Free Green-Eyed Envy by Kasey Mackenzie Page B

level of magical ability to counteract the defenses I’d had installed after my bout with arcane and mundane assassins just months earlier. Unless whoever it was had broken into an upstairs window?
    Sure enough, I circled back around through the dining room to the front entryway and found a spitting Nemesis and Nike slithering their way along the stair banister. They allowed me to scoop and carry them rather than fall behind my headlong flight up the stairs. My office and guest bedroom were both empty, as was the guest bathroom between the two rooms. Which left only my bedroom—and wasn’t that a chilling thought?
    I hurtled through the open doorway only to find yet another empty room. Everything seemed to be in its usual place, although the room seemed a bit chilly thanks to the breeze pouring in through the open window—
    Wait, I never leave my windows open . . .
    My eyes narrowed. Well, that explained where the intruder had entered and exited, but not how they had safely gotten in and out. Or what they’d been after. Dre Carrington and I were definitely going to have a little chat about his supposedly infallible security experts, however.
    I slowly pivoted, letting my gaze take in the room’s contents one last time before heading back toward the hallway, which was when I caught sight of the paper that had fallen to the floor. My pulse picked up speed as I bent down, retrieved the paper, and quickly skimmed it.
    The message was short and not-so-sweet. Since you can’t be bothered to answer your phone, get yourself to Salem NOW Marissa Eurydice Holloway. Nan’s awake.
    I froze as those last two words sank in. To anyone else, they might have seemed innocuous, but for me they heralded a miracle: My grandmother had finally awakened from a decades-long coma.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    SCOTT WAS JUST AS SHOCKED TO HEAR THAT my grandmother had woken up from her twenty-two-yearlong slumber as I had been. He also insisted on accompanying me to nearby Salem so I could hear the details from my mother. While Mom spent most of her time “Realmside” these days, recementing old ties to sister Furies, my brother and sister-in-law maintained a cozy suite for her in the attic of the home David and I grew up in.
    By the time we stood on the front porch to ring their doorbell, it was well past nine o’clock. Normally I might have felt guilty for barging in on them that late without calling ahead first. Well, guilty toward David and my niece Cori anyway. Vanessa’s sister, Jessica, and I might have called an uneasy truce after I finally solved Vanessa’s disappearance and rescued her daughter, but that hadn’t made us into sudden BFFs. And admittedly, tweaking her nose had been my main reason for not bothering to call ahead.
    The door swung open before I even had a chance to ring the bell. A harried-looking, slightly older-looking mirror image of myself jerked me inside and patted me down as if to make sure I was in one piece. Rather roughly patted, which clued me in to just how exasperated my normally polite mother really was.
    “It’s about time you got here, Marissa Eurydice Holloway.” I winced as every child—no matter how old—did when confronted by a parent using their full given name. She paused in her harangue of me to throw Scott a thousand-watt smile. Sometimes I thought she liked him more than me. “Hello, Scott dear. Come on in.”
    She turned back to me once Scott stepped into the entryway and shut the door behind him. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve been trying to get in touch with you? Why in the names of all the gods did you not answer your bloody cell phone?”
    Uh-oh. A tiny bit of her childhood brogue—she’d been raised in the late 1800s in Scotland—slipped back into her voice. Wow. She was really ticked off. Not quite the reaction I expected to the news that Nan had awoken from her seemingly endless coma. Annoyance I hadn’t answered her calls sooner—that made perfect sense. But anger that bordered