“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Let’s see, first off, it took me like one day to kill your guardian.”

“Yeah, thanks for that.”

“You’re welcome. Second, your servitor magick stinks. I was able to put a tracer on it with no effort.”

“The green dot.” I knew it.

“Very good. You spy on me, I spy on you. I’d been warned that you’re hard to trace, but that little boy over there was quite easy. Nice and earthy.” She punctuated her words by scraping a couple of long fingernails across the chalk-board.

“Yeah, well, you kinda fucked up when you decided to mess with him.” I stole a quick glance behind me. Lon had managed to get Jupe back out of the closet and on his feet.

“Look,” she reasoned, “if you had just come quietly when I sent that Pareba after you, we could have avoided all this. All I wanted was for you to come with me so that you could stand trial for your psycho parents. But now you got these people involved. So all three of you are coming with me now.” She looked behind me and called out, “I see you trying to leave back there.”

She patted her gun again, still looking at them, then smiled at me.

“That seems like a lot of trouble,” I said, pressing the tips of my fingers together to reopen the wounded hangnail. “Why don’t you just take me and save yourself the hassle?”

She laughed, tapping one of the heels of her boots on the floor. “This isn’t up for negotiation.”

All right, then. No chance of a peaceable outcome now.

I couldn’t escape, because she’d only hunt me down again. She might have been an overconfident bitch about my magical training at the E∴E∴, but she was right about one thing: She knew how to detect servitor magick and tag it well enough to find Jupe. I didn’t. Maybe if my parents hadn’t been so overprotective and had taken the time to teach me, I might’ve known better; as it was, I did the best I could on my own.

But even if she could track me down, I sure as hell wasn’t going to give myself up to her, either. I hadn’t stayed alive all this time just to kowtow at the last minute to someone like her.

Still, fight or flight, after years of considering only my own survival, it really came down to one crucial thing that had nothing to do with me: she had hurt Jupe. And she was going to pay for that.

“Oh, well,” I lamented as I smeared the tiniest drop of blood on my invisibility ward and erected it one more time. The air wavered in front of me, and for a second, the nausea almost dropped me to the floor. Drained from the first time I put it up, I was afraid it wouldn’t work. But in the middle of trying to keep my balance, the bewildered look on Riley Cooper’s face said it all—she couldn’t see me.

Better act fast, before she wised up and realized what I’d done.

You hear about adrenaline giving people access to superhuman strength during moments of crisis. I’d experienced this twice—once when my parents and I faked our deaths, and the other time about a year later, when a cop almost blew my alias.

I probably didn’t have enough adrenaline in me now to lift a car or anything quite that spectacular. I did, however, have enough to unhinge the wooden top off the school desk next to me. Bracing my foot on the seat, that’s exactly what I did.

The desk creaked and protested as I twisted it, then the screws popped out. I flew back a step with the flat weapon in my hand. It must have looked as if it were floating in air, because Riley Cooper’s eyes went wide. Jupe whimpered behind me after my name died on his lips.

I raced forward several steps with the desktop and as Riley stepped back, her spiked heel caught on the sunken grout between two cracked floor tiles. She faltered as I dropped my ward and materialized a couple of feet away from her out of thin air. As Lon had noted in my backyard, it was, indeed, one hell of a spell. Guess this untrained girl knew a few tricks after all.

When Riley saw me, her hands automatically went to her gun. I’ll admit, her reflexes were pretty fast, but I was faster.

With both hands, I gripped the desktop and reared it back over my left shoulder, swung with all my strength, and nailed her right in the side of her face. Hard. The hollow crack! of wood hitting bone reverberated around the room. Her body slammed against the teacher’s desk, knocking a flurry of papers and books into the air.

A slow trickle of red blood began seeping from her hair-line above her ear. Her arms flailed as she struggled to get a grip on the corner of desk and pull herself up. Not gonna happen. I brought the board down on top of her head. The wood fractured in two and fell apart on impact, sending a sickening jolt of pain through my arms. She went down face-forward. Her chin hit the tile and one of her teeth popped out and skipped across the floor in five quick hops.

Lon and Jupe said, “Fuck!” in unison from the back of the room.

Chest heaving, I tossed the split desk and dropped to my knees, tugging the edge of a pair of shiny handcuffs from her back pocket. She lay still on the floor as I straddled her legs, twisted her limp arms back, and cuffed her as tight as I could. It was the first time I’d ever gotten to do that; it felt a little satisfying.

As I stood up, she still didn’t move. I worried for a second that I’d killed her.

Lon sprang toward us as I bent down to flip her over and check her pulse. The side of her face was splotched with crimson. Blood was also leaking out of her mouth.

“She’s alive,” I reported with relief.

“Jesus Christ,” he mumbled. Then he repeated it. Twice.