The cold venom in her voice shocked me, and I stared at this strange person that I’d never seen before. “But you always say that we shouldn’t use our powers to hurt other people. That that isn’t what our elemental magic is for.”

   Mom leaned forward again and gently cupped my face in her hand. Perhaps it was my imagination, but her fingers seemed colder than before, and I almost thought that I could see the Ice magic running through the blue vein at her temple. I pressed my lips together and held back a shudder.

   “That’s right. We don’t use our magic to hurt others, unless it’s absolutely necessary to defend ourselves and the people we love. Just like it was for me tonight. Do you understand?”

   I nodded, pretending to understand and trying to ignore how scared and horrified I still was deep down inside. Right now, all I could think about was the black eye of that gun, lining up with my forehead, and how much I didn’t want to die. I held back another shudder.

   “Can you tell me what happened?” Mom’s blue eyes were still on my gray ones. “How did you know that man was in the house?”

   My gaze darted past her to the dead man and all the blood still oozing down his chest, but I forced myself to focus on her again. “I fell asleep under the Christmas tree during the party. I’d just woken up when I heard someone coming up the stairs. I thought that it was you coming to check on us, but then I saw his boots. So I stayed quiet until he went past me. I thought that he might go into one of the bedrooms and hurt Bria or Annabella, but he came here instead. So I crept out from behind the tree and followed him.”

   Mom’s face hardened into a blank, remote mask. “The man came straight back here to my office? Instead of searching the house?”

   I nodded.

   She glanced over her shoulder at him. “So Tucker sent him as a warning, then,” she murmured, talking more to herself than to me. “Probably just to scare me. Maybe rough me up a little. I bet Tucker didn’t think that I’d actually kill him instead.”

   Every word she said made more and more worry ball up in the pit of my stomach. “A warning?” I whispered. “A warning about what?”

   “About what will happen to you and your sisters if I don’t do something for him and his friends,” she replied, still distracted by her thoughts.

   “What? What do you have to do?”

   Instead of answering me, Mom kept staring at the gunman, her expression getting angrier and angrier by the second, until her eyes were glowing an arctic blue with her Ice magic. She snapped up her hand, and another blast of power rolled off her and shot across the room. I winced and looked away from the bright flash of magic. After several seconds, she dropped her hand and released her grip on her power, although the air was still bitterly cold. I looked over at the gunman and gasped.

   She’d frozen him solid.

   The man was now encased in elemental Ice from head to toe, looking more like a Popsicle than an actual person. And still my mom eyed him, like she wanted to blast him over and over with her power, even though he was already dead. I’d never seen her so angry before, not even the time a couple of months ago when she’d caught Annabella sneaking into the house after her ten o’clock curfew.

   “Don’t worry, Genevieve.” Mom turned back to me. “Every­thing’s fine now.”

   I opened my mouth to argue, to scream and shout and yell that everything was most certainly not fine. That there was a dead man in her office that had almost killed both of us.

   She gave me a stern look. “You will not say anything about this to Annabella or especially Bria. Not one word. Do you understand me?”

   “But—”

   “Do you understand me?” she snapped, cutting me off.

   Anger spurted through me, that she was ordering me around like this. That she was telling me to keep quiet. That she was lying right to my face and saying that everything was okay when it was so obviously not okay. But then I looked at her again, and I noticed her tight lips, trembling fingers, and the faint shudder that shook her entire body before she could hide it.

   And I realized that she was afraid.

   I thought of the man in her office earlier. Hugh, the vampire. And somehow, I knew that he was behind everything that had happened tonight.

   “Do you understand me?” Mom’s voice came out softer this time, more of a desperate plea than a direct order.

   “I understand,” I whispered, even though I didn’t.

   But I would have done anything in that moment to take away her fear.

   She smiled at me, but it was a wobbly expression. “Good. That’s good. Don’t worry, Genevieve. I’ll take care of this. Everything will be the same as it’s always been. You’ll see. No one will ever come in here and hurt you again, not as long as I have breath and magic left in my body.”

   I just nodded, not sure what she expected me to say. Not sure what I could say that wouldn’t be an outright lie.

   Mom stared at me, then her shoulders shook again, and a choked sob escaped her lips before she was able to swallow it. She reached over and pulled me into her lap, her arms going tight around me, hugging me close and rocking me back and forth, back and forth. Trying to comfort me—and herself.

   “Everything’s going to be all right,” she whispered. “You’ll see.”

   Mom kept repeating those two phrases over and over, as if she was trying to convince herself, even more than me. . . .

   “Gin?” a soft voice asked. “Gin, are you awake?”

   For a moment, I could still feel my mother’s arms around me, still feel her warm breath in my hair, still feel her Ice magic coiled in her body, ready to strike out with it at anyone who dared to hurt me. In an instant, the feelings faded, and she was gone, lost to the dark corners of my mind. Although fresh pain, loss, and longing kept knifing through my heart.