I popped the doors and she climbed in, her long black hair like a veil around her, her thin clothes covering a shivering body, pimpled with cold. "Food," she said, her voice hoarse. I passed the bowl of oatmeal and a serving spoon to her. She tossed the top of the bowl into the floorboards and dug in. I watched her eat from the corner of my eye as I drove. She didn't bother to chew, just shoveled the cold oatmeal in like she was starving. She looked thinner than usual, though Jane was never much more than skin, bone, and muscle—like her big cat form, I thought. Criminy. Witches I can handle. But what Jane was? Maybe not so much. I hadn't even known shape changers or skinwalkers even existed. No one did.

Bowl empty, she pulled her leather coat from the tote I had brought, snuggled under it, and lay back in her seat, cradling the empty bowl. She closed her eyes, looking exhausted. "That was not fun," she said, the words so soft, I had to strain to hear. "Those vamps are fast. Faster than Beast."

"Beast?"

"My cat," she said. She laughed, the sound forlorn, lost, almost sad. "My big hunting cat. Who had to chase the scent back to their lair. Up and down mountains and through creeks and across the river. I had to soak in the river to throw off the heat. Beast isn't built for long-distance running." She sighed and adjusted the heating vents to blow onto her. "The vamps covered five miles from the McCarleys' place in less than an hour yesterday morning. It took me more than four hours to follow them back through the underbrush and another two to isolate the opening. I should have shifted into a faster cat, though Beast would have been ticked off."

"You found their lair?" I couldn't keep the excitement out of my voice. "On the Partman Place?"

"Yeah. Sort of." She rolled her head to face me in the dark, her golden eyes glowing and forbidding. "They're living in the mine. They've been there for a long time. They were gone by the time I found it. They were famished when they left the lair. I could smell their hunger. I think they'll kill again tonight. Probably have killed again tonight."

I tightened my hands on the steering wheel and had to force myself to relax.

"Molly? The lair is only a mile from your house as the vamp runs. And witches smell different from humans."

A spike of fear raced through me. Followed by a mental image of a vampire leaning over Angelina's bed. I squeezed the wheel so tight, it made a soft sound of protest.

"You need to mount a defensive perimeter around your house," Jane said. "You and Evan. You hear? Something magical that'll scare off anything that moves, or freeze the blood of anything dead. Something like that. You make sure the kids are safe." She turned her head aside, to look out at the night. Jane loved my kids. She had never said so, but I could see it in her eyes when she watched them. I drove on, chilled to the bone by fear and the early winter.

Jane was too tired to make it back to her apartment, and so she spent the day sleeping on the cot in the back room of the shop. Seven Sassy Sisters' Herb Shop and Cafe, owned and run by my family, had a booming business, both locally and on the Internet, selling herbal mixtures and teas by bulk and by the ounce, the shop itself serving teas, specialty coffees, brunch and lunch daily, and dinner on weekends. It was mostly vegetarian fare, whipped up by my older sister, water witch, professor, and three-star chef, Evangelina Everhart. My sister Carmen Miranda Everhart Newton, an air witch, newly married and pregnant, ran the register and took care of ordering supplies. Two other witch sisters, twins Boadacia and Elizabeth, ran the herb store, while our wholly human sisters, Regan and Amelia, were waitstaff. I'm really Molly Meagan Everhart Trueblood. Names with moxie run in my family. Without a single question about why this seemingly human needed a place to crash, my sisters let Jane sleep off the night run.

While my sisters worked around the cot and ran the business without me, I went driving. To the Partman Place. With Brax.

"You found this how?" he asked, sitting in the passenger seat. I was driving so I could pretend that I was in control, not that Brax cared who was in charge so long as the rogue vampires were brought down. "The dogs got squirrelly twenty feet into the underbrush and refused to go on. It doesn't make any sense, Molly. I never saw dogs go so nuts. They freaked out. So I gotta ask how you know where they sleep." Detective Paul Braxton was antsy. Worried. Scared. There had been no new reported deaths in the area, yet I had just told him the vamps had gone hunting last night.

There were some benefits to being a witch-out-of-fhe-closet. I let my lips curl up knowingly. "I had a feeling at the McCarleys' yesterday, but I didn't think it would work. I devised a spell to track the rogue vampires. At dusk, I went to the McCarleys' and set it free. And it worked. I was able to pinpoint their lair."

"How? I never heard of such a thing. No one has. I asked on NCIC this morning after you called." At my raised brows he said, "NCIC is the National Crime Information Center, run by the FBI, a computerized index and database of criminal justice information."

"A database?" Crap. I hit the brakes, hard. Throwing us both against the seat belts. The wheels squealed, popped, and groaned as the antilock braking system went into play. Brax cussed as we came to a rocking halt. I spun in the seat to face him. "If you made me part of that system, then you've used me for the last time, you no-good piece of—"

"Molly!" He held both hands palms out, still rocking in the seat. "No! I did not enter you into the system. We have an agreement. I wouldn't breach it."

"Then tell me what you did," I said, my voice low and threatening. "Because if you took away the privacy of my family and babies, I'll curse you to hell and back, and damn the consequences." I gathered my power to me, pulling from the earth and the forest and even the fish living in the nearby river, ecosystems be hanged. This man was endangering my babies.

Brax swallowed in the sudden silence of the old Volvo, as if he could feel the power I was drawing in. I could smell his fear, hear it in his fast breath, over the sounds of nearby traffic. "NCIC is just a database," he said. "I just input a series of questions. About witches. And how they work. And—"

"Witches are in the FBI's data bank?" I hit the steering wheel with both fists as the thought sank in. "Why?"

"Because there are witch criminals in the U.S. Sorcerers who do blood magic. Witches who do dark magic. Witches are part of the database, now and forever."

"Son of witch on a switch," I swore, cursing long and viciously, helpless anger in the tones, the syllables flowing and rich. Switching to the old language for impact, not that it had helped. Curses had a way of falling back on the curser rather than hurting the cursed.

I beat the steering wheel in impotent fury. I was a witch, for pity's sake. And I couldn't protect my own kind. Rage banging around me like a wrecking ball, I hit the steering wheel one last time and threw my old Volvo into drive. Fuming, silent, I drove to the Partman Place.

The entrance, once meant for mining machinery and trucks, was still drivable, though the asphalt was crazed and broken, grass growing in the cracks. The drive wound around a hillock and was lost from view. Beyond it, signs of mining that were hidden from the road became more obvious. Trees were young and scraggly, the ground was scraped to bedrock, and rusted iron junk littered the site. An old car sat on busted tires, windows, hood, and doors long gone. The office of the mining site was an old WWII Quonset hut, the door hanging free to reveal the dark interior.

Though strip mining had been the primary means of getting to the gems, tunnels had gone into the side of the mountain. The entry to the mine was boarded over with two-by-tens, but some were missing, and it was clear that the opening had been well used.