Master of Smoke

considered surrender, her mother’s empty eyes seemed to catch hers. Mama didn’t die so I could give up.
    Miranda stared at Joelle’s broken corpse. Determination begin to grow from an icy little seed buried somewhere in her numb heart.
    What if she could find a way to get to the Magekind and tell them everything they needed to know to destroy Warlock?
    Unfortunately, she had no idea how to reach La Belle Coeur. “Dammit, Mama, why couldn’t you let me keep that communication gem?”
    Well, she’d just have to find another way to reach the Magekind, preferably before Warlock found her.
    So the race was on.
    She’d need to run, which meant she’d have to have money and a car. Gerald could provide her with both—albeit posthumously.
    The thought tore a bitter, rasping laugh from her lips.
    The library safe was hidden behind a massive nineteenth-century painting of fox hunters riding to the hounds. Luckily, Gerald had never been a very creative man; it took Miranda about two minutes to deduce that the combination was his birthday.
    Well, it wasn’t as if it would have been her own.
    The safe’s thick door swung open to reveal piles of cash in thick, banded stacks. “Hell, Gerry, what were you doing—dealing cocaine?”
    She packed the money into one of her two suitcases, then filled the other with her clothes and loaded the lot into her stepfather’s dark gray Lexus. Then she unbolted the car’s license plate and carried it upstairs.
    Miranda had been strictly forbidden from studying magic. Which, naturally, hadn’t stopped her. She’d read every book she could get her hands on, trawled forbidden Internet sites, and experimented endlessly.
    It hadn’t taken her long to determine that damn near everything she read was utter horseshit. Yet sometimes the spells she attempted did work, largely because they helped focus her own innate magic on her goals.
    So it was that she flipped the license plate over, got out a bottle of black enamel paint and a fine brush, and began to paint a spell across the back of the plate.
    It wasn’t a particularly powerful spell—if it had been, any werewolf who saw the plate might notice it. All it would do was keep cops from taking an interest in Gerald’s car.
    Satisfied, Miranda reattached the plate to the Lexus and slipped back inside the house.
    Now she needed something to keep Warlock from sensing her if he decided to conduct a magical search. And sooner or later, he would.
    She found what she was looking for in her mother’s jewelry box: Joelle’s favorite cameo on its black velvet choker. The Victorian piece had come down from her great-greatgrandmother. Generations of werewolf females had worn it, which gave it a certain power all its own. Power that would provide Miranda with a matrix to support the spell she planned.
    The cameo in her hand, she crouched in her bedroom closet, flipped back a section of carpeting, and lifted up the floorboards she’d unscrewed years before. In the space beneath them, she found her spell book, chalk, several beeswax candles, a few bottles of dried herbs, and an athame—a ritual knife.
    The spell Miranda had in mind was both powerful and complex, and to cast it she needed more space than there was in her bedroom. So she carried everything down to the basement, to begin the painstaking process of drawing the necessary chalk designs on the cement floor.
    Hours passed while she drew and chanted, candlelight throwing dancing shadows on the basement’s contents—dusty old toys, boxes of clothing her mother had planned to take to Goodwill, even a Christmas tree that stood in one corner, wrapped in a shroud of green plastic. All the bits and pieces of Miranda’s old life.
    At last it was time for the spell’s finishing touch. Still chanting softly, Miranda used the athame to slice her left hand. Tilting her palm carefully, she let a few drops of blood drip onto the back of the cameo.
    The spell snapped to life. With a sigh of relief, Miranda tied the necklace around her throat.
    Now she could make her escape.

    By the time Miranda left the house half an hour later, her mother lay in the big bed upstairs, hands folded neatly on her chest, sightless eyes closed.
    She’d left Gerald’s corpse where it fell.
    Miranda clicked the key fob on Gerald Drake’s Lexus and tossed her suitcases in the trunk. Just before she got in, she looked back at the mansion that had housed generations of Drakes. She sketched a design in the air and