“But we can assume there may be some kind of booby trap out there rigged with tear gas?” Lee said. “This is fucked up.”
“Yeah,” I breathed.
“We need to check over the house. Carefully,” Grant said.
“I’ll search with you,” Anastasia said to Grant.
“Don’t want to let me out of your sight?” he said.
“That’s right.”
We scoured the house top to bottom. I wasn’t even sure what we were looking for, but we brainstormed and made up a list: wires, cameras, or other bits of electronics in odd places. Places where recent construction might have been done: odd seams in the walls, sawdust on the floor. Any trace of anything that didn’t belong. We checked windows, doors, roof beams, vents. Lee and I hunted by smell, though he said that out of the water he wasn’t much good.
Just because we didn’t find anything didn’t mean nothing was there. That was the worst part. It felt futile.
I slumped into the kitchen, looking for something to eat and drink, and found Ariel. She’d taken a drawer full of butter knives and was lashing them together with a coil of wire from the secret stash upstairs. She’d made a half-dozen crosses.
“It’s curandera magic,” she said. “I was never very good at it. I tried, but I didn’t have the patience like I should have. Grandma was always telling me to slow down, not to try to learn everything at once, that there’d be time. Then she was gone, and I wished I’d learned better. I don’t have her talent, but this should work.”
“I know,” I said softly. “I’ve seen something like this work before.”
“I had to do something,” she said. “It’s not much. But… it’s something.”
I helped her start hanging them above the doors and windows. It was protective magic, supposed to keep evil outside. It certainly couldn’t hurt, could it?
Except when Anastasia and Gemma returned from searching the basement. Anastasia stopped in the doorway and glared. Not looking scared, but angry.
“Kitty?” she called. “What are those?”
I was standing on a chair, using duct tape to secure one of the impromptu crosses above the kitchen window. Crosses. Vampires. Oops.
“Crosses. Protective magic,” I explained. Ariel held another cross to her chest and looked stricken.
“Was this Grant’s idea?” she said. If I’d looked at her eyes, they would be flashing with rage, but I knew better than to look at her eyes. Grant wasn’t around at the moment—Anastasia wouldn’t let him accompany her into their basement lair.
“No,” Ariel said, quickly—bravely—stepping forward. “It was my idea. It’s something my grandmother did. I thought—I thought it might help. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking, we’ll take them down.”
Anastasia couldn’t say anything to that, and my estimation of her went up a bit when she didn’t try. She could see that Ariel was only trying to help.
“Can I ask a stupid question?” I said to Anastasia.
“I don’t know why you bother asking permission,” she said.
I ignored that. “What were vampires afraid of before Christianity and crosses and all that?”
“Crosses have been around in one form or another since before Christianity. It’s a powerful symbol.”
“And?”
She didn’t continue. Ah well.
The vampires waited in the doorway until we’d removed the several crosses we’d put up. Ariel kept them, though, stashing them out of sight in an old grocery bag.
“They may not have worked anyway,” I told her. “They’re magical. I’m afraid we may be up against something entirely mundane.”
“It’s okay,” Ariel said. Out of the blue, she gave me a hug. Quick, spontaneous. More comfort. “I’m glad you’re here. I mean, I’m not glad you’re stuck. But I’m glad you’re here, because I know you’ll figure this out.”
“I elect you morale officer,” I said. That got her to smile. My work here is done.