Chapter 89 Tit For Tat
Erica moved through her bedroom with the briskness of someone who had packed in a hurry before and knew exactly which things mattered and which didn't. The suitcase on the bed was open and half full and she was working through the wardrobe with the focused calm of someone operating on a decision already made, not revisiting it.
She raised her voice toward the hallway.
"Molly, get moving. We don't have all night." She pulled two folded blouses from the shelf and set them in the case. "I'm putting the house up for sale through the agency. We won't need to come back once we leave, I'll handle everything remotely."
She moved to the dresser.
"I know this feels sudden. I know you don't understand all of it yet and I did promise you an explanation, so here it is while you pack." She raised her voice to carry through the wall between the rooms. "Werewolves and witches do not have a peaceful history, Molly. They never have. Wolves have always known what witches are capable of and they've always wanted to control it using means like abductions, coercion, and other things. They kept witches like servants to do their workings for them."
She closed the dresser drawer and opened another. "It's been happening for centuries and it's worse now because we're fewer. Old bloodlines like ours are rare. Most of the covens that existed a hundred years ago are gone, dead out or scattered, and the ones that remain are careful for good reason."
She stopped at the window and looked out at the street, checking it out of habit.
"That's why your father wanted the binding on you. It wasn't only about giving you a normal life. An unmanifested witch reads as human to most wolves. The binding kept you invisible." She turned back to the suitcase. "The moment it lifts, the moment your abilities are present and readable, you become something they want. Tonight proved that. That boy put his hand over my mouth in my own home, Molly. In our home."
She zipped the half-packed side of the case and moved toward the hallway.
"Five minutes," she called out. "Bring what you need and leave the rest."
She stopped at the top of the stairs, unlike Molly, there were no responses or snarky comments.
The living room below was visible from where she stood. She could see the coffee table with the bowl and the tray still on it, the map beside it, and the floor where Enzo and Zion had gone down.
The floor was empty.
Erica stood at the top of the stairs and looked at the empty floor for a moment without moving.
"Molly."
She said it at a normal volume first, refusing to believe her instincts, though they never lied. She waited.
Nothing.
"Molly." Louder now.
She came down the stairs quickly, half running, and moved through the living room and into the kitchen and back through to the hallway, and then to the foot of the stairs again. She stood there and the house gave her back its silence.
She went upstairs fast.
Molly's room door was open, she pushed through it, stood in the doorway, and took in the room. The wardrobe door was open. A few things were gone from the desk.
Molly was not there.
Erica crossed to the window.
The street below was quiet and still and her car, which had been parked directly in front of the house was not there. She stood at the window and looked at the empty space where it had been.
Then it hit her, she had heard the rev of an engine a moment ago and had attributed it to a neighbour, now she knew that the sound of an engine accelerating away from a kerb belonged to her car. Molly had taken her car.
She stood at the window and the pieces assembled themselves without her needing to work at it. Enzo and Zion couldn't have woken on their own, the spell had a twenty-four-hour mark and she had made it properly. Which meant Molly had done something to bring them around, she couldn’t have woken them up because they wouldn’t wake till it’s twenty-four hours. How had she done it, surely she didn’t lift them. Erica didn’t think her daughter had the strength to.
Erica put both hands flat on the window frame and breathed.
Her daughter had saved them. The same two boys who had followed her home and threatened her in her own doorway and put a hand over her mouth, Molly had left with them.
She didn't understand it. She turned it over and looked at it from every angle she had available and she could not make it make sense, the logic of choosing the people who had just threatened you over the mother who had been protecting you your entire life.
Unless Molly thought she was protecting something else.
Erica moved away from the window and back to her room.
She went to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, took out her phone and found the number, and dialled.
It rang twice.
“911. What’s your emergency?”
"Yes, I need to report a kidnapping." Her voice was level and precise. "Two boys have taken my daughter. I have the plate number of the vehicle." She gave her own plate number and waited while the operator typed. "I understand. Yes. Please treat it as urgent." She gave her address and her name and answered the follow-up questions with the economy of someone who had a limited amount of time and patience for the process. Then she ended the call and sat with the phone in her hand.
She said three names to the empty room.
"Enzo. Zion. Maddox."
The names sat in the air with a particular weight. She looked at the window and thought about all of it, the sequence of it, from the moment Grace Ainsley had walked through her front door unannounced and Molly had let her in. Everything that had followed traced back to that entry point. Grace had brought this world into Molly's life in a way that was now, apparently, impossible to close back out.
She didn't blame Grace, not entirely. The girl hadn't known what she was or what she was carrying, that much was clear. But not knowing hadn't protected anyone.
Erica stood and walked back to Molly's room slowly this time, not searching but thinking. She moved through the space her daughter had occupied and tried to locate herself in the situation she was in, which was the situation of a woman whose son was dead and whose daughter had just driven away with the people she should have been running from and whose careful, deliberate, years-long project of keeping her family away from this world had come apart in the space of a single week.
‘Ryan.’
She stopped moving.
She had received the confirmation from the station two days ago when she called. He had not survived the operation. He had been among the casualties.
Ryan, who had assured her that he would fight for them, her son’s partner turned family. Ryan, who had been kind to her family and had shared their grief with them.
He was gone. He’d been killed.
Both Daniel and Ryan were gone. Both of them were gone and the person responsible was somewhere out there and had been helped, directly and personally, by Grace Ainsley, who was apparently half werewolf and half witch, she was protecting Maddox because of whatever history existed between them, and that was the thing Erica could not get past.
She moved around the room slowly, looking without quite knowing what she was looking for, and then she stopped.
The floor beside the bed. Something caught the light at a specific angle, fine and almost invisible, and she crouched down and picked it up carefully between two fingers.
A single strand of hair.
Not Molly's colour. Not Molly's texture. This was Grace's, she was certain of it without needing confirmation, left behind from the nights the girl had slept in this room.
Erica stood up and held it between her fingers and looked at it.
She thought about what Molly had told her, that Grace was half werewolf and half witch. She had thought it was clearly a joke because those two supernatural beings had been at odds for years. But she had thought about it since. A hybrid. One parent from each side, which should have been genetically illogical, it happened so rarely that the recorded cases across centuries of coven history could be counted on two hands.
Hybrids didn't usually manifest both abilities. The bloodlines competed and one dominated while the other lay dormant or disappeared entirely. That was the established reality. One in a thousand was being generous.
But Grace had done something in that car. Erica had felt it, a presence, raw and untrained and completely unintentional, when Grace had demanded she stop. The girl hadn't known she was doing it. She'd been running on anger and betrayal and something had moved through her that was not wolf and was definitely not nothing.
Grace didn't know how to use it. That much was obvious. The ability was there and the access was not, which meant that with the right intervention, it could be developed, and a developed hybrid was something that had not existed in recorded history in any form Erica could name.
She closed her fingers around the strand of hair.
She had wanted to go after Maddox. That had been the plan, find him and bring the police, have him face what he had done. The police plan had failed and cost more lives than it had saved and Ryan was dead alongside her son and Maddox was still out there, moving, operating, apparently gathering people and resources and extending his reach.
If she couldn't get to Maddox directly, she needed something that could.
She needed something that would draw him out. Something he would come for regardless of the risk to himself, something that mattered to him enough that self-preservation stopped being the primary calculation.
Grace had run toward that camp. Not away from it, toward it. She had gotten out of a moving car and run toward a location full of rogues and police and active violence because Maddox was there. Whatever the connection between them was, it was not casual and it was not one-directional.
Erica looked at the strand of hair in her hand.
She stood in her daughter's room in the quiet of the house and turned the strand of hair over in her fingers and looked at it and felt the grief of Daniel and Ryan sit in her chest alongside the cold, practical logic of someone who had run out of clean options and was now looking at what remained.
"Don't worry," she said. She said it to Ryan, to Daniel. "I'll avenge you both."
She closed her hand around the strand of hair and held it. If she couldn’t get to Maddox then she’ll place a curse on Grace that’ll bring him to her.