“Her?” I asked, suddenly confused, wondering if she was seeing Beast’s soul inside me.

“This.” She leaned in and touched my hurting flesh, drawing out something I had never expected to see. A mote of magic, its color uncertain, one moment silver, another red, another black. And then a tint of green. “Blood black magic,” Angie said with utter confidence.

“Holy craa . . .” I stopped, seeing the mote of dark power that she was drawing from my chest into the air. The mote was attached inside me via a length of dark red soul/spirit energy. My heart rate skyrocketed and my breath came fast. Pain flared along the length of the trailing energies and knotted around the healing wound. Each beat of my heart ached and trembled along the magical chain that bound the mote to me. And the mote beat like a tiny heart, but an unfamiliar tempo, out of rhythm with my own, a peculiar antiresonance to my own heartbeat.

I had seen something like it before. The mote of magical power was familiar, as familiar as old scars and fresh wounds. It was part of my history in New Orleans, from the time I saved Angie and Little Evan from being killed by black magic witches searching for more power than anyone should ever need. Red motes of raw, black magic power had invaded me. I had thought them all gone. And this one was no longer just red, it was red and black and silver and blue and green, moving through the spectrum in scintillating patterns of light and shadow.

“When you was saving us,” Angie said, “one got inside. And it’s still there.”

From the time I fought the Damours and the blood diamond and the motes of evil energies attacked me. One stayed inside.

Somehow I had known this, on some deep plane, darker and deeper than I had been able to perceive on a conscious level. Hiding, along with a lot of other magical mumbo-jumbo crap. Chained inside me. I had seen it not so long ago, a black beating heart in the center of the roof of my soul.

Even with the protection of the angel Hayyel, the dark mote of power had been with me ever since the Damours.

I asked, “Angie? Can you yank it out?”

“If I break the chain it might hurt your real heart and you might die, Aunt Jane.” Words so calm, so adult on her lips. Words no witch child so young should ever speak or understand or know.

The mote was chained to me. I remembered the chain I once had to Leo, when he tried to bind me and I had instead accidentally bound him. I had broken the chain and the binding, but that was many months ago and partially by accident. I wondered if Beast and I were strong enough to break this chain. A spear of fear stabbed into me from the new wound and I wondered if I would die if I tried to break it. I wondered if it would kill me anyway, or warp me, or drive me to become u’tlun’ta. Liver-eater. The final persona of all skinwalkers when we veer from the path of good into the pathways of darkness. All that thinking took only an instant and I said, “Let it go, then, Angie. Let it go back into me. But keep an eye on it, okay? If it gets wonky, you tell me. Okay?”

“Wonky,” Angie giggled. “Okay, Aunt Jane.”

“Wo’ky. Okay, Aunt Jane,” EJ echoed.

Angie let the mote go and I felt it slide back into me through the scar and between my ribs. Into my heart. Into my spirit. Into my soul home. It hurt, sharp and cutting, as piercing as the sting of Gee DiMercy’s blade. I needed to talk to the little Anzu, maybe at the point of a steel blade. And soon.

Angie stood, EJ moving with her. He tossed the soccer ball to me and laughed, his eyes alight with mischief. I caught it and tossed it back, moving woodenly, without the grace of Beast, who had been silent inside me for too long. Again.

Standing, I followed the children into the house, shutting the door quietly behind me. On the sofa, Molly and Big Evan were curled against each other, Big Evan snoring slightly, his mouth open, lips drooped against his red beard. Molly was slumped on his chest, her baby bump more pronounced than only weeks in the past, her red hair in wild short curls, a nimbus of energy that even slumber didn’t abolish.

Alex was asleep at the small table he used as a desk, his head resting on his arms. Eli was sitting upright at the kitchen table, his eyes closed and jaw loose, but his posture perfect. Silent. Not snoring.

Even Kit-Kit, Molly’s not-familiar cat (because witches didn’t have familiars), was asleep, curled on a shelf with the television screen.

Asleep. All of them asleep. This was so bad on so many levels. “Angie. You know the rules. No magic without your parents’ approval.” And worse, so much worse, the last time I had seen Angie, I had been outside time. I had seen the way her parents’ bindings came free and I had used Angie’s own magic to bind her down, used her own potential to put her in a straitjacket that left her without power, that tied her magics around her in a sheath of binding. And now she had it all back.

The little girl shrugged, and the four people instantly woke up. No snapping of fingers, no magical wyrds of a spell, no wiggling nose, as in an old TV show about witches, before the workings of magic were so well-known. Nothing. Just asleep, then awake. My godchild was scary powerful. The last time I’d seen her put someone to sleep, she had used a “Tu dormies!” wyrd spell, one over the abilities of most adult witches, and all witch children. And at the time, only weeks past, she hadn’t possessed the ability to wake up her victims. Now she did. Crap on crackers. Too much had changed.

Molly scrubbed her face like a child and peeled herself off her husband. Moving gracefully despite the pregnancy, she grabbed me up and hugged me. I hugged back, watching Angie over her head, as my godchild crawled into the chair beside the couch, picked up her doll, and started talking to it, too soft to hear over Molly’s chatter about the trip in. “You’re not listening,” she said.