The End of Magic (The Witches of Echo Park #3)(44)

"The blood sisters have always tried to maintain the balance," Arrabelle said, hating that she sounded like a teacher lecturing to a class. She hoped Lyse appreciated the effort. "When we perform our magical rites, it's more about the power of connection. We connect to our sisters and, through each other, we connect to the flow lines. We draw our power from the Earth-and that power goes out into the world through us and through our good acts. Does that make sense?"



       
         
       
        

"Yes," Lyse said. "I think so."

"In other terms, the blood sisters bring connection to the world-"

"And The Flood brings bad?"

Arrabelle shook her head.

"They bring imbalance and that's bad," Lyse said, amending her answer.

"The good guys shouldn't control the world any more than the bad guys should," Arrabelle said. "The good guys telling everyone what to do would be just as bad-in its own way-as what The Flood is doing."

Lyse seemed to accept this answer. She stopped pacing and stuffed her hands deep into her jeans pockets.

"Okay, so we don't work for the good guys or the bad guys . . . we work for the balance."

Arrabelle smiled. Lyse was learning fast.

"Let's do that spell you were talking about," Lyse said. "The locating one."

"Perfect," Arrabelle replied. "We'll try when we have Daniela and Devandra back with us."

Lyse gave her a tight smile.

"Sold. Now let's get the hell out of this stupid bathroom."

Arrabelle laughed.

"But I liked your office," she said, grinning as she hopped off the countertop and headed for the door, Lyse's footsteps echoing behind her.

Lost in her thoughts, Arrabelle stepped out into the corridor and headed down the hallway toward Daniela's room. Her mind raced as she tried to fashion a plan for when they found The Flood . . . because she knew that stopping them would be the only thing that tipped the balance back into place-and returned the world to normal again.

Of that, Arrabelle was almost certain.





Lizbeth





"This can't be," Lizbeth said, her jaw dropping as she looked through the doorway. She was still holding Ginny in her arms, but for a few moments she felt bodiless, untethered from reality-all realities-as she tried to process what she was seeing inside the interior of the Red Chapel.

It was an exact replica of her first home-the downtown Los Angeles loft that she'd come home to as a newborn . . . before her parents ended their marriage and she'd gone to live with her mother and Weir had stayed with their father. It had been so long ago, and her memories so fractured by the trauma she'd experienced after her mother's death, that she was surprised she remembered it at all. 

"Oh my God," she murmured. "I can't . . . it's not . . ."

There were no words, no way to take in everything she was seeing and feeling. It was just too overwhelming.

While Lizbeth stood in the doorway and tried to control her breathing, Tem laid his charge down on the white leather sectional couch that took up one side of the front room before coming over to Lizbeth and relieving her of her own burden. He placed Ginny on the other side of the couch so she was head to toe with her sister, and then he took Lizbeth by the crook of the arm and led her toward the kitchen. Once there, he sat her down at the white granite kitchen island-Lizbeth had forgotten how white the loft had been. Starkness met the eye at every turn. It was the kind of colorless apartment that eschewed comfort for glamour. It was a glacier-white showplace for her father to flaunt his money. Not one bit of it had ever been home to Lizbeth.

She waited while Tem brought out two tall water glasses from a kitchen cabinet and set them on the island in front of her. Then he turned to the massive built-in refrigerator and began digging around inside it.

"Why?" she asked, shaking her head in disbelief. "This place is awful."

But looking around, she realized this wasn't an entirely true statement. It was cold-that was a fact-yet revisiting the loft now, through the lens of adulthood, Lizbeth saw the touches her mother had wrought from her father's sparseness: the heavy plate-glass windows that let in copious amounts of light and afforded views of the downtown Los Angeles skyline-but hanging from the ceiling in front of them were stained-glass art pieces that belonged to her mother, their colored panes catching the cold winter light and turning it into glorious diamonds of color that danced across the walls; the floor that had been fashioned from whitewashed planks of oak, distressed by age and use-but there was the pink-and-blue handwoven Navajo rug her mother had bought for a song at an estate sale in Los Feliz and somehow its cheerful color brightened the whole room; the skylights built into the plaster ceilings that funneled even more light into the large, open-plan space-and illuminated by this light were the faint pencil marks on the back kitchen wall that Lizbeth's mother had used to document Weir's height, and then Lizbeth's own, as they each grew older.