He eyeballed me. “Since you came over three weeks ago? No.”

“Just making sure.” At least I wasn’t going to bring down death and destruction on their home again. Suzy’s premonition had been of somewhere else.

Gosh. What a relief.

I shoved the thought away by jamming my fingers through my hair. “Does Mel need advance notice? Should we call ahead?” I got to my feet as I spoke. Everyone else followed suit, Gary with my drum tucked carefully under his arm. Sandburg stole glances between all of us, and I wondered what he was thinking. Possibly that we were equal parts fascinating and alarming, which was a verdict even I could get behind.

Billy took his phone off his belt, nodding. “I’ll let her know. Mr. Sandburg, thank you for grace under pressure, and I’m sorry if this was bewildering. I’ll try to explain it sometime, if you like, but in the meantime, if Sonata doesn’t mind, maybe you could drive her home?” He gave Sonny an apologetic look that she brushed off. Sandburg looked between him and Sonata, and then, evidently deducing he could be the heroic gentleman of the hour, offered the medium his arm. We all trooped out after them, Billy on the phone to Melinda as Sandburg locked up behind us. I hoped I’d never see the inside of the MoCA again, at least not as anything other than a tourist destination.

Some of my steam had bled off. I drove to Billy’s house without breaking many speed limits or giving Gary another heart attack. Billy, presumably wise in the ways of neighborhood shortcuts, managed to get home just before us, so he was the one to initially greet Melinda. She stood in their doorway, arms akimbo to her enormous tummy, and nerves surged through me all over again. I didn’t care if it was the only viable choice. I didn’t like asking Mel to be searching out death magic when she was only a few days away from giving birth. It seemed like too much could go wrong.

“My goddess is not Brigid,” she said softly, as soon as we were within earshot. “She may not be willing to help. She may not be able to. But the downstairs is ready. Eric wants you to come kiss him good-night,” she added to Billy. My partner smiled and kissed her first, then went upstairs to look in on his kids while Melinda ushered Gary and me downstairs.

I’d been in the Hollidays’ home dozens of times, and in the daylight basement half a dozen times, usually chasing the younger kids around the house in a madcap game of tag. It was fully the size of the rest of the house, with a laundry room adjacent to a large playroom. If I had four kids and Seattle’s rainy winters, I’d have wanted a room that size to keep my children entertained in, too. Especially since there was a door at the top of the stairs that could be closed, isolating piercing shrieks from the rest of the house.

There were several other doors off the playroom, none of which I’d ever really thought about before. One stood open now, the scent of fresh paint emanating from it. I peeked in, then lifted a curious eyebrow at Melinda. “It’ll be Robert’s new room,” she said with a degree of regret. “He’s old enough not to have to share with Eric, and with the new baby we won’t all fit upstairs anymore. Clara’s agitating to move down here, too, now. They’re growing up.”

“You going to let her?”

“Oh, probably. It’ll make Robert feel less alone, and she’s not old enough to think of having boys sneak in through her window yet.” Melinda made a face and opened a door at the opposite end of the playroom. “I hope. Come, this is my room.”

Gary breathed, “Sure is,” as he stepped in, and I couldn’t help but agree with him. Dozens of low-burning candles sat on small tables, illuminating the room. The floor was concrete and littered with brightly colored pillows made out of fabric ranging from rough satin to raw cotton. Rosaries and Stars of David hung from the walls, and a chalk drawing glowed on the concrete floor. I took a breath to comment, and instead inhaled a lungful of delicate sweet air. I’d never thought of Melinda having any particular scent, but the light perfume smelled like her, and was just enough to wash away the smell of candle wax and flame.

“Vallesia,” she said. I blinked and she smiled. “People always ask what flower it is. It grows in Mexico. My grandmother loved it.”

“Your grandma had good taste.”

Amusement danced in Mel’s eyes. “Or a good sense of smell.”

Gary chortled. I made a face. Melinda, pleased, walked around the perimeter of the room, lighting a handful of candles that had been blown out when the door opened. I came farther in, stopping at the edge of the chalk outline. “I don’t know what I expected,” I said after a minute, “but this isn’t it.”

“You expected a pentagram,” Melinda said amiably. “It’s the only power circle anybody ever uses on television, but it’s not the only one available to us. You should know that, Joanne.”

I closed my hand over the necklace pendant at the hollow of my throat. “I guess I should.”

The drawing inscribed on her temple floor—because that was the only word I could use for the room, temple—was the same quartered circle I wore. It was a symbol used by both sides of my disparate heritage: for the Cherokee it was a power circle, embodying the directions, the elements and the shape of the world. Actually, as far as I could tell, it represented exactly the same things for the Irish, though it had also been adopted as a particularly Celtic symbol of Christianity. My mother’s grave was marked with a Celtic cross, as were many others far older than hers. “What does it do?”

Melinda shrugged. “Protects. Captures. Honors. The same thing the pentagram does, really. They call the pentagram the devil’s circle, but it’s only a symbol. This one could be used for corruption, too. Anything can be, and almost nothing is so weighted by external perception that it leans toward good or evil on its own.”

“Almost nothing?” That was Gary, asking the question I wanted to. I sort of felt like I should know this one.

“Traditional Christian crosses, Stars of David, the star and crescent.” A smile flashed across Melinda’s face. “Buddha statues. Even with so much religious strife and conflict in the world, those symbols are nearly impossible to use as focal points for wicked things. It’s why they’re reversed in so many hate rituals, the cross upside down, the star with its point toward the ground.” She wobbled a hand. “Not that the Star of David can be reversed, but a true devil’s circle puts the spire of a five-point star at the bottom. It’s only by altering their aspects somehow that darker magics can gain a hold on them.”

“What about people who do evil in the name of those symbols without reversing them? How can they do that without staining the original?” I had never thought about any of this. I was a little in awe that Melinda had.

“They can’t.” She shrugged. “But through the millennia, there have been more good people, with good hearts and good faith, who have stood beneath these shapes and put their trust in them, than there have been evil. Sometimes the balance comes very close. A token of peace can be corrupted in a single generation, if enough people come to see it as a representation of evil.”

“The swastika,” Gary said. Melinda nodded, and a sort of guilty surge of relief raced through me. That one, at least, I knew. It had been a symbol of healing, kind of an ancient Red Cross, and now it was the universally recognized sign of one of the worst evils man had ever done. If there was ever a symbol that needed rehabilitating, the swastika was it, but I wasn’t sure it should be. Maybe it was better to have it always raise hairs on the arms and give a prickle of discomfort, to remind us of how badly we could go wrong.

Billy came down the stairs, surprisingly light-footed for a guy as heavy as he was. “Robert wheedled another half hour of reading time out of me. The rest of them are asleep.”