“That is an excellent plan. Very twisty.”

I smiled up at him. “That’s the idea. Confuse the shit out of everyone else.” Hopefully not my team, though.

With the plan laid out, all we had to do was wait for midnight to roll around.

And for me? It was time to ask Gran the really hard questions.

20

“Gran.” I sat on my bed in my room, in a house that wasn’t mine, trying to tease information out of a ghost who sometimes couldn’t remember the most important details. “Can we trust Missy?”

Gran paced the room from door to window and back again. Night had fallen, but we were waiting for closer to midnight to kick our plan into action. Which meant we had some time to prepare and I had time to talk to Gran about some of the things that were tugging at me.

“Missy and I were not friends, you have to understand that,” Gran said softly. “We—along with Hattie—were guardians of Savannah. Three kinds of abilities, tied together by our oath to protect the city. I know Missy went out of her way to hurt you when I wasn’t looking. I wasn’t blind to it.”

“And you let her?” I couldn’t help the pain in my voice. That my gran would have knowingly allowed someone to hurt me when I was just a child was unfathomable to me.

“No, of course not! In private I put her in her place more than once. She was behind me in strength, but not by much. Hattie was the weakest of the three of us, but even so she was not weak.” Gran sighed heavily. “I ignored Missy’s behavior because she was in her own way trying to waken your powers. Pain . . . sudden and sharp pain can crack open abilities. It is how many of us in the shadow world were trained. I was much softer with you.”

Just like that, Missy being a shit to me made more sense. Even so . . . “But she didn’t like me.”

“No, she didn’t. She’s always known you have the potential to be stronger than her.”

I scooped up my bag, which I’d set on the bed, and pulled out Gran’s book. “And this? Someone was trying to steal it, you saw that. Missy wants it. Could it have been her?”

Gran sat beside me and settled her hand on the red leather-bound book. “Perhaps, but she hates humans, and Alan is very human. No, I think someone else wants it. There are spells within spells in this book. Pages that aren’t what they seem.”

I didn’t even fight the eyeroll. “Of course there are. Jaysus lordy, Gran! Can you at least tell me which pages?”

“No, I can’t,” she said, “and not because I’m dead. My memory was struck from me—by myself—so I couldn’t pass on that information under duress. But know that there are spells in here”—she stroked the cover—“that can’t be found anywhere else.”

“I need Missy to remove whatever spell O’Sean put on the Hollows Group, and to remove that mark on Crash.”

“She can’t do either,” Gran said.

Hope fled me like a balloon deflating, right down to the raspberry my lips made. “Well, fuck.”

“Watch your mouth.” Gran snapped her fingers in my face and I sighed again. No matter how old I was, Gran would always be Gran, and the F-bomb was just one word she didn’t tolerate well.

“There is a way to release them all, but it is dangerous. And they must all be in very close proximity.” She told me how to make sure the spells were removed from everyone.

Gran was not wrong. Not only was it dangerous, but the very thought of it made my stomach roll. Even so, I adjusted the plan I’d been making. I’d learned not to question her wisdom.

I hurried downstairs to the front door and opened it. Crash was sitting there, staring out at the garden. He turned at the sound of the door opening. “Would you come and talk to Gran with me?” I asked.

He stood and followed me inside without a word.

All the way up to my room, where Gran waited quietly.

“Are you planning to have one last toss before the fight?” Gran asked. “That’s a good idea. I’ll leave you to it.”

“GRAN!” Okay, so apparently I could still be embarrassed by my dead grandmother. “Crash,” I turned to him, deliberately putting my back to my gran. He was grinning, though. Of course he was.

“I think she’s right, one last toss.” He winked and I lifted both eyebrows.

“I think not.” Even if my libido was screaming at me to ride him like a pony. “I’m not interested in competing for your attention with women less than half my age and with tits that defy gravity. Can you get O’Sean to the Hollows by midnight? Tell him we have the cross there.”

Crash shook his head. “Wait—”

“Can you get O’Sean there?” I asked again. I didn’t want to repeat the rest, my ego was bruised enough as it was.

“Yes, I can get him there, but the two girls—”

I pointed at the door. “You said you’d listen to me, so go. Get O’Sean to the Hollows just after midnight.”

Crash’s eyes narrowed. “We’re going to finish this discussion later.”

I shrugged. “Far as I’m concerned, we’ve already finished it.”

I expected him to spin around, to stomp off in a huff, because the man I’d lived with for twenty years would do just that. Then again, Himself didn’t have the confidence to own his actions.

Not so much with Crash. He stepped into me, tipped my face up with one hand and placed the softest of kisses on my lips, sending little bolts of energy across my skin, right through to my belly. I might have gasped. Gran might have sighed.

“We are far from done,” he said, his words tingling all the way through me. “But I’ll let it go for now.”

Then he did turn and left me standing there in my room, my legs shaking from a simple kiss that should not have made me feel like that. I slumped to the bed. “Gran.”

“Yes, it was that way for me with your grandfather. Kisses like fire, those fae men.”

Not fire exactly. More like electricity and storm waves and lightning bolts, night wind and moonlight, it was all there in his kiss and his touch, and I wanted him in a very, very bad way that made my heart race as uncontrollably as if I were closing in on a heart attack. I dropped my head between my knees and did some slow breathing until my blood cooled.

A few minutes later, I heaved a sigh and got up to finish my preparations for the night, which took some time. I pulled a few books off the shelves of my room before making my selection. I went to work on the spine, taking the pages out, and more than a few fluttered to the ground. After much sweating and cursing and, let’s be honest, a bit of a mess, into my bag went Gran’s book of spells. Next to it was Bob-John’s invisibility powder, my flashlight, and an extra shirt.

Around my neck hung the talisman that Alan had tried to steal. I didn’t know just how it was important, but I knew that it was and there was no way I was taking it off.

“Ready as I’m going to be,” I said more to myself than Gran as I looked at the clock. Eleven-thirty. “You look after Eric, watch out for eyes on him,” I said as I headed down the stairs. Suzy stood in the entryway, as did Eric and Feish. I pulled Robert’s finger bone out of my bag and set it on the floor. A blink and he was there, swaying side to side.

“Robert, can you call the skeleton horse up in the garden? We need a ride out to the Hollows without being seen,” I said.

“Friend. Horse,” he said as I opened the door, and he stepped out, his bones clacking on the steps as he went down to the garden.

I put a hand to my back, reassuring myself that it was there. That this wasn’t all part of some strange out-of-body experience. I looked at my friends. “Be careful, all of you. We still don’t know who shot me the other day. We could have more than O’Sean to deal with tonight.”

Eric pulled me into a sudden hug. “You too. You’ll be taking the brunt of this.”

Hugs all around, then Suzy and Feish hurried off, one going toward the water, the other toward Forsyth Park. I waited until they were gone and then gave Eric his final task beyond staying hidden in the house.

I wrapped my hands around his as best as I could. “Gran will help you. But you have to hurry, and cover your tracks well.”

He swallowed hard. “I won’t let you down.”

I left him there and pulled myself up onto the back of the skeleton horse, a little more gracefully this time. Robert climbed up behind me and then we were off, leaping over the garden gate and racing down the streets of Savannah, heading for the Hollows and a showdown I wasn’t sure I was ready for.

21

The horse under me seemed more solid than the last time Robert and I had ridden it. If Robert were capable of more than one-word answers, I would have questioned him about my suspicion that the horse was—for better or worse—becoming more alive. More real. But he wasn’t likely to say anything more than “friend,” so my thoughts branched in a different direction as we galloped the streets of Savannah.

If everything came together according to plan, then we’d free the Hollows Group and Crash from O’Sean’s machinations, and the fairy cross would be safely hidden from any other idiots wanting it for nefarious purposes.

Maybe we’d even stop the shooter who’d come after Eric and me, although I wasn’t so sure on that one. Crash had said it was a shifter.

I let my mind mull that over. The only shifter I really knew was Sarge, but he wouldn’t shoot at me.

Would he?

“Oh duck me,” I whispered. “What if it was Sarge?”

He’d been coming at me hard lately, and that spell had made everyone in the Hollows Group act so weird . . .

As my mount leapt the fence surrounding the Hollows graveyard, my suspicions were confirmed.

A bounding black shape with shaggy fur ran straight for us. Jaws wide open, snarling, slavering tongue.

The really bad thing? Luke was behind him, trying to stop him, tears running down his face. “Breena, he’s going to kill you!” Luke screamed. “Get out of here!”