I was seeing to make sense.

It looked like I was in a half-finished office building. I saw scaffolding, clear plastic sheets, boxes of drop cloths, stacks of sheet rock, huge spools of cables, and tables covered with hand tools. There were lights on stands set up around us. The rest of the building was dark. It must be night.

I lay on top of a large wooden table in my bra and underwear. All of my weapons and jewelry were gone, even my belly-button piercing. I was miserably cold.

I glared at Eppright, who stood about four feet away near a smaller table covered with a black cloth. His right hand and wrist were wrapped in gauze. I got a sudden flash of him standing under my carport with a gun. I didn't think I'd been shot, but how had I ended up here? Whatever was going on, he was clearly in on it.

I heard a sound from the darkness and turned my head to look. It was a mistake.

Nausea surged. Vomit filled my mouth and sinuses, and I couldn't get any air. I made desperate noises and tried to breathe through my nose, but that caused me to aspirate vomit into my lungs.

Eppright started cursing. He untied my gag and left wrist, lifted my upper body, and turned me awkwardly onto my right side so I could vomit off the table onto the floor. As I was desperately trying to breathe, I noticed a leather cord tied around my left wrist with several spell crystals on it. I wondered what its purpose was. I saw a second table next to mine, but it was empty.

"What's going on?"

It was a woman's furious voice. If I hadn't been trying not to choke to death on my own vomit, I would have looked to see who it was. My brain felt too big for my skull. Definitely a concussion. The fact I was having a hard time thinking clearly and had been unconscious for at least several hours were very bad signs.

"She started to choke," Eppright told the woman, who stood behind him and out of my line of sight. "You said we needed her alive."

I threw up again, then started coughing up bits of stuff that had gone into my lungs.

"You should have thought of that before you and that idiot bashed her skull in," the woman said.

I decided I didn't recognize her voice at all. Also, I'd like to know which "idiot" hit me on the head so I could return the favor. My eyeballs throbbed in time with my pulse.

"That was Ray." Eppright looked a little green, hopefully due to my vomit.

"Clean that up," she ordered. I wished she would move so I could see her. She sounded like she was in charge of whatever the hell was going on. My brain started to catch up. Was this the mystery mage? With the cuff on, I couldn't sense her magic.

He looked like he wanted to refuse her order, but thought better of it. "Are you done?" he demanded.

I coughed up some vomit out of my burning lungs and spat it in his face.

He jerked back, but not in time, and my glob of spit hit him on the forehead. Eppright's face turned bright red as he pulled back his bandaged fist to punch me. I didn't give him the satisfaction of cowering.

"Stop!" the woman snapped. Furious, Eppright obeyed, dropping his fist to his side. She stepped around him and I got my first look at her.

She looked like she was in her mid-to-late fifties, but in good shape for her age. She wore slacks and a light blue shirt, her ash-blonde hair pulled back in a neat ponytail. She looked vaguely familiar, though I'd have sworn I'd never seen her before. Then I realized she looked a lot like Betty.

"So you're Betty's other daughter." My voice was hoarse from throwing up.

Eppright used a drop cloth to clean up my vomit. I winked at him and he clenched his fists so tightly that his knuckles turned white.

The woman looked surprised. "Well, aren't you smart." She didn't sound sarcastic. "I'm Amelia Wharton. Formerly Amelia Eppright."

I glanced at Peter. "Brother?"

"Yes."

I made a face. "My condolences."

Eppright flushed again.

"Now, don't be rude," Amelia said. "I can understand why you're upset, but there's no reason we can't all be civil."

My eyebrows went up. I was beginning to think Amelia might not be all there. There was something off about her tone—a kind of detachment, like she was discussing the weather report, not standing over someone she'd had kidnapped and tied up.

Kidnapped. That triggered a memory. My brain still felt entirely too sluggish. "Where's Natalie?" I asked.

Amelia glanced at her watch. "They should be bringing her here in a few minutes."

"Is she all right?"

Amelia shrugged. "She's alive."

"That is not the right answer," I retorted. "She's done nothing wrong. She's your niece."

She looked at me with flat, expressionless eyes that reminded me of my grandfather's empty gaze. Amelia, like my grandfather, did not care about human life. She was a psychopath, just like him. Whatever she was planning, I wasn't going to be able to appeal to any kind of a conscience to get us out of this.

"I must say, I am impressed by your spellwork," she said. "Natalie's magic is better bound now than it was when Betty was alive. Judging by the burn mark on the floor in her bedroom, it must have gotten loose at some point."

"Yes." No sense revealing any details. "Why do you call your mother by her first name? Why didn't Natalie know you existed?"

I saw a flash of emotion in Amelia's eyes: pure hate. Then it vanished, as if it had never been there. "Betty sent me away when I was six years old and Peter was two. My magic developed very early, and she found it impossible to bind completely. Rather than raise me, she sent me to a…facility in Oregon. I lived there until I was twelve, and then I was sent to live in a group home in South Dakota."

"I don't understand. Betty was a strong mage."

"I was stronger. Even at six years old, she couldn't control me. She was concerned I would use my magic in public and expose her. She was hiding our magic from her husband, so she sent me away."

It was equally possible Betty had recognized her daughter's psychopathy, I thought, looking at Amelia's flat stare. This didn't seem like the time to pry into that, though. "If you hated your mother so much, why did you come back?"

Amelia smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "Five years ago, my harnad in Portland heard a rumor that Betty had come into possession of Adelbert's Kasten. It seemed impossible, but I had to find out. No one has seen it in more than a century."

"So you showed up on her doorstep, or what?"

"Yes. The prodigal daughter, returned." Her tone was dry.

"And she trusted you?"

"Not at all, but I could see she felt some guilt over abandoning me, so I used that. I showed her that I was a strong blood mage, and that I could make her harnad stronger."

"She brought you into her harnad?" I was having a hard time believing Betty would trust her daughter enough to let her join her alliance of blood mages. I'd known her five minutes and I didn't trust her one little bit.

"After some persuasion from John West," Amelia said. "I showed John how powerful I was, and he wanted me to join. Plus, after I figured out I was his daughter and I made Betty tell him, all he wanted was to know me. The poor man never had any other children, apparently."

The pieces were falling into place. Amelia was the daughter of Betty and the powerful fire mage John West. Peter was actually her half brother, the son of Betty's first husband. No wonder their magic felt similar, but Amelia's was so strong and the other siblings' magic so weak.

"So you came back for the Kasten?" I scoffed. "It's a myth."

"It's not a myth," she countered. "It's very real, as a lot of people are about to find out. I've been waiting a long time for this day. I wish Betty could be here too, but the bitch died before I had everything in place."

"What exactly are you planning here? And what's Tweedledumb's role in all of this?" I glanced at her half brother.

He looked like he would love nothing more than to strangle me with his bare hands. The feeling was mutual. My head was killing me.

Amelia patted Eppright's arm. "Peter is key to everything. Without him, none of this would be possible."

Eppright preened.

I would have rolled my eyes, but they hurt too much. "Then what the hell am I doing here?" I asked the obvious question.

"At first, I was simply curious as to how much you'd found out by snooping around Betty's house and visiting my brother and sisters. Until Natalie asked William today if Betty had had any other children, I wasn't worried." I assumed William was the lawyer. "But when he called to warn me, I realized my complacency had nearly cost me everything. William helped me get Natalie at her home. I had Peter and Ray Browning intercept you at your house and bring you here. Unfortunately, we had to get rid of William. He became too much of a liability."

I was sickened by her casual admission of murder. "How did you manage to get Betty to give you passage through her library wards?"

Amelia looked surprised. "Well, well. I clearly underestimated you from the beginning. That explains why you were visiting my brother and sisters, and why you had Natalie ask if Betty had any other children—you were looking for whoever besides Betty could pass through the wards."

"So you somehow tricked Betty into allowing you into her library. Then after Betty was dead, you waited until Natalie was out, and came in and took the Kasten and Betty's spell books?"

Before Amelia could reply, I heard voices. Out of the darkness, a small group approached us. I saw Deborah, Kathy, and a large man I didn't recognize. He was carrying something over his shoulder wrapped in a blanket. I saw a flash of red hair inside the blanket and felt ice in my veins. Natalie.

Deborah avoided looking at me, but Kathy gave me a big, ugly smile. "Well, hello, Audrey," she said in a singsong voice. "So nice to see you again. Still looking to buy a house?"

"Oh, you know," I said casually, "it's really a buyer's market right now. I'm not rushing into anything."

Her eyes narrowed. "Where's your friend?" She turned to Amelia. "She wasn't alone when she came to see me."

"The werewolf?" Amelia said.

I stiffened. How the hell did they know who Sean was?

"He won't be able to find her. The obfuscation spell she's wearing and the blood ward will block any magical or metaphysical links."

I glanced down. Sure enough, there was a dark stain on the floor in a large circle around the table I was on. The circle was about fifteen feet wide and contained both of the large tables and the smaller, cloth-covered table. I hadn't been able to sense the ward because of the spell cuff. Between that and the spell I was wearing on my wrist, there was no way for Malcolm or Sean to find me, even if Sean hadn't been in Charles's custody.

Charles.

For a moment, I felt a flare of hope, but it quickly died. Without drinking my blood, he wouldn't be able to sense my location. There was no rescue coming. I'd have to get out this by myself. Fair enough; I was used to being on my own.

"Put her on the other table," Amelia instructed the man carrying Natalie.

He grunted and dropped the rolled-up bundle with a thud that made me wince.

"Ray," Amelia scolded.

"Sorry." He didn't sound like he meant it.

So this was Ray, Elise's husband, the asshole who'd bashed in the back of my head. "Why isn't your wife here?" I asked him.

Ray scowled at me. "She doesn't believe in using magic," he said shortly. He unrolled the blanket, revealing Natalie's unconscious body. She looked extremely pale, and there was a bloodstain on her shirt near her shoulder blade.

"What did you do to her?" I demanded.

"Shut up." Ray started tying Natalie to the table with rope. On her left wrist was a leather bracelet like mine.

I looked at Amelia for an answer.

She gestured at Natalie. "I had to use magic to knock her out, as well as an obfuscation spell to prevent you from locating her. Her magic and your binding have been reacting badly to my spells. It can't be helped. I don't have time to make new ones."

"Then let me do it," I said. "It's killing her."

Amelia gave me another one of those cold smiles. "Do you think I'm stupid? You won't be using your magic here today. Tie her arm down again," she said to Ray.

I had really, really been hoping they would forget about my untied left arm. As Ray moved toward me, I fought him off for a few seconds. Then Eppright backhanded me across the face, my head hit the table, and I blacked out.