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found Renee foster homes the other times she’s run away. Gwen, too.”
    “Gwen?”
    “She’s the pregnant one.”
    The thought of three delinquents alone in her grandmother’s antique-filled home was not the most encouraging thing Raine had heard today. “I don’t understand. You said it happened this morning.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Why isn’t my mother handling things?”
    “Oh, Lilith’s on the coast with her friends, preparing for some sort of return-of-the-sun celebration, or something. It’s like one of the coven’s most important gatherings.”
    “Coven? My mother’s a witch, now?” Despite her ongoing concern for her grandmother, Raine couldn’t help being sidetracked by this little news flash.
    “Not exactly. At least I don’t think so. I mean, I haven’t seen her waving a magic wand or boiling up toads and lizards in the Dutch oven or anything. It’s Mama Ida who’s always callin’ it a coven. Mostly it’s just some of your mama’s New Age stuff. She’s a pagan now,” Shawna added matter-of-factly.
    “I see.” Raine poured a glass of water from the carafe on her desk and took a long drink, hoping it would put out the inferno blazing in her gut. It didn’t.
    “I don’t care if the sun’s coming back, sucked into a black hole, or explodes, Shawna. I want you to call my mother right now and have her get back to Coldwater Cove.”
    Not that Lilith would prove that much help. During her lifetime, Raine’s mother had been a flower child, a war protester, an actress usually cast as the soon-to-be-dead bimbo in a handful of low-budget horror films, as well as a rock singer with a pretty but frail voice who’d managed to stay in the music business because of her looks. Which were stunning. Unfortunately, she could be selfish, like beautiful women often are, and in Raine’s opinion, habitually behaved like a foolish, willful schoolgirl, mindless of the consequences of her actions. But at least she should be capable of preventing the kids from stealing the silver before Raine could get back home.
    “I tried calling the lodge where they were supposed to be staying, but the lady who answered the phone said they all left to go camping out in the woods. She said Lilith said something about a ceremonial bonfire. But maybe the sheriff’s sent someone out—”
    “The sheriff? How exactly did he get involved in all this?”
    “Oh. That happened after we locked ourselves in the house.”
    “You did what?” Raine jumped to her feet. At the same time she reached into the drawer for her plastic bottle of Maalox. “Why on earth would you do that?”
    “Because Mama Ida told us to batten down the hatches and barricade the doors. She quoted something—you know how she does that all the time, right?—about free fighters and defenders of old homes and old names.”
    “And old splendors,” Raine murmured. “It’s from Cyrano de Bergerac .” But, like everything else her grandmother quoted, it always came out twisted.
    “Oh. That’s the guy with the big nose, right? Mama Ida brought home the video last month. Gwen thinks Steve Martin’s really funny. For an old guy, that is. Ever since then, she’s been thinking of maybe naming her baby Steve. If it’s a boy, I mean. Renee is voting for Leo. After Leonardo DiCaprio? I kinda like Denzel.”
    “They’re all lovely names,” Raine said. She ground her teeth, making a mental apology to Ida, who’d paid for years of expensive orthodontia. “Now, if we could get back to why my grandmother told you to barricade yourselves in the house—”
    “Oh, sure. That’s easy. She said there was no way she was letting any government bureaucrat take us away from our home just because we didn’t, like, have a responsible adult present in the house.”
    “I see.” Personally, Raine thought that they’d be in the same fix if her mother had been home. No one, in her memory, had ever used the words “responsible adult” to describe Lilith Lindstrom