I retook my seat and used the tip of a finger to push the photos away. I was pretty transparent, I guess, having to check on the babies after seeing the dead McCarleys. "They're fine. Still sleeping. Still… safe." Which made me feel all kinds of guilty to have my babies safe, while the entire McCarley family had been butchered. Drunk dry. Partly eaten.

"You finished thinking about it?" he asked. "Because I need an answer. If I'm going after them, I need to know, for sure, what they are. And if they're vamps, then I need to know how many there are and where they're sleeping in the daytime. And I'll need protection. I can pay."

I sighed and sipped my tea, added a spoonful of raw sugar, stirred and sipped again. He was trying to yank my chain, make my natural guilt and our friendship work to his favor, and making him wait was my only reverse power play. Having to use it ticked me off. I put the cup down with a soft china clink. "You know I won't charge you for the protection spells, Brax."

"I don't want Molly going into that house," Evan said. He brushed crumbs from his reddish, graying beard and leaned across the table, holding my eyes. "You know it'll hurt you."

I'm an earth witch, from a long family of witches, and our gifts are herbs and growing things, healing bodies, restoring balance to nature. I'm a little unusual for earth witches, in that I can sense dead things, which is why Brax was urging me to go to the McCarley house. To tell him for sure if dead things, like vamps, had killed the family. How they died. He could wait for forensics, but that might take weeks. I was faster. And I could give him numbers to go on, too, how many vamps were in the blood-family, if they were healthy, or as healthy as dead things ever got. And, maybe, which direction they had gone at dawn, so he could guess where the vamps slept by day.

But once there, I would sense the horror, the fear that the violent deaths had left imprinted on the walls, floor, ceilings, furniture of the house. I took a breath to say no. "I'll go," I said instead. Evan pressed his lips together tight, holding in whatever he would say to me later, privately. "If I don't go, and another family is killed, I'll be a lot worse," I said to him. "And that would be partly my fault. Besides, some of that reward money would buy us a new car."

"You don't have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, Moll," he said, his voice a deep, rumbling bass. "And we can get the money in other ways." Not many people know that Evan is a sorcerer, not even Brax. We wanted it that way, as protection for our family. If it was known that Evan carried the rare gene on his X chromosome, the gene that made witches, and that we had produced children who both carried the gene, we'd likely disappear into some government-controlled testing program. "Moll. Think about this," he begged. But I could see in his gentle brown eyes that he knew my mind was already made up.

"I'll go." I looked at Jane. "Will you go with me?" She nodded once, the beads in her black braids clicking with the motion. To Brax, I said, "When do you want us there?"

The McCarley house was on Dogwood, up the hill overlooking the town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, not that far, as the crow flies, from my house, which is outside the city limits, on the other side of the hill. The McCarley home was older, with a 1950s feel to it, and from the outside, it would have been hard to tell that anything bad had happened. The tiny brick house itself with its elvish, high-peaked roof, green trim, and well-kept lawn looked fine. But the crime scene tape was a dead giveaway.

I was still sitting in the car, staring at the house, trying to center myself for what I was about to do. It took time to become settled, to pull the energies of my gift around me, to create a skein of power that would heighten my senses.

Brax, dressed in a white plastic coat and shoe covers, was standing on the front porch, his hands in the coat pockets, his body at an angle, head down, not looking at anything. The set of his shoulders said he didn't want to go back inside, but he would, over and over again, until he found the killers.

Jane was standing by the car, patient, bike helmet in her hands, riding leathers unzipped, copper-skinned face turned to the sun for its meager warmth on this early fall day. Jane Yellowrock was full Cherokee, and was much more than she seemed. Like most witches, like Evan who was still in the witch-closet, Jane had secrets that she guarded closely. I was pretty sure I was the only one who knew any of them, and I didn't flatter myself that I knew them all. Yet, even though she kept things hidden, I needed her special abilities and gifts to augment my own on this death-search.

I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing, huffing in and out, my lips in an O. My body and my gift came alive, tingling in hands and feet as my oxygen level rose. I pulled the gift of power around me like a cloak, protection and sensing at my fingertips.

When I was ready, I opened the door of the unmarked car and stepped out onto the drive, my eyes slightly slit. At times like this, when I'm about to read the dead, I experience everything so clearly, the sun on my shoulders, the breeze like a wisp of pressure on my face, the feel of the earth beneath my feet, grounding me, the smell of late-blooming flowers. The scent of old blood. But I don't like to open my eyes. The physical world is too intense. Too distracting.

Jane took my hand in her gloved one and placed it on her leather-covered wrist. My fingers wrapped around it for guidance and we walked to the house, the plastic shoe covers and plastic coat given to me by Brax making little shushing sounds as I walked. I ducked under the crime scene tape Jane held for me. Her cowboy boots and plastic shoe covers crunched and shushed on the gravel drive beside me. We climbed the concrete steps, four of them, to the small front porch. I heard Brax turn the key in the lock. The smell of old blood, feces, and pain whooshed out with the heated air trapped in the closed-up home.

Immediately I could sense the dead humans. Five of them had lived in this house—two parents, three children—with a dog and a cat. All dead. My earth gift, so much a thing of life, recoiled, closed up within me, like a flower gathering its petals back into an unopened bloom. Eyes still closed, I stepped inside.

The horror that was saturated into the walls, into the carpet, stung me, pricked me, like a swarm of bees, seeking my death. The air reeked when I sucked in a breath. Dizziness overtook me and I put out my other hand. Jane caught and steadied me, her leather gloves protecting me from skin-to-skin contact that would have pulled me back, away from the death in the house. After a moment, I nodded that I was okay and she released me, though I still didn't open my eyes. I didn't want to see. A buzz of fear and horror filled my head.

I stood in the center of a small room, the walls pressing in on me. Eyes still closed, I saw the death energies, pointed, and said, "They came in through this door. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven of them. Fast."

I felt the urgency of their movements, faster than any human. Pain gripped my belly and I pressed my arms into it, trying to assuage an ache of hunger deeper than I had ever known. "So hungry," I murmured. The pain grew, swelling inside me. The imperative to eat. Drink. The craving for blood.

I turned to my left before I was overcome. "Two females took the man. He was surprised, startled, trying to stand. They attacked his throat. Started drinking. He died there."

I turned more to my right, still pointing, and said, "A child died there. Older. Maybe ten. A boy."

I touched my throat. It wanted to close up, to constrict at the feel of teeth, long canines, biting into me. The boy's fear and shock were so intense, they robbed me of any kind of action. When I spoke, the words were harsh, whispered. "One, a female, took the boy. The other four, all males, moved into the house." The hunger grew, and with it the anger. And terror. Mind-numbing, thought-stealing terror. The boy's death struggles increased. The smell of blood and death and fear choked. "Both died within minutes."