Page 68 of Demon Loved
Everyone assembled in the living room was still staring at her as if they’d never seen her before. Or rather, Connor and Angela and Tricia and Allegra were. Both her parents seemed a little stunned, but her mother sent her an encouraging smile, and Levi also appeared very thoughtful.
“I’ve often wondered….” he began, then shook his head. “That is, some part of me always believed there was much more to your talents than met the eye, although I couldn’t think what it might be. But this incident seems to prove we simply weren’t looking in the right place.”
“I wouldn’t beat yourself up too much, Dad,” Brianna replied. “None of us could have possibly guessed that my talents would have manifested themselves like this.”
“No,” Belshegar put in. “It was only because of the nature of the attack that they finally surfaced. If that hadn’t happened, I believe they would have remained dormant.”
Would that have been better? In a way, she thought so, simply because she could have continued to think of herself as completely ordinary, just a regular witch with an undistinguished grab bag of talents.
Now, though…now she had a power she’d never even heard of, and neither had anyone else in the room, if their original reaction to Belshegar’s revelations had been genuine.
“Well, those talents are here now,” Connor said briskly. “I think the next order of business is to try to decide the best course of action to keep the Collector from dropping in anytime he feels like it and causing havoc in our town.”
Everyone nodded, and Brianna was inclined to agree. Bad enough that the guy thought he had a claim to every magical artifact in existence, but the troubling fact that he also seemed to be just fine with creating a little mayhem in the pursuit of those objects made this a situation which needed to be dealt with quickly.
“It’s unfortunate that we know nothing about this person,” Belshegar replied. “Other than his obsession with any magical objects he can lay his hands on. It’s difficult to defend against someone when we don’t know where his home base is, or what methods he might use next to obtain the treasures he desires.”
That was for sure. The boogeyman who had terrified Brianna when she was around five or six had nothing on this guy. At least the boogeyman was always either hiding under her bed or lurking inside the closet. The Collector, on the other hand, could come from anywhere.
Or at least, his minions could.
Angela had been silent during this exchange as she listened to the others speak. Now, though, she tilted her head to one side as she glanced over at her husband. “Maybe we shouldn’t be worried about defense. Maybe we should be going on the offense.”
Connor’s dark, level brows lifted. “How are we supposed to go on the offense against someone when we don’t even know where to find him?”
“Also,” Levi cut in, “we have to keep in mind that we have no real idea as to how many magical artifacts he currently possesses. They could give him all sorts of advantages.”
The prima didn’t look too deterred, though. There was a martial spirit in her brilliant green eyes, and Brianna had the feeling she was royally pissed off about the way the Collector had sent someone to attack a member of the McAllister clan right on their home turf.
“We’ve got plenty of advantages of our own,” she said. “We have you, Levi, and we have Hayley to bolster the powers of anyone who would be of help in this fight. And now we have Brianna, too. If the Collector or his lackeys try to use any sort of dimensional magic against us, she should be able to neutralize it.”
Bree thought that was a pretty big “should.” After all, she’d only used those powers once, and it had all been pure reaction. There hadn’t been anything calculated or thoughtful about the way she’d jumped in to save Belshegar.
No, she’d only done what needed to be done because she couldn’t bear to consider the alternative.
“I don’t know,” she said, not bothering to hide the doubt in her tone. “We’re working with a lot of big ‘if’s here. We don’t know if my powers will manifest the same way during a second attack, and we have absolutely no idea what kind of magical objects the Collector might be working with. It sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.”
Angela’s lips pursed, and she looked over at her husband. It seemed pretty clear she wasn’t happy about being contradicted like this…even as she probably realized they were working with far too many unknowns for any of them to be certain about how this all might shake out.
But then Connor said, “I know this isn’t a sure thing. On the other hand, do we want to spend the rest of our lives — or even the next few months or years — always looking over our shoulders, never sure when the Collector or his servants might show up? Because I don’t think that would be very much fun…do you?”
No, probably not. On the other hand, Bree thought an extra level of vigilance might be better than a magical confrontation that could get someone hurt or worse, or maybe cause enough havoc in their small town that the civilians would be sure to notice something very wrong was happening in Jerome. So far, they’d managed to keep their magical conflicts hidden from the general public, but if the Collector had the enchanted equivalent of an atom bomb or something, that might be a little more difficult.
“What are you proposing?” Belshegar asked. His tone was so neutral that Bree got the feeling he wasn’t entirely happy about any of this, either, but he must have still wanted to hear what the primus had to say.
“A trap,” Connor replied at once. “It’s pretty clear that what the Collector wants most of all is to grab those two artifacts we have in the safe. So we make it so he thinks they’d be easy to obtain — maybe we let the wards slack a little, something that would give him an opening. And when he swoops in to get them, we capture him.”
“And then what?” Tricia said, her voice openly skeptical. “We’re just going to keep this guy prisoner indefinitely?”
“And that doesn’t even take into account that it could be another servant of his who shows up to take the artifacts rather than the man himself,” Bree added before Connor could respond, glad that not everyone seemed to be on board with the primus’s plan. While it would be great to get rid of the threat the Collector presented, there did seem to be the very real possibility that they wouldn’t even be dealing with their real target when they sprang their trap.
Once he found out they’d been lying in wait for him, he probably wouldn’t be too thrilled with the McAllister clan.
Connor’s jade-hued eyes narrowed, and she could tell he was thinking over her words, even if he wasn’t very happy to be contradicted like that. Most of the time, he was just as chill as his wife, but every once in a while, some of the Wilcox stubbornness would pop up to make things difficult.
“Maybe it’s not about trapping the Collector,” Allegra said in her wispy voice, and everyone turned to look at her.
“What do you mean?” Angela asked. Her tone was noticeably gentler now, and Bree could tell the prima was doing her best to show the oldest elder the proper deference.
