I opened the cock, inspected each round with eye and nose, and tested the weight distribution. I hadn’t taken the weapon into battle conditions since Eli had given me the shotgun-shell holder, which was mounted on the left side of the receiver, giving me quick access to an additional six shells, but changing how the weapon rested in my hands and how it drew from the recently modified spine rig. I slid the weapon into the sheath, feeling the slight catch on the shell holder. I always had to be careful how I drew it, but more ammo in a battle was always better than less.

I also had two nine-millimeter semiautomatic handguns, six extra mags, ten vamp-killers of various lengths and weights, three throwing knives—what Beast called her killing claws and her flying claws—and my sterling stakes, which had been returned via Edmund Hartley and a blood-servant. The blades and stakes were held in sheaths, loops, specially designed pockets, and the shafts of my boots. The modern, mundane gear was heavy. Not so much the arcane gear.

On a thong around my neck, underneath the silver-plated titanium gorget, I had the sliver of the Blood Cross in a velvet drawstring bag. The blood diamond, this time wrapped in a lead pouch, the kind I kept my crosses in when I wanted to not insult a vamp, was tucked beneath the edge of my vest, over my heart. Lead worked to damp vamp energy, so maybe it would work on witch energies and keep Molly from recognizing it. I could hope.

A second vehicle pulled into the cemetery lot and parked beside our SUV. It was a soccer mom’s sports van with seating for six—eight in a pinch, and it was packed with people right now. Molly and Lachish stepped out of the front doors. The back doors opened, and without consciously knowing why I pulled it, I was suddenly holding the M4. Eli appeared behind the van and said softly, “Halt. Raise your arms. And do. Not. Move.”

Eight women halted, but they didn’t raise their arms. My heart rate went into overdrive. There was too much cohesion here. Too much precision of action. They turned to face Lachish, and their witch power rose, a humming, raw beat of power that thrummed into the night. Eli was about to be a witch-fried Younger. Or the witches were about to become hamburger. “Molly!” I barked. “Are you in your right mind? And can you speak for the absence of compulsion on the witches with you?”

“Son of a witch on a switch,” she cursed, realizing what was happening. She stepped to the side and lifted her arms. Independent action. “Yes. We’re good. No vampire has been close to us.”

I swallowed my heart back out of my throat and said, “More.”

Molly hesitated a beat, tucking a strand of red hair behind her ear, and then chuckled. “Last time I was in this city, you made me prune a tree with my magic.”

What I had done was make her kill a sapling, but saying that would have let the witches know just how bad Molly’s little problem with her magic was. “They’re good, Eli,” I called out. My partner vanished again into the shadows and the hum of power emanating from the witches died away.

“What just happened?” Lachish demanded.

“You stepped out of the van like a dance troupe, organized and of one mind,” I said. “Like you might if you were all under compulsion of a vamp mind.”

“We’ve been practicing a working,” Lachish said, her tone severe and laced with sarcasm. “Of course we were attuned to one another.” Which made sense, and would have been nice to know ahead of time.

Before I could reply, I felt a tiny pop of displaced air and found Sabina standing at my elbow, her eyes black and flat and empty. I caught myself before I reacted, fighting to keep my adrenaline from spiking in surprise, a reaction that might be interpreted as fear—not a good reaction in the presence of an apex predator. “Sabina,” I said carefully.

“This is witch magic. Go away, skinwalker. Go away, Onorio. And take your foolish human with you.”

I had no intention of leaving, but I did back away to our SUV, where I handed out bottles of water to the guys before taking one and draining it myself. I kept my eyes on the witches, especially Sabina, who wore fresh, starched, habit-like whites, all the way to the wimple covering her hair. She had been burned at our last meeting, dangerously so, and now she wore white gloves of soft leather on both hands, hiding her wounds. Her fingers seemed to move more stiffly than usual, and I had to wonder how much pain she was in and how well she would handle confrontation with Joses Bar-Judas if he came to them.

As the witches walked into the central open space, I felt the tingle of magic through the ground as a circle was raised, but . . . nothing happened in the grassy area. “Did you feel that?” I asked Bruiser.

“Feel what?”

Whatever I had felt had happened elsewhere, not just there, in front of me. The sensation had been like ants running across my feet, little feathery touches, there and then gone. The sensation hadn’t come from a regular witch circle, but from something else, something more finessed and subtle, more practiced.

I tossed my empty into the back of the SUV and drew on my Beast. She peered out of my eyes, lending me her night vision and pulling up a hint of the Gray Between, which turned the world into sharp focus, grays and silvers and deep sylvan greens. I turned in a circle, questing with my/our senses, and spotted something different just beyond the tree line. A soft greenish glow of power ran through the trees on the far side of the chapel, crossed the drive, just short of the road, and circled back into the trees, enclosing the mausoleums. It wasn’t a ward, exactly; it was more of an early-warning system, like a magical burglar alarm, and a very sophisticated one too.

Sabina’s territory had once been used by the Damours in a black-magic, blood-magic ceremony trying to raise vampires into the undead without the devoveo—without the insanity that vamps go through when they’re changed. Everything in this gig came back to the vamps I’d killed my first few months in New Orleans. I’d missed the chance to gather intel back then—too busy killing things. Too sure that my way was the best and only one. Too dependent on Reach for intel, and not careful enough to gather my own. I’d learned that lesson the hard way.

Since then, Sabina had instituted modifications to her territory that I hadn’t noticed the last time I was there, probably because I was in danger of losing my head last time and had other things on my mind. I explained Sabina’s spell and added, “We don’t have to worry about Joses/Joseph walking up to us unannounced. I have a feeling that if he tried it, we’d see fireworks.”