“No.”
He wanted his brother and she wanted to see. Just for a moment. She held her hand out. “Touch me again.”
. . . and the sparkles returned like glitter scattered in front of her. Small bits of skin and hair, too small for what she needed. But there was something . . .
She followed the glittering trail, and as if it had been hidden, a small wad of something blazed like a bonfire.
“Is there a wall just to our right?” she asked.
“A building and an alley.” His voice was tight, but she ignored it. She had other business first.
They’d waited for Tom’s brother in the alley. Maybe Jon came to the pay phone here often.
She led Tom to the blaze and bent to pick it up: soft and sticky, gum. Better, she thought, better than she could have hoped. Saliva would make a stronger guide than hair or fingernails could. She released his hand reluctantly.
“What did you find?”
“Molly’s gum.” She allowed her magic to loosen the last spell and slide back to her, hissing as the power warmed her skin almost to the point of burning. The next spell would be easier, even if it might eventually need more power. Sympathetic magic—which used the connections between like things—was one of those affinities that ran through her father’s bloodlines into her.
But before she tried any more magic, she needed to figure out what Tom had done to her spell. How touching him allowed her to see.
She looked unearthly. A violent wind he had not felt, not even when she’d fastened on to his hand with fierce strength, had blown her hair away from her face. The skin on her hands was reddened, as if she held them too close to a fire. He wanted to soothe them—but he firmly intended never to touch her again.
He had no idea what she’d done to him while she held on to him and made his body burn and tremble. He didn’t like surprises, and she’d told him that he would have to look, not that she’d use him to see. He especially didn’t like it that as long as she was touching him, he hadn’t wanted her to let him go.
Witches gather more power from hurting those with magic, she’d said . . . more or less. People just like him—but it hadn’t hurt, not that he’d noticed.
He wasn’t afraid of her, not really. Witch or not, she was no match for him. Even in human form, he could break her human-fragile body in mere moments. But if she was using him . . .
“Why are you helping me?” he asked as he had earlier, but the question seemed more important now. He’d known what she was, but witch meant something different to him now. He knew enough about witches not to ask the obvious question, though—like what it was she’d done to him. Witches, in his experience, were secretive about their spells—like junkyard dogs are secretive about their bones.
She’d taken something from him by using him that way . . . broken the trust he’d felt building between them. He needed to reestablish what he could expect out of her. Needed to know exactly what she was getting him into, beyond rescuing his brother. Witches were not altruistic. “What do you want out of this? Revenge for your blindness?”
She watched him . . . appeared to watch him, anyway, as she considered his question. There hadn’t been many people who could lie to Tom before he Changed—cops learn all about lying the first year on the job. Afterward . . . he could smell a lie a mile away an hour before it was spoken.
“Alan Choo sent you,” she said finally. “That’s one. Your brother’s a policeman, and an investigation into his death might be awkward. That’s two. He takes risks to help people he doesn’t know—it’s only right someone return the favor. That’s three.”
They weren’t lies, but they weren’t everything, either. Her face was very still, as if the magic she worked had changed her view of him, too.
Then she tilted her head sideways and said in a totally different voice, hesitant and raw. “Sins of the fathers.”
Here was absolute truth. Obscure as hell, but truth. “Sins of the fathers?”
“Kouros’s real name is Lin Keller, though he hasn’t used it in twenty years or more.”
“He’s your father.” And then he added two and two. “Your father is running Samhain’s Coven?” Her father had ruined her eye and—Tom could read between the lines—caused her to ruin the other? Her own father?
She drew in a deep breath—and for a moment he was afraid she was going to cry or something. But a stray gust of air brought the scent of her to him, and he realized she was angry. It tasted like a werewolf’s rage, wild and biting.
“I am not a part of it,” she said, her voice a half octave lower than it had been. “I’m not bringing you to his lair so he can dine upon werewolf, too. I am here because some jerk made me feel sorry for him. I am here because I want both him and his brother out of my hair and safely out of the hands of my rat-bastard father so I won’t have their deaths on my conscience, too.”
Someone else might have been scared of her, she being a witch and all. Tom wanted to apologize—and he couldn’t remember the last time that impulse had touched him. It was even more amazing because he wasn’t at fault: she’d misunderstood him. Maybe she’d picked up on how appalled he was that her own father had maimed her—he hadn’t been implying she was one of them.
He didn’t apologize, though, or explain himself. People said things when they were mad that they wouldn’t tell you otherwise.
“What was it you did to me?”
“Did to you?” Arctic ice might be warmer.
“When you were looking for the gum. It felt like you hit me with a bolt of lightning.” He was damned if he’d tell her everything he felt.
Her right eyebrow peeked out above her sunglasses. Interest replaced coldness. “You felt like I was doing something to you?” And then she held out her left hand. “Take my hand.”
He looked at it.
After a moment, she smiled. He didn’t know she had a smile like that in her. Bright and cheerful and sudden. Knowing. As if she had gained every thought that passed through his head. Her anger, the misunderstanding between them was gone as if it had never been.
“I don’t know what happened,” she told him gently. “Let me try re-creating it, and maybe I can tell you.”
He gave her his hand. Instead of taking it, she put only two fingers on his palm. She stepped closer to him, dropped her head so he could see her scalp gleaming pale underneath her dark hair. The magic that touched him this time was gentler, sparklers instead of fireworks—and she jerked her fingers away as if his hand were a hot potato.
“What the heck . . . ” She rubbed her hands on her arms with nervous speed.
“What?”
“You weren’t acting as my focus—I can tell you that much.”
“So what was going on?”
She shook her head, clearly uncomfortable. “I think I was using you to see. I shouldn’t be able to do that.”
He found himself smiling grimly. “So I’m your Seeing Eye wolf?”
“I don’t know.”
He recognized her panic, having seen it in his own mirror upon occasion. It was always frightening when something you thought was firmly under control broke free to run where it would. With him, it was the wolf.
Something resettled in his gut. She hadn’t done it on purpose; she wasn’t using him.
“Is it harmful to me?”
She frowned. “Did it hurt?”
“No.”
“Either time?”
“Neither time.”
“Then it didn’t harm you.”
“All right,” he said. “Where do we go from here?”
She opened her right hand, the one with the gum in it. “Not us. Me. This is going to show us where Molly is—and Molly will know where your brother is.”
She closed her fingers, twisted her hand palm down, then turned herself in a slow circle. She hit a break in the pavement, and he grabbed her before she could do more than stumble. His hand touched her wrist, and she turned her hand to grab him as the kick of power flowed through his body once more.