“But why?” I asked, trying to keep my voice mild. I had to know what was behind all of this. All those deaths. “I mean, does this big spell even do anything?”

This was meant to taunt her a little, and it worked. She gave me another disapproving look. “Of course it does,” she said severely. She turned her focus back to the pentagram. Mallory was seated now, her cane abandoned outside the ring of candles. An enormous, tattered book sat open in front of her, and she was reading aloud from it. The Book of Mirrors. A good man had died just so that book could be in this room. “There are two parts, now,” Olivia whispered. “First she needs to restore herself, physically and magically. That’s what the mandrake is for, to gather life that she can channel into her own body.”

“She’s going to heal?” I asked. I don’t know why I was surprised.

Olivia nodded smugly.

“Where does it come from? The…life…she uses to heal herself?”

Olivia waved a hand. “Oh, the air, perhaps, I don’t know. She’s not stealing a whole life for that, so a sacrifice is not necessary, not with the arsenal she’s got.”

Okay, I thought. So far not so bad. “What’s part two?”

The smug look again. “When she is whole, I’ll escort her to the hospital, to Kirsten’s bedside.”

“Kirsten?” I echoed, startled. “What does she have to do with any of this?”

But Olivia held up a hand. “Shh. This is my favorite part.”

I felt like we were at an outdoor barbecue, watching the cook flip burgers in the air. Mallory went silent, her eyes closed, and a wind seemed to pick up in the enclosed room. The witch’s long hair whipped around her head, and the lapel on her white lab coat fluttered. I couldn’t feel any sort of draft, though, and the candles weren’t flickering.

I had to at least try to do something. If I could just get the Transruah in my radius, I could shut it down permanently, and the spell with it. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my radius again, trying to expand it once more, but I couldn’t find the edges. It was still intact, still there, because I could feel Olivia within my radius, but I just couldn’t focus on it.

“Is there something else in this IV?” I mumbled.

Olivia smirked. “I wondered if you’d notice.” She patted my hand again. “The chemo can be quite painful, so I had Mallory add a little bit of morphine. Just to help with the first dose.”

I’d had the drug before, when I had my wisdom teeth out in high school, and the thrown-for-a-loop-de-loop feeling was awfully familiar, now that she mentioned it. I also thought that I might pass out. Olivia had an expectant look on her face, like I should be thanking her, but I couldn’t even collect my thoughts enough to decide if the morphine was a good thing or not. Had she really given it to me to help with pain, or had she figured that morphine would scramble my thoughts enough that I wouldn’t be able to focus on my radius? Was that too paranoid? Could you be too paranoid, on a morphine drip?

My eyelids slid shut. A few minutes went by, or maybe more, and then I felt Olivia nudge me.

“Watch this,” she whispered next to me, and I struggled to open my eyes. The wind inside the pentagram was dying down, and Mallory’s hair went still. Her head was slumped over, her chin resting on her chest. As she lifted it, both Olivia and I gasped.

Mallory’s face was flawless. The scarring was completely gone from her neck and chest too, and the skin looked white and brand-new, which it was. She met Olivia’s eyes and gave her a sharp nod, then stood up swiftly, testing her weight on her right leg. Then Mallory broke into a brilliant, victorious smile, and for just a moment I couldn’t even hold it against her. Almost a decade of those injuries, and now they had been wiped clean.

In that moment, if Mallory had announced she was planning to stop right there, retire from witchcraft, and move to Flagstaff to raise purebred French bulldogs, I would probably have wished her luck and offered her some gas money. Then I remembered Eli and Caroline, not to mention Erin and Denise and the rabbi in San Diego. And Denise’s daughter, Gracie.

And Kirsten. She wants to hurt Kirsten, I reminded myself.

But you’re kind of mad at Kirsten right now, my inner monologue said. For Jesse?

Yeah, not that mad.

Goddamned morphine.

Mallory took the Transruah off and set it carefully on the Book of Mirrors. She left both of them in the center of the pentagram and came over to us. When she hit my radius it felt blinding, like when you walk out of a dark movie theater into bright sunlight. If my arms had been free, I might even have shielded my eyes from it. As strong as she had felt before, now she was supercharged.

And yet…my radius still made her human again. She was strong, but my ability to neutralize her was stronger. I would have felt a teensy bit smug about that if I hadn’t been receiving unnecessary chemotherapy in the arms of an invulnerable clay robot man at the moment.

“Are you ready to get moving?” Mallory asked Olivia, still smiling her joyful smile. “I’m feeling very energized. The time is right.”

Olivia rose from the wheelchair in one graceful move and looked doubtfully at me. “Will she be okay?” she asked Mallory. “I don’t want anything to happen to her.” She eyed me speculatively, like a valuable painting she had purchased and now had to store.

“She’ll be fine,” Mallory assured her. “The golem will keep her in position. I’ll switch the IV bag before we leave.” She came up to Olivia and put one hand on her shoulder. “Everything we’ve worked for is finally happening, Liv.” Olivia patted Mallory’s hand on her shoulder.