"Hmmm," I said, thinking that it was probably a good idea.
"And my curfew! Ten o'clock! Bakker doesn't have to be home till midnight."
"Bakker's almost seventeen," I pointed out. "You're fourteen."
Her brows drew together, and she dropped a handful of silverware into the dishwasher with an angry crash.
"You hate Bakker," she grumbled. "You're not going to help."
Too right, I thought, but I said, "I just don't trust him after he tried to hurt you. I mean, he held my sister down and made her cry. I can't forget that."
"He's changed," Mary K. insisted.
I didn't say anything. After I'd scraped the last plate, I went up to my room. Twenty minutes later I picked up on Bakker's vibrations, and then the doorbell rang. I sighed, wishing I could protect Mary K. from afar.
Up in my room, I studied my book on the properties of different incenses, essential oils, and brews that one can make from them. After an hour I turned to Maeve's Book of Shadows once more, dreading what I would find out and yet compelled to keep reading. It was so full of sadness right now, of anguish over Ciaran. Even though he had concealed his marriage and proved ready to desert his wife and children, she still felt he was her muirn beatha dan. It was hard for me to understand how she could still love him after learning all that. It reminded me of Mary K. and Bakker. If someone had held me down and almost raped me, I knew there was no way I would ever forgive him or take him back.
Who's there? I looked up, my senses telling me that another person's energy was nearby. I scanned the house quickly. I did that so often and was so familiar with my family's patterns that it took only a second to know that my parents were in the living room, Mary K. was gone, and a stranger was in the yard. I flicked off my bedroom light and looked out my window.
I peered down into the darkest shadows behind the rhododendron bushes beneath my window, and my magesight picked out a glint of short, moonlight-colored hair. Hunter.
I ran downstairs and through the kitchen, grabbing my coat off the hook by the door. Boldly I crunched through the snow across the backyard, then down the side, where my bedroom window was. If I hadn't been looking for him, if I didn't have magesight, I never would have seen Hunter blending with the night's shadows, pressed against our house. Once again I got a strong physical sensation from his presence—an uncomfortable, heightened awareness, as if my system was being flooded with caffeine over and over.
Hands on hips, I said, "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Can you see in the dark?" he asked conversationally.
"Yes, of course. Can't every witch?"
"No," he said, stepping away from the house, dusting off his gloves. "Not every witch has magesight. No uninitiated witch does, except you, I suppose. And not even every full-blood witch has it. It does seem to run strongly in Woodbanes."
"Then you must have it," I said. "Since you're half Woodbane."
"Yes, I do," he said, ignoring the challenge in my voice. "In me it developed when I was about fifteen. I thought it had to do with puberty, like getting a beard."
"What are you doing here?"
"Redrawing the protection sigils on your house," he said, as if he was saying, Just neatening up these bushes. "I see Cal laid his own on top of them."
"He was protecting me from you," I said pointedly. "Who are you protecting me from?"
His grin was a flash of light in the darkness. "Him."
"You're not planning to try to bind him again, are you?" I asked. "To put the braigh on him? Because you know I won't let you hurt him."
"No fear, I'm not trying that again," Hunter said. He touched his neck gingerly. "I'm just watching—for now, anyway. Until I get proof of what he's up to. Which I will."
"This is great," I said, disgusted. "I'm tired of both of you. Why don't you two leave me out of whatever big picture you're playing out?"
"I wish I could, Morgan," said Hunter, sounding sober. "But I'm afraid you're part of the picture, whether you want to be or not."
"But why?" I cried, fed up.
"Because of who you are," he said. "Maeve was from Belwicket."
"So?" I rubbed my arms up and down my shoulders, feeling chilled.
"Belwicket was destroyed by a dark wave, people said, right?"
"Yes," I said. "In Maeve's Book of Shadows, she said a dark wave came and wiped out her coven. It killed people and destroyed buildings. My dad went to look at the town. He said there's hardly anything left."
"There isn't," said Hunter. "I've been there. The thing is, Belwicket wasn't the only coven destroyed by this so-called dark wave. I've found evidence of at least eight others, in Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales. And those are only the ones where it was obvious. This—force, whatever it is—could be responsible for much more damage, on a smaller scale."
"But what is it?" I whispered.
"I don't know," Hunter said, snapping a small branch in frustration. "I've been studying it for two years now, and I still don't know what the hell I'm dealing with. An evil force of some kind. It destroyed my parents' coven and made my parents go into hiding. I haven't seen them in almost eleven years."
"Are they still alive?"
"I don't know." He shrugged. "No one knows. My uncle said they went into hiding to protect me, my brother, my sister. No one's seen them since."
The parallels were clear. "My birth parents went into hiding, here in America," I said. "But they were killed two years later."
Hunter nodded. "I know. I'm sorry. But they're not the only ones who have died. I've counted over a hundred and forty-five deaths in the eight covens I know about."
"And no one knows what it is," I stated.
"Not yet." His frustration was palpable. "But I'll find out. I'll chase it till I know."
For a long minute we stood there, not speaking, each lost in our thoughts.
"What happened with Linden?" I asked.
Hunter flinched as if I'd struck him. "He was also trying to solve the mystery of our parents' disappearance," he said in a low voice. "But he called up a force from the other side, and it killed him."
"I don't understand," I said. A chill breeze riffled my hair, and I shivered. Should I ask Hunter in? Maybe we could hang in the kitchen or family room. It would be warm there.
"You know, a dark spirit," Hunter said. "An evil force. I'm guessing the dark wave is either an incredibly powerful force like that or a group of many of them, banded together."
This was too much for me to take in. "You mean, like a dead person?" My voice squeaked. "A ghost?"
"No. Something that's never been alive."
I shivered again and wrapped my arms around myself. Before I knew it, Hunter was rubbing my back and arms, trying to warm me up. I glanced up at his face in the moonlight, at his carved cheekbones, the green glitter of his eyes. He was beautiful, as beautiful as Cal in his own way.
This is who hurt Cal, I reminded myself. He put a braigh on Cal and hurt him.
I stepped away, no longer wanting to ask him inside. "What will you do with this dark force when you find it?" I asked.
"I won't be able to do anything to it," he said. "What I hope to do is to stop the people who keep calling it into existence."
I stared at him. He held my gaze; I saw him glance at my mouth.
"And then," he said quietly, "maybe then people who have been hurt by this, like you, like me… will be able to get on with their lives."
His words fell like quiet leaves onto the snow as I stood, trapped by his eyes. My chest hurt, as if I had too much emotion inside, and to let it all out was unthinkable: I wouldn't know where to begin.
Frozen, I watched Hunter lean closer to me, and then his hand was on my chin, and it was cold, like ice, and he tilted up my face. Oh, Goddess, I thought. He's going to kiss me. Our eyes were locked on each other, and again I felt that connection with him, with his mind, his soul. A small spot of heat at my throat reminded me that I wore Cal's silver pentacle on a cord around my neck. I blinked and heard a car drive up and realized what we were doing, and I stepped back and pushed against him with my hands. "Stop that!" I said, and he looked at me with an unfathomable expression.