Jamie made a sudden movement, his eyes blazing, but Mika slipped quickly between him and Edward. Around them, clouds of gold dust swirled angrily.

She tried to be understanding. Edward had to be afraid, after all. He’d been accosted by a skeleton, then locked in a shed.

“You probably have a lot of questions,” she said gently. “Why don’t you come back into the house and we can talk about it properly? Maybe if you understood what’s really going on here—”

“I understand perfectly,” Edward interrupted her, scoffing. “I’ve been kidnapped and imprisoned by three mostly feral children. My phone has been taken from me to prevent me from calling for help or reporting any of the crimes I’ve been witness to. And someone has killed an innocent woman, no doubt for her money. I warned her. I told her none of you could be trusted. What a pity she didn’t listen.”

“No one killed her,” Jamie snapped. “It’s ridiculously irresponsible to throw around accusations like that.”

“Well, it’ll be up to the police to determine that one way or another.”

“Edward, if you’d just listen—”

“I think not.” His eyes sparked spitefully. “You, on the other hand, are going to listen because I feel I need to be very, very clear about what’s going to happen next. You will release me from this shed. You will return my phone to me. I will call the police. And by the end of the day, ideally, you will all be paying through the nose to get someone like me to defend you from the accusations I am going to rain down on your wicked, unnatural heads.”

There was a ringing silence after this speech. Mika could feel Jamie’s rage humming through his body behind her. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. For a moment, she was rooted in place by the cruelty of the words, the spite in his voice. She was afraid, as she’d always been afraid, of somehow making it worse.

Then the gold dust curled around Mika’s ankles like a friendly cat, the dreadful moment passed, and she laughed.

She was done being afraid. She was done letting people like this make her feel small and strange and wrong. She was standing on the cold, damp earth of her own home, and Edward Foxhaven was no match for her.

Mika twitched just a single finger. Slowly, panic wiped the malice from Edward’s face. Mika watched, her head tilted with interest, as vines grew out of the dirt below their feet, wrapping around his ankles, coiling around his arms, binding him.