A slow, almost shy smile had crept onto Patience’s face as Jade was speaking. Now the blonde stretched her long, elegant fingers and looked at them. Nine nails were shaped and painted a pale, pearlescent pink. One, the left pinkie, was snapped off near the quick, leaving a ragged edge.
“Typing’s physical . . . it’s really just hand-eye coordination, after all. In fact, it’s almost a sport.” She paused. “But thanks for seeing me as capable. Sometimes I forget that I used to be that person. Here . .
.” She looked around the plain auxiliary room, though Jade suspected she was seeing all of Skywatch and the responsibilities it symbolized. “Here, I feel like a misfit cog in the calendar wheel. I’m a day that’s just slightly out of step. A week with too many hours in it, or too few.”
“I think we’ve all felt that way, some more than others.” Jade lifted a shoulder. “We just lose track that we’re not the only ones feeling it.”
Patience glanced at the computer screen, though Jade wasn’t sure what she saw there. “It just sucks, you know? There are enough of us here that it shouldn’t feel like we’re all alone.”
“Welcome to my world,” Jade said emphatically.
Patience frowned. “But I thought you and Lucius—”
“Are having sex. Great sex, mind you, but that’s it.”
“Don’t knock it,” the blonde said dryly. “Sometimes the love part really stinks.”
“There’s a song in there somewhere.”
“Very funny.”
After that surprising exchange, the women fell companionably silent. As Patience once again started her rapid-fire typing, Jade steeled herself, closed her eyes, and thought back to the night before —not the attack, but the lovemaking. She tried to remember only her own thoughts and feelings, but instead found herself locked on the look in Lucius’s eyes as he’d taken her, possessed her, branded her. Her skin heated as the magic came; her body tightened and throbbed as she remembered his hands on her, his mouth, his fingers—
Jerking herself out of the memory, she opened her eyes. But instead of the spell book, she found her attention drawn inexorably to the man who was standing in the doorway as he had the night before, leaning on the door frame, watching her.
“Lucius!” she exclaimed, hoping he didn’t see from her face how open she was to him at that moment, how much her senses lit at the sight of him, and how much she wished they were alone.
Patience’s head snapped up. “Oh!” She did something with the mouse, then very deliberately looked back at the screen and started typing again. “Just pretend I’m not here. Or tell me to get lost if you need to.”
“You’re fine,” Jade said, but her attention was locked on Lucius. “I’m not sure I can say the same about you,” she told him. “What happened?” He looked tired and run-down, and although his hair was slightly damp and he was wearing clean clothes, he smelled inexplicably of wood smoke.
“Rabbit sterilized the scene,” he said when she wrinkled her nose. He held out his hand to her.
“Let’s take a walk. I need your help with something.”
“Is that a euphemism?” Patience asked without looking up.
Lucius grinned. “I thought we were pretending you had turned yourself invisible.”
Her head came up and she glanced speculatively at him. “Given that she would be able to see me but you wouldn’t, that thought has potential. Weird potential, granted, but potential nonetheless.”
Jade snorted. “Glad to see you’re feeling better.”
“I haven’t been feeling good for way too long,” the blonde answered bluntly. “I’ve decided it’s time for me to get over myself.”
“Fair enough.” Jade set aside the Idiot’s Guide, let the magic dissipate, and stood. To Patience, she said, “After the solstice, you, Sasha, and I should have a chick date.”
A shadow crossed the younger woman’s face. Jade was familiar with the look, having seen it plenty in her practice. It was one part excitement at the thought of making plans, one part, Oh, no, I couldn’t; I need to spend time with my child/boyfriend/husband, and one part dismay at realizing that number two wasn’t true anymore, whether because of a divorce, a breakup, or a death. Patience rallied quickly, though with a smile nowhere near the wattage of the others. “I’d like that.”
To Lucius, Jade said, “A walk, huh? Anywhere in particular?”
“Humor me. I have an idea.”
Jade and Lucius left hand in hand. Patience watched them go and felt a twist of envy, not just for the great sex they were apparently having, but for the uncertainty and excitement of a new relationship.
New love was supposed to be simultaneously wonderful and awful; that was okay. If it was tearing you up inside, you were doing it right. When that sort of thing started happening for the first time at year six . . . that was a different story.
“Just get through this and you’ll be fine,” she told herself for the hundredth time. After checking to make sure nobody else was coming to hang in the book room—since when was the archive party central?—she returned to the computer and the two files she had open.
She saved and closed the first one, a quick rundown of her and Brandt’s trip to Egypt that she’d named “Camel butter, Cairo, and nothing new on the pharaoh.” That left the one she’d really been after, a doc Strike had entitled simply “Finding Mendez.”
Patience had been afraid to read it openly with Jade in the room, because she knew that pretending interest in recent history wasn’t going to fly with the archivist. So she’d waited the other woman out—
and had enjoyed the process far more than she had expected to.
Now, though, she focused on her objective, skimming through the story of how, as a new-made king, Strike had gone personally to collect two of the hold-outs who hadn’t answered the messages informing them of their true Nightkeeper natures and calling them to Skywatch. The first had been Nate, who had initially resisted, but had eventually come around. The second had been Snake Mendez, and that was where things had gotten complicated. Strike had walked into the middle of the mage’s apprehension on an outstanding warrant for several all-too-human crimes. Raised by a less than sane winikin, Mendez had found the magic on his own, and potentially had access to one of the lost spell books. He also had an impressive list of arrests. Amid the chaos of trying to re-create the Nightkeepers out of a dozen human-raised magi, Strike had decided to let Mendez stay in jail rather than orchestrating anything.
But Patience wasn’t interested in Mendez; she wanted the person who’d taken him down. The address she’d stolen off Strike’s laptop had been six months too old. A call to their landlord had revealed that Woody, Hannah, and the boys had moved on. Patience couldn’t ask Carter to look into it; he was the king’s PI. Nor was she interested in picking someone out of a phone book. She wanted the best.
Halfway down the screen, Patience’s eyes locked on the name Reese Montana. “Bingo.”
Who better than a bounty hunter to find a couple of winikin who were doing their blood-bound best to stay lost?
Lucius elected to walk himself and Jade out to the back of the box canyon on the theory that, one, he was sick of the Jeep, two, they could return for wheels later if necessary, and three, he didn’t want to make a big deal out of the expedition, in case his hunch didn’t pan out. So they walked hand in hand along the canyon floor, breathing the strangely humid air and passing ragged clumps of the algaelike plants that were growing throughout the canyon now. They didn’t talk about the plants, though, or the way the dim sunlight made the humidity feel ten times stickier than it might have otherwise. In fact, they didn’t talk at all, which he thought was probably best, because he couldn’t think about much of anything other than what he hoped they were about to find . . . and how much he dreaded finding it.