Chapter 29

Charity Babbitt stood outside the meeting hall at Sisco Heights more than a little alarmed. Her mind was slipping. She stood in the parking lot and for the life of her she couldn’t remember her name. The last few weeks have been like that. Whole periods of time seemed to fade from her grasp. Blackouts. Increasingly she was having trouble maintaining her shields that disguised the taint of the blood magic. What was more worrisome was that she sometimes forgot why she needed them. She had such glorious power she wanted to show them all.

She did remember that she had to call the Druid and inform him of the meeting as well as her failures. She had initiated the call in a high state of anxiety and not a little resentment.

It wasn’t her fault.

She was really starting to hate that damned Lachlan Quinn. Three times she had tried to kill him, and three times she had failed. She could see why her sisters feared the Keeper’s Boy. He was just too powerful.

“I expected this,” the druid said. “Your incompetence is rapidly diminishing your value to me.”

Surprisingly and suspiciously, he didn’t seem all that upset.

“You have two main tasks now. Two simple tasks: The first—since you failed to end the boy, I have had to retain the Brotherhood. They will select a being to come and take care of things. Follow the boy, set up an ambush site somewhere out-of-town then perform the summoning to bring the assassin across the Thinning. I assume you have the strength for that?”

Charity nodded, but she wasn’t at all sure that she could. It took a huge amount of power just to summon the faerie.

“The second is the shifter girl. Use that faerie you have hanging around you to lure the girl to you—use some imagination for once instead of brute force. Meet me at the Keeper’s cabin when you get her. She is the only one, besides the boy, who can get me into the house. I have to have that book.”

“I’m going to need something to call in the assassin,” she said.

He tossed her a coin. “Use this and hand it to whatever they send when it finishes its task. Don’t forget.”

She wasn’t worried about getting the shifter girl, she was terrified about failing to bring the assassin across. Where was she going to find the power to do that? She remembered how he punished mistakes and decided she would call up the faerie for help.

She needed to get back to her house to summon it just as soon as she could remember who brought her here, she didn’t see her car in the parking lot.