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.Maybe if you’d let me color your hair, the resemblance wouldn’t be so strong.”I wasn’t sure I had ever met anyone so matter-of-fact, and I wasn’t sure if I found it refreshing or disconcerting.Maybe both.At least, with her, I knew exactly where I stood.“Darker or lighter?” I asked, gesturing toward my hair, which I had no intention of coloring for anyone’s benefit, least of all hers.“Redder, perhaps,” she said after a moment’s thought.“With bright green streaks?” I suggested.“That way, I can scare away your son.”She smiled.“You’ll look like a Christmas present, and besides, he loves green.Better to go for orange.”“And take a freckling potion.” I tapped my chin thoughtfully.“Although, now that I think about it, I’m not sure if there’s any such thing.”“I’m sure there is, somewhere.I’d be happy to brew some for you, if you’re interested.”“How kind of you.Do you suppose it will work?”“At what? Making you look less like your mother? I would hope so.”“Repelling your son.”“Oh, that.” She shook her head.“Not a chance.I think you and I will just have to find some way to get along.”That idea sobered me.Did everyone think, then, that Evan and I were a foregone conclusion?“Why don’t you want to marry him?” Laura asked.“Isn’t it obvious?” I waved my hand up and down my body.“No magic.He would have total control.”To my surprise, she laughed.“You don’t understand men at all, do you?”“What is that supposed to mean?”Before she had a chance to respond, Evan walked through the door, followed closely by his father.Evan looked anxiously between the two of us, but neither of us betrayed our conversation.“Did you find them?” I asked.“No.” Evan held a manila envelope in his hands.“I’ve got what we need, though.It’s time to go.”* * *The trip would take well over an hour, an hour I did not look forward to spending with Evan.I never used to have trouble coming up with conversation, especially with him, but of course, everything was different now.Around us, the rolling hills of the Ozark Mountains rose and fell in verdant waves.The winding, two-lane road that took us south into Arkansas flowed with the land rather than barreling through it like major Interstates, almost creating the illusion that it belonged.Only the smattering of man-made hovels that interrupted the landscape in the form of abused gas stations or ramshackle farm houses broke the illusion.Finally, Evan cleared his throat to get my attention.When I looked at him, he asked, “Are you ready to hear about the girls?”“Yes.” Definitely.Anything to push away the silence.“There’s a picture in the envelope.”I reached into the back seat, where he had tossed the envelope, then opened it to pull out a glossy digital photo print.It showed two teenage girls in front of a small wooden cabin, their faces full of laughter, arms around one another’s shoulders.“That was taken last week at camp,” Evan said.“Laura’s the one on the right, Regina’s on the left.”Laura had long, straight hair down to her waist, colored in varying shades of black and platinum.Her face was caked in makeup, and a tiny glint of metal hinted at a stud in her eyelid, though it was hard to tell in the photograph.She was lean, almost willowy, and she wore a black “Camp Ozark” t-shirt that washed out her overly painted face.The other girl, Regina, could not have been more different from her friend.Regina’s hair was a deep, dark chestnut that remained its lovely natural color.Her round face was scrubbed clean, enlivened by sparkling blue eyes.I hadn’t even noticed Laura’s eye color, I realized, but when I looked back at her face I could still only see the glint of metal in her eyelid.Regina was slightly shorter than Laura, her figure showing its curves even beneath the shapeless camp t-shirt.She looked like the girl next door as much as Laura looked like everyone’s nightmare of a Goth child, and yet their faces and posture showed that they couldn’t have been better friends.“Laura’s father, Jack, is my dad’s second cousin,” Evan said.“Is he a sorcerer?” I asked.“No.That branch of the family never had any magic, as far as I know.My father and Jack grew up together around here before Jack moved to Little Rock, and my dad always looks out for family.”So did mine.Apparently, they had a little more in common than their mutual enmity.“Jack knocked on Dad’s door last night with a hair sample, begging him to help find his daughter.Obviously, we didn’t find her with magic.”I shuddered.There was no way the reason for being unable to find a teenage girl with a hair sample and a decent scrying spell could be a good one, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask Evan whether he thought they were dead.I looked back down at the laughing faces of the fifteen-year-old girls whose broken bodies might be lying in the woods somewhere, waiting for discovery.I tried to think about what I knew of scrying from my own family.It required something of the target such as fingernails, saliva, hair, or best of all – blood.A knowledge of the search area helped too, but a powerful sorcerer and access to the target’s blood could overcome that obstacle.I had looked into ways of hiding myself from magical spying a few weeks earlier, and found that the only real way to do that was for a more powerful sorcerer to conceal me.Evan had done that for me to keep my own family from spying on me.Knowing Evan, he had probably put in a loophole for himself.“What can you tell me about the spell you and your father did?” I asked hesitantly.Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a good idea to ask a sorcerer for his secrets, even peripherally, but I thought my careful phrasing would allay any annoyance.“There’s not much to tell,” Evan said.He didn’t sound annoyed.“Your family probably did the same basic thing looking for Regina.The bottom line is, unless someone was blocking us, we should have been able to find her anywhere within about a thousand miles of that camp.”“But not anywhere in the world?” I pressed.Evan shook his head.“No, for that we would have needed blood.”If Jack had been raised near a sorcerer, then he would have known better than to leave blood lying around.But the mention of blood reminded me of something I had wondered ever since Evan had saved me.When the vampire nearly killed me a couple of weeks ago, I had lost a lot of blood
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