I nod again, and he places his fingers beneath my chin, tilting my head back. He turns my head gently from side to side.

  “How’s it looking, doc?” I say.

  “I suspect you’ll live,” Grayson says. “After a touch of magic, and at least eight hours’ sleep.”

  Sleep, in fact, sounds good. Very good.

  Grayson looks around. “Is there a blanket around here?”

  “Bedroom,” I say, gesturing toward the hall, a bit weakly it seems to me now.

  Grayson leaves the room and returns a moment later carrying my pillow and comforter. Which works out great, since I’m pretty sure I won’t be leaving the sofa tonight.

  “Um, why don’t you...” Grayson gestures, and I get it. I swing my legs up onto the couch and stretch out. It’s strange, possibly the fever, but I don’t feel the least bit self-conscious or concerned. All I feel is cared for, as Grayson lowers the blanket over me, then kneels beside the couch.

  “Okay,” he says. “This won’t take long at all. Are you comfortable?”

  “Totally,” I mumble, closing my eyes.

  “Right, well, here goes.”

  What follows is a feeling of soothing coolness flowing over my face, as all the stinging I’ve been trying to ignore starts to fade. Grayson never touches me, nor does he speak again, as the discomfort, stress, pain and worry all slip away. After a while, from some distant place, I sense the light next to the couch being clicked off. I just barely hear soft footsteps fading toward the door.

  He speaks softly, one last time to say, “Goodnight, Cassie.”

  The door creaks open, then closes again with a soft click. After that, I hear nothing at all.

  CHAPTER 14

  One happy coincidence to having Grayson seemingly drop out of the sky, to both save me from vampires and fix my face, is that it wasn't until this morning that I remembered the plans I’d made with my mother and sister. These plans for spending the day together wouldn't have worked out well if the vampires had drained me of blood. The same goes for having a face that looked like, well, I'd tried to escape from a dragon by running through a forest at night.

  Autumn told me that in the years following my abduction, our mother nearly lost the will to live. She gained that back, and then some, upon my return from the dead. As for her will to shop, I don't know what happened during the dark years, but it's definitely alive and kicking these days. As it turns out, Autumn and I appear not to have inherited her retail therapy gene, since we both tend to favor the get-in-quick-and-get-back-out-of-there-again approach to shopping. But we don't mind playing along for our mother's sake. All that matters is that we're together again after all of those years.

  Still, the day turns out to be a doozy. It kicks off with seemingly random mall wandering, but it soon becomes apparent that our mother is shooting for not only a new wardrobe but a whole new look. As if that isn’t enough of a red flag, on the way back she decides she wants to stop off at a car lot. “I just want to get a closer look at those Mini Coopers,” she says. “They're so cute, and I also hear they're great on gas.”

  Obviously, that last part about fuel efficiency is thrown in as an afterthought, and I feel pretty sure what inspired all of this. Autumn is thinking the same thing, obviously, and she voices her suspicion first as our mother parks her old Toyota beside a sea of gleaming new cars.

  “Hang on, Mom,” she says. “Do you have the hots for someone?”

  “What? My goodness, no!”

  Her overly emphatic response, combined with her face suddenly turning scarlet, serves as a clear indicator of the truth.

  “Holy shit, Mom,” I say. “Who's the stud?”

  “Watch your language,” my mother says. “People will think you're crude.”

  I knew she'd attempt that tactic as a distraction, but I don’t let her get away with it. “What people? Spill the beans, Melissa. Is it someone at work?”

  “Oh, look, there's a salesman now. Should we get out of the car?” Our mother ignoring my use of her first name also speaks volumes about her attempt at deception. The only one of us she allows to call her Melissa is Autumn's boyfriend, who she adores.

  “Wow. A car salesman in a car lot,” Autumn says. “Imagine that.”

  “Oh, my God,” I say. “We better get moving before all the cars are gone.”

  Ignoring our needling as well, our mother all but leaps from the car, as if she needs to flag down the salesman who’s already bee-lining in our direction like a shark toward a bleeding surfer.

  Autumn turns to me. “Has she said anything about this before?”

  I prepare to get out. “Are you kidding? If she had her way, she'd have us believe she was born without a vagina.”

  “Okay, that is kind of crude.” Autumn tries not to laugh. “Mom does have a point.”

  “Just saying.” I get out of the car.

  Honestly, the last comment was made mostly for effect. Autumn is not unlike our mother in being a little on the prudish side. When she first started seeing Ian, I kept asking about her sex life just to watch her squirm. That girl can blush with the best of them. And I know for a fact she's been afraid of asking me about my sex life. Which is probably for the best, all things considered. No one can ever say that my sister lacks good instincts.

  We catch up to our mother, already in the clutches of the car salesman, a guy who looks like a onetime high school quarterback who these days downs a twelve-pack each night while watching ESPN.

  “So, tell me about this little one over here,” my mother says.

  “They’re all little,” I say. “That’s why they call them Mini Coopers.”

  She scowls at me. “Shush, you.”

  Autumn bursts out laughing.

  The salesman offers a smile, but then tries to ignore us. We’re not the ones buying, after all. “Nice, isn’t it?” he says. “That’s a hard-top two-door, with twin-power turbo.”

  Our mother nods thoughtfully, as if the term “twin-power turbo” means anything to her.

  I peer inside a little wagon deal that’s super cute, hoping she buys one so I can trick her into swapping for the Volvo some weekend that turns into a month. “Are any of them big enough to lie down in?” I ask.

  The salesman cocks his head, frowning as he anticipates which way to go with the question. “Well, I guess you could recline the seat, if you needed to rest for a bit.”

  I smile at him. “I meant more like you just suddenly, for reasons I can’t really go into, feel the need to get horizontal.”

  I hear Autumn snicker behind me, which she turns into a fake cough.

  “Ignore my daughters,” my mother says. “What can you tell me about the convertibles?”

  Autumn fake-coughs the word, “exhibitionist,” and we both crack up laughing again.

  We torture our mother for another half hour or so, asking questions such as, “What about middle-aged men? Can they fit in these okay?” and “Do any of these have leather seats, in case you’re not wearing pants?” until our mother finally chases us across the lot trying to hit us with her purse. She’s laughing her ass off, so that part’s good, but she’s way too embarrassed to resume her car shopping. The last we see of the salesman, he’s walking across the lot shaking his head, no doubt wondering where the hell we came from.

  Before long, we get back to our mothers’ condo, having worn her down enough that she finally admits there does happen to be a new guy at work who asked a couple of times if she’d like to go out for coffee. “Not an actual date, or anything,” she says. “Just like, you know, coffee.”

  “So, like, a coffee date,” I say.

  “No, just coffee! I’m sure he doesn’t mean anything by it.”

  “He’s just not allowed to have caffeine on his own,” Autumn says. “So, he wants you there in case something goes wrong.”

  Our mother shakes her head. “Don’t be ridiculous. Jim can handle caffeine, I’m sure.”

  “Ooh, he has a name,” Autumn says.

  “Does anyone call him Big Jim?” I say.

  “You two,” our mother says. “I’m going upstairs to get out of these shoes.”

  By which, she means change her clothes. I don’t know if it’s a generation thing, but our mother actually dresses up to go shopping. Despite the fact that—or possibly because of, now that I think of it—her daughters both wear torn and faded jeans, tennis shoes and wrinkled t-shirts pretty much full-time. That’s another thing Autumn and I have in common. Essentially, we grew up apart, but neither one of us gives much of a crap about clothes. We both dress like we’re still in college, although I just so happened to attend college while sharing Julia’s body.

  With our mother gone, Autumn and I park ourselves on sofas in the living room, where we both dive into our phones. I’m half-hoping for a text from Grayson, which makes no sense considering he didn’t ask for my number. Then again, given his level of magic, he could probably pluck it right out of my mind. Autumn, on the other hand, did get a text from Ian. Not fair.

  “Ian says he’ll be here in about an hour,” she says.

  “Cool. Did Mom say what we’re having for dinner?”

  Autumn shakes her head, but doesn’t say anything as she continues staring at her phone.

  “What’s up?”

  She keeps reading for a few moments. “Oh, Ian sent me a link. Kind of wish he hadn’t, actually.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing, really.”

  I don’t buy that, and I’m already plunking myself down next to her. I read over her shoulder to see that it’s a news article. Local, once again. “Oh, geez,” I say. “Another one?”

  Autumn shrugs, but keeps scrolling. “I guess. I mean, who knows? Not all of them can be real.”

  “So, you think they’re just making it up?”

  My sister thinks for a moment. “Some, maybe. You know how it goes. Like after the nightclub thing.”

  She’s referring to the night I got my body back, when we took down Opal in the nightclub she owned. The place was crawling with Vamanec P’yrin and vampires trying to get in with her, thinking she was about to become the new supernatural head honcho. We went on a bit of a rampage—well, I did, mostly—eliminating as many of Opal’s pals as possible in what the papers first called the Richmond Club Massacre, so titled because of the ensuing hysteria as we melted one vampire into a pile of bones and caused what looked like the deaths of multiple other people inhabited by body snatchers. Naturally, once two women started racing through the club causing people to collapse with a touch of their hands, a certain level of panic followed. Go figure. The result was a stampede, as all the club-goers tried to flee. Hey, it was my debut in my body after fifteen years, which also meant regaining the use of my powers. You can’t exactly blame me for going overboard.

  The thing was, though, most of the bodies that collapsed to the floor soon rose again, now inhabited by their rightful owners. When a bunch of them started going on the news saying they had no idea how they’d gotten to Richmond, and that the last thing they remembered was living in places like Chicago and Arizona many years ago, the media sources started calling the event the Richmond Club Miracle instead. The miracle being that all of these people had gone missing at various times in the past, and hadn’t been heard from until now.

  “Sure, there were copycats,” I say. “People trying to get attention, and all that. But most of those involved were telling the truth.”

  Autumn speaks softly. “I know.”

  She doesn’t have to say the rest, since we’re both thinking the same thing. People keep saying their kids are going missing, even as all signs indicate that they haven’t gone anywhere. And that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s limited to just kids. It might just mean that parents are more likely to voice their concerns.

  “What about Paul and Claudia?” I say. “Have you seen them?”

  Autumn shoots me a look that says, “Really?”

  I realize my implication in asking, that I still can’t quite bring myself to believe that this has nothing to do with the Vamanec P’yrin. I mean, the signs are all there. As in, these kids look exactly like they did before, but seem totally different. And that might be because, on the inside, they literally are someone different.

  “You were at the meeting,” Autumn says. “Paul said he felt sure it wasn’t them. Need I remind you that this was right after he saved your life?”

  It’s true that I was at the meeting she’s talking about. And Paul, along with Claudia, have actually gotten me out of a few scrapes now. “Look, I know it’s kind of shitty,” I say. “But doesn’t it make you wonder? I mean, that it keeps happening around here. We both know our little city is way more popular with supernatural entities than anyone ever suspected.”

  That part took me a while to wrap my brain around. It wasn’t until Paul told Autumn that it has to do with Richmond’s history of conflict, and how the city was once burned to the ground, that it started making sense. Apparently, all that strife, bloodshed and destruction created a special kind of energy attracting supernatural elements. Not all of them good, obviously. But we also know that there are powerful ley lines running beneath Richmond. Whether those have anything to do with the energy lingering from that same past, I can’t say. Either way, the result is that Richmond attracts witches, vampires, werewolves and, of course, the Vamanec P’yrin, like nobody’s business. And, of course demons. Ugh.

  “Right, Richmond does have that kind of thing going on,” Autumn says. “Which also might be a reason to think Paul is telling the truth about it being someone other than the Vamanec P’yrin. By the way, as far as I know, he’s never lied to me.”

  “Well, he did wipe your memory at one point.”

  Autumn’s brow furrows. “Yeah, I get that. Not cool, I realize. But, all things considered, I’m okay with letting that go.”

  “Okay, fine,” I say, before we get into it once again. Besides, she definitely has a point. “I’m just trying to figure it out.”

  Autumn sighs. “That’s what worries me. Just leave this one alone, okay?”

  “Okay, sure,” I say. “You’re the one who brought it up.” A weak argument, I realize, but Autumn appears to accept that reasoning for now.

  She hesitates, then adds, “Besides, Ian said there was something else he noticed about these cases.”

  I try not to perch forward too suddenly. “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we haven’t talked about it. It’s just something he said in the text. It’s not like I’m psychic.”

  I stare at her, a smile tugging at the corner of my mouth.

  “Okay, not that psychic,” Autumn says, starting to smile too.

  At that moment, our mother comes downstairs as if floating on air. She’s barely into the room when she beams at both of us. “Guess what just happened?”

  “You got a call from Jim,” both Autumn and I say at the same time.

  Our mother stops and stares at us. “You two. I swear there are times when I wonder if you’re both psychic.”

  ~~~

  As for the actual psychic in the family, he shows up before long. Okay, technically, Ian isn't part of the family, but he might as well be as far as our mother is concerned. She loves the guy, and I have no doubt she'd love to see Autumn and Ian get married. Actually, I’d be fine with that too. Whatever it takes to offset all of the pain she suffered.

  Ian obviously feels fond of our mother too, made evident by the way he gives her a warm hug and says, “Hi, Melissa. Good to see you.” He holds up a bag and withdraws a bottle of white wine. “I hope this is okay. I read somewhere that sauvignon blanc goes well with shellfish.”

  “It looks lovely,” Mom says.

  “We're having shellfish?” Autumn says.

  “Wait,” I say. “How does Ian know what we're having?”

  Mom takes the wine from Ian, flashing him another adoring smile before turning to me. “I sent him a text to make sure he's not allergic to scallops.”

  “What if I was allergic to scallops?”

  “You're not allergic to anything.” Mom looks at Ian again, adding, “Well, except maybe manners. My daughters could learn a thing or two from Ian here.” Then she laughs at her own joke while Ian blushes.

  I shoot Autumn a look saying, “We'll make her pay for that crack shortly,” and Autumn nods in agreement.

  ~~~

  Dinner turns out to be scallops with linguine, served with garlic bread and a salad. A nice surprise. Well, for me and Autumn. Ian, apparently, had already been made aware of tonight's menu. The wine also complements the meal perfectly, although Ian doesn't have any himself.

  Autumn told me that he swore off booze a long time ago. This happened after a particularly dark period of his life, following the disappearance of his girlfriend at the time. She never turned up, but the circumstances of her disappearance led to Ian becoming suspicious that there might be supernatural forces involved. She was the reason he became a private detective specializing in missing persons cases. Whoever she was, she must have been beautiful. The Vamanec P’yrin rarely go for anything less than young and perfect specimens. Well, other than when they want to tap into someone's magic, as was the case with me and Autumn. We're nearly twins in appearance—pale, small and raven-haired, each of us displaying a nearly trademark array of freckles across the bridges of our noses. We're not bad looking, but we're hardly material typical of selection by the VP.

  “So, Ian,” Mom says. “Autumn tells me you might have noticed something about those kids who've been in the news.”

  I always forget that Autumn keeps our mother up to speed on supernatural events. On one level, it seems more like we should be trying to protect her. I mean, after all, who needs the stress? On the other hand, I get it. If we left her completely out of the loop, we’d be lying to her all the time. After all, even though it seems weird to think of it that way, her daughters are both supernatural creatures themselves.

  “Well, I’ve been poking around a bit,” Ian says. “No direct contact, or anything like that. Just a bit of research.”

 

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