Page 20 of Wind Called

Connor took a step forward, a frown of his own pulling at his brows. Like his wife, he had night-dark hair and greenish eyes, only his were a cloudy mixture of green and gray, like moss agate. “We would never have left it there.”

“And you didn’t,” Levi said. He’d paused near the entrance to the living room, but now he approached the safe and laid one long-fingered hand on top of the little box. “It was on a shelf in the main bedroom closet. Whoever got past the wards was able to bring it this far, but then they must have realized that the magic barring the front door wouldn’t allow them to remove it from the house.”

“And thank goodness for that,” Allegra put in. She was much older than the other two elders, nearing eighty and probably past the point where she should have retired and allowed someone a few decades younger to take over her duties. However, she seemed determined to drop in harness, and since Connor and Angela appeared to have decided it was better to let the matter go than press her to step aside, no one had seriously brought up the prospect of her replacement. Pale gaze shifting to Levi, she added, “I’m so glad we followed your advice and doubled the wards on all the doors and windows.”

He didn’t look very glad, however. No, he was frowning deeply, keen blue eyes sweeping the room, even though — at least as far as Bellamy could tell — there wasn’t anything to see.

Well, except the safe where it incongruously sat on the coffee table.

“They must have left it there and fled,” Levi said. “Whatever magic they used to get in, it probably told them that they’d tripped the alarm, so to speak, and that it would only be a matter of time before we came to investigate.”

Angela had moved to the center of the living room and stood there for a moment, arms outstretched at her sides, as though she was trying to reach out and feel the energy of the space. “I can sense frustration,” she said. “But that’s about it.”

“Any dark magic?” Connor asked. Clearly, he hadn’t forgotten about the recent incursion by an Escobar warlock into de la Paz territory, even though the McAllisters had mostly stayed out of that tussle.

Theprima’slips pressed together, and then she shook her head. “Not that I’m able to tell. Whoever did this, their energy feels weirdly…neutral, for lack of a better word.”

“That’s the sense I get, too,” Levi said. “Which may not mean anything at all. We could be dealing with someone who has the ability to mask their particular brand of magic.”

Bellamy had never heard of a gift like that, but she’d be the first to admit she hadn’t done an in-depth study of all the various types of magical talents that manifested amongst the witch clans. There were your standard ones, of course, like healing and controlling the weather and seeing the future, but odd ones popped up all the time. She’d heard that Marie Begonie, one of the Wilcox witches, had made it her life’s work to catalog such things in addition to keeping track of her clan’s complex genealogy, and yet Bellamy wasn’t sure whether Marie had ever shared her findings with the other Arizona clans.

“Well, the important thing is that they weren’t able to get the amulet,” Tricia said, still sounding no-nonsense and brisk.

“No, they weren’t,” Angela replied, although she appeared far more troubled. “But the problem is that now they know exactly where it is.”

“We can take it back to the Forest Highlands house with us,” Connor suggested, but his wife immediately shook her head.

“I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. We’re the only witch family in the development, and I’d feel better if we had it someplace where we have some backup. No, I think we’d better come back to Jerome a little early, just to be safe.”

Connor’s mouth tightened slightly, but it didn’t look as if he planned to argue with her on that point. Most of the time, they returned to their house here on Paradise Lane in late September now that they were far past having to worry about their kids’ school schedules, which a decade ago would have dictated that they be in Jerome no later than the first week of August. Now, though, they tended to linger at the higher elevations until the summer heat began to ease and they could enjoy autumn in the Verde Valley on their own time.

All those considerations had gone out the window, though, now that they had to worry about whether someone might make another attempt to steal the amulet. Bellamy had a hard time believing anyone would try such a thing if they were both here, just because she knew that working together, Connor and Angela were probably stronger than any other witch or warlock on the planet.

Well, at least now that the Escobars were no longer a threat.

She hoped.

“But thanks for putting all those wards in place,” Angela went on. “I think we would have been dealing with a very different situation if we’d only trusted the house’s regular security system to keep the amulet safe.”

Right. Even though the magic that protected the house was its first line of defense, they also had an alarm they left on whenever they were going to be gone for an extended period. No one had mentioned it getting tripped, which made Bellamy believe that whoever had broken in, they’d used magic or some other means to bypass the system.

The elders nodded, although Levi still looked troubled. Because of his otherworldly origins, he tended to take more upon himself than the other two elders, and he was probably beating himself up right now that even his powerful magic hadn’t been sufficient to keep the intruder away.

But it had been enough to keep the thief from escaping with his — or her — prize, and that was the most important thing.

Angela looked over at Marc then, as if really seeing him for the first time. “And thanks for putting the elders on alert,” she said. “Because of what you told your grandmother, she and the others were already keeping an eye out for anything strange. I think things might have gone much worse for us if it hadn’t been for that.”

He gave an embarrassed hitch of his shoulders, as if he wasn’t quite sure whether he’d actually provided all that much help. “No problem,” he said, tone a little too casual. “I just wish my dreams could have shown me who’s behind all this.”

“Well, they still might,” Tricia said briskly. “For now, though, I think it’s enough that the feeling of foreboding you got from those dreams was real, and that something is trying to communicate that the amulet is a real target.”

“Exactly,” Connor chimed in. “We owe you a debt of gratitude.”

“It’s nothing,” Marc began, but Angela shook her head.

“It’s not ‘nothing.’ Since we don’t know who tried to take the amulet, we also don’t know what they wanted to use it for. Maybe their reasons were totally innocuous — maybe they needed to boost their healer’s abilities to cure a particularly awful case of cancer or something — but I have to believe if that was their real reason for wanting to take it, then they could have just approached us directly.”

Bellamy hadn’t even considered that angle to the problem, but she thought theprimahad a point there. They also could have asked Levi’s wife Hayley for assistance, since her natural-born gift offered much the same kind of magical boost that the amulet did.

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