“Yeah,” I said miserably, finding the couch again. “That’s the conclusion I came to, too. Unfortunately.”

“So now what are you doing?”

“Sitting on the couch. Reagan went out for something. I’ve got the rest of the night off.”

“She…went out?” Alarm crept into Veronica’s voice. “Where did she go? Did she go far?”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

More shifting, and the rest of the tiredness seeped out of Veronica’s voice. “Callie and Dizzy are a bit on edge these last couple days. First they were pissed that you weren’t headed back to their house, especially after what went down at Darius’s, but yesterday John was hanging around, asking about you. We all know he’s smitten, right?”

“He just wants a powerful dual-mage partner.”

“Well, right. For him, that counts as smitten. He’s a douche. Anyway, he was hanging around, and then Mary Bell came over out of the blue. She wondered where you were, too, and spent the rest of the time giving John the side-eye.”

Tingles crawled up my spine. “Dizzy told me Mary Bell has had a somewhat foggy past.”

“I know,” Veronica said in a heavy voice. “Callie filled me in. She was doing human sacrifices at one point!”

I curled up and hugged my knees to my chest. I had liked the old mage’s approach to magic…theoretically…but murder was categorically wrong.

“They wanted to try and sacrifice a vampire, so her and her dual-mage guy tried to capture one. Well, her dual-mage guy got killed. That was when she changed her ways. Callie said it was the heartbreak that did it, not a return to morality.”

“Goodness,” I breathed out. “And yet Callie has this chick hanging around?”

“She’s powerful. Callie is keeping an eye on her, or so she says. I really think they all like to keep tabs on one another. I wouldn’t say they’re friends.”

“Well with a past like that…”

“Right. And then…” She let her words trail away, and I knew she was conflicted about telling me something.

“What?” I prodded.

“Well…Dizzy says it was nothing, but you know how he is? Everything is nothing until he’s knee deep in blood.”

“That’s not…” I blinked, trying to match up our different takes on his personality. Maybe I’d just spent too much time around blood lately.

“But I don’t know. Lately there’s been more people around this neighborhood than normal. And, I mean, no, they don’t seem particularly suspicious, but I get the feeling they are watching me. Like, when I go around fixing the grammar on signs, I always feel eyes on me, you know?”

I nodded, forgetting we weren’t speaking face to face and she couldn’t see my silent cues.

“And then last night,” she went on, “I glanced out my window because I thought I heard something bang, and I could swear a person slipped into Dizzy’s shed. I could swear it, Penny. Dizzy says he has a good warden or something on it, and that the warden or whatever was fine in the morning, but…” She sighed forcefully. “I don’t know. Maybe magically it doesn’t make sense, but I know what I saw.”

“I could probably take down a ward, then put the same ward back up.” I chewed my lip. “But there aren’t a lot of people with enough power to do that to one of the dual-mages’ spells, I don’t think.”

“Right. That’s what he said. But…”

“Well, keep your eyes out. If you saw one, you’ll probably see more. Information can be just as important as spell work.” Reagan had said that to me once, and it seemed to fit my life pretty well lately.

“Yeah,” Veronica said, letting go of the thread of the conversation. “Well, anyway, Callie and Dizzy are certain you’re in the safest place. Especially because they said you put some sort of warning or something on Reagan’s house.”

“Ward. The same thing Dizzy had on the shed.”

“Ah.”

“I have to physically bring people into Reagan’s house, or they can give a blood offering.”

“Gross. Really? Isn’t that dark magic stuff?”

“It’s like giving a DNA offering, basically. A way of getting foolproof ID.”

“Oh. Okay, then. So yeah, you should stay there.”

“Does anyone know where I am?”

“No. Callie and Dizzy won’t say—she gets hostile about people asking—and I try to make myself scarce when they come around. Which has been more frequently lately. They were impressed by the warehouse thing. Word has spread that you are a bona fide natural.”

“The failed practice session, you mean?”

She started laughing. “The ones with all the power know you can do better, and the ones without it think you’re fabulous. I don’t know heads or tails about magic, but I’m getting a pretty good idea about the mage social structure at this point. Because here I am, stuck in the middle, breaking the magical rules because I’m a normal human who is privy to this stuff.”

“So Dizzy and Callie have been filling you in?”

“Yeah. I think I am actually getting your lessons. They really did want to teach someone. You know what’s funny?” She shifted again. “I’m editing this paranormal book right now that is depicting vampires completely inaccurately. I want to do up notes about each point that’s incorrect, but the author thinks she’s writing fiction. So I can’t say anything. She’d think I was crazy.” She paused and then mumbled, probably to herself, “I think I have to stop editing that genre. It’ll drive me bonkers.”

A knock sounded at the door.

I hopped up, then regretted it the moment my body screamed in protest. “Oh, that’s the nightly maid crew. I gotta go.”

“You are so lucky,” she said before we said our farewells.

I was so lucky, that was true. Somewhere along the line, Darius had paid people to “plague” Reagan, as she called it. They looked after her place, stocked her fridge, cooked food, and cleaned up. Now that I was living here, I got the same benefits.

She was worried about an intrusion of privacy. I thought she was crazy. Having people look after us was awesome. As far as I was concerned, if they wanted to do my chores, they could snoop as much as they wanted.

“Come in,” I called, staying where I was for the moment.

The door swung open and a head slowly came into view. His eyes darted around the house, probably looking for Reagan, who would try to torment him in some way, before landing on me. And there they stayed, wary.

His body slowly followed his head. Hair styled just so and a face beautiful enough to make angels sing, the maid was surely a vampire. His graceful movements only confirmed it. And based on his nervousness, he’d clearly heard about the other night.

“You’re good.” I threw up my hands in surrender, and his eyes blink-flinched. Had I thrown magic, I totally would’ve had him. “Oh, sorry. I just meant that I won’t do any magic. You can come in. Worry-free.”

And this was what working with Reagan had done to me—think about every situation as a possible life-ending event. Yesterday’s vamp had been greeted by my bug zapper. What would happen when someone went to hug me? Would I sucker-punch them?

The vampire nodded and scooted to the kitchen with his bag of groceries. He didn’t even want to be in the same room as me.

There went my hope of having vampire friends. If I’d ever had one.

I thought about texting my mother, just to check in, but I’d probably wake her up. That would guarantee me a call and a serious tongue lashing. Best to wait until tomorrow and claim forgetfulness for not doing it today.

I stopped near the edge of the living room, deciding which way to go. My room was obviously the no-brainer choice, but if I did that, I’d end up falling asleep. As good as that sounded, I’d wake up early (by Reagan’s standards), and tomorrow would be a long day.

So it was either sit in the backyard with the dummy I’d tried to kill on multiple occasions, or on a porch chair looking over a sea of remembered loss.