“Actually, I don’t think anyone rots in hell,” I said brightly. “I mean, your body rots in its grave, but my understanding is that hell is more of a burning, fire-type situation.”

Lucy froze, her brow furrowing. This was what I was wasting my last words on? “Also, you might want to look down at your chest,” I added.

Her chin dropped, and she saw what I’d already seen: a small red dot, hovering on her breastbone. She screamed with rage. She didn’t look quite so pretty and delicate anymore. “You think I care?” she cried. “If you both die, I can heal from any gunshot.” She sighted down the shotgun.

“That’s probably true,” I admitted. In my lap, Jameson was getting pale. I needed to take him to a hospital, now. “But hopefully it’ll be hard to move fast enough once the other thing happens.”

“What other thing?” Lucy demanded.

For once, my timing was pretty excellent. At that exact moment, the floor began to shake. No, not the floor, the ground below it. There was a bit of cracking and crashing as some of the rotting floorboards fell in. “What’s—” Lucy began, but at that moment a torrent of water exploded through the floor between us like a geyser from hell.

Chapter 36

I’d known for a while that different witch clans used magic in different ways, even the ones without a particular specialty. But most of the magic I’d encountered was some form of sympathetic magic—a small thing standing in for a big thing, like when you torture a voodoo doll and the magic actually injures your ex-husband.

As Wyatt had explained earlier that evening, however, Laurel and her clan were experts in elemental magic, specifically the manipulation of water. A hundred years earlier they had been employed as dowsers, finding small veins of water in the desert, then merging and cultivating them to create springs. Their witchblood had diluted as more and more of them married non-witches, until the current generation, which was pretty weak on Scarlett’s Internal Magical Power Scale.

Laurel had spent years designing fountains on the Strip, using water magic in many tiny ways, but so much manipulation of water had started burning her out—hence the career change.

When I first heard about Laurel’s talent I thought it was interesting, but I couldn’t really see how it could be useful in our situation. How would nudging an underground stream to move over a few inches—which was about the most Laurel or anyone in her clan could manage anymore—help us stop the Holmwoods?

Then Lex told us about enhancing witch power with crystals, and I realized Laurel’s value as a diversion. The original idea had been to either draw the Holmwoods to one specific spot so we—or Cliff, with his rifle—could take them out, or to create a distraction somewhere away from Wyatt and me, so we could escape, depending on what the situation required.

But we were still in the desert. I’d expected Laurel to produce a garden hose–sized spray of water, you know, outdoors. I hadn’t banked on an actual geyser that caused the windows to explode outward. Cliff could have shot Lucy, but if he hadn’t been expecting the geyser either, I wasn’t sure he’d recover quickly enough to take her out.

As the column of water continued to surge upward through the floor, Jameson and I were immediately drenched, although the water was raining down on us after it hit the ceiling, so it had lost most of its force. I wondered how long the wood ceiling could take that kind of abuse before the second story came crashing down. I couldn’t even see Lucy Holmwood anymore. Had Cliff managed to shoot her after all? I felt around, but there were no vampires in our immediate vicinity, and I couldn’t afford to concentrate on expanding it at the moment. Shit. Was she dead, or had she escaped back through the door?

Or was she working her way around the geyser to us?

The sound of water roared in my ears, and I shouted down to Jameson, “We gotta get out of here! How bad are you?”

He shook his head a little, grimacing. “I’m fine. Vest caught most of it,” he yelled. “Broke some ribs.”

“Come on.” As the cold water continued to pour down on us, I picked up my knife belt again and struggled to stand, feeling every bit of the pain in my body, including my heels in my drenched, shredded socks. Then I had to reach down and help Jameson up, and everything hurt even worse. With his arm draped over my shoulders, I stepped toward the doorway—but I could feel vampires in my radius, obviously moving closer, so I turned around again and we made our way to the big windows, picking our way around the rotten floor. I didn’t think we would ever make it there, and I was braced for another shot in my back or for the ceiling to drop on me.

But that didn’t happen. We finally reached the blown-out windows, where I helped Jameson step through, onto the ground. He reached up to help me, groaning with pain.

And suddenly Cliff was there, an assault rifle slung across his back with a leather strap. He reached up to my waist, helping me down to the ground. “Where’s Laurel?” I yelled over the noise of the water.

Cliff was careful to put me a little ways away from the glass—he’d seen my socks, which were now smeared with dirt and watery blood. I could barely feel my feet. That water was cold. “Twenty yards away, protected in a circle,” he shouted. They’d stayed back a little, so us nulls wouldn’t undo her magic. Smart.

“Help me get this thing on,” I said, holding up my knife belt.

Cliff helped me unbuckle it, looping it around my waist and re-fastening it. I was swaying again, so he ducked under my arm, choosing the side without the wound. With me still half holding up Jameson, we probably looked like a demented kick line, but we managed to inch away from the house. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw the Range Rover parked haphazardly a little ways away. With everyone focused on the gunshots and the arriving vampires, he’d been able to pull up practically onto the lawn.

“That is a lot bigger than I pictured,” I said, jerking my head toward the geyser.

“Yeah, she tapped into the house’s water main,” Cliff replied. “She said the crystal Lex recommended is spectacular.”

We stopped just in front of the car, where I had to squint against the headlights. “Jameson, get in,” I said to the other null. He looked bad, and was now shivering from the cold water, on top of it. “I’ve got to go back for Wyatt.”

“Lucy must have killed him,” Jameson pointed out. His color was terrible. “We heard those shots.”

“He might have gone through the window. I have to be sure,” I said firmly. Even if Wyatt had wanted to be put out of his misery, I wasn’t leaving him behind. If Lucy Holmwood was still alive, she would use him to vent her frustrations.

I didn’t say it to Jameson, but in that moment I decided that I also wouldn’t leave until I knew for sure that Lucy Holmwood was dead. She couldn’t be allowed to run away and start this whole thing again somewhere else, or provoke a war with Los Angeles. I had started this hero bullshit, and I was going to finish it.

I looked at Cliff. “Do you have a gun I can borrow?”

Cliff reached into a back holster and pulled out a Glock. It was my Glock. Well, the one I’d had earlier. I looked at him with surprise, and he smiled at me. “I’ve been scouting the property for half an hour. I’ve got your boots in the car, too, if you want to grab them.”

“Can you? I don’t want to get too close to Laurel while—”

Beside us, with no warning, Jameson fell to his knees.

I yelped and dropped down beside him, setting the gun on the dirt. “Jameson!” I looked for a wound, but he’d fallen away from the headlights, and between the low lighting and his black clothes, it was like trying to find a shadow inside another shadow. Cliff, who had squatted next to us, pulled a flashlight out of one of his coat pockets and flicked it on, shining the beam on Jameson’s shirt. “Here,” he said, pointing to holes above and below the Kevlar. “Looks like they were using buckshot. Nasty.” He palpated one of the upper wounds for a moment, and Jameson screamed with pain. “Broken collarbone,” Cliff announced. “And he’s losing blood too fast. We gotta get him to a hospital.”