Rafe frowned, yet I saw the playful twinkle in his eye. “Are you sure? You seem like a person who likes her space.”
And here was where I needed to actually be truthful. I closed the book and maybe stacked a few before I could work out the words. I would never say that I was afraid, but maybe I didn’t need to be so stubborn. “Piper told us to stay together, and even though I have these sigils, I’m not a super-powered werewolf.”
He looked down at the stack of books, running his finger along the edge of one, then tossed his jacket on the chair again. “Thank you, Merci. I appreciate it.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s not like I’ll be cooking you breakfast.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
I woke to the smell of baked goods. I stretched, and as the cobwebs cleared from my mind, I remembered there was another person in my house. Was Rafe baking? In my kitchen? No one made actual food in my kitchen. I wasn’t even sure I had anything to bake on. Worst of all, could he be a morning person?
I ran through the shower and dressed for the day, a whole ten-minute process I’d perfected over the years. I did stop to smear some tinted moisturizer to keep the sunburn and wind burn at a minimum and I flicked some mascara on my lashes. Presentable enough for my kitchen at this ungodly hour.
Rafe was not flipping pancakes as I had imagined, and I sighed, slightly disappointed.
A pot of coffee was brewing and there was something in the oven. He looked up from the book he was reading as he leaned against the counter. “It’s cinnamon rolls from the corner store. Don’t be too impressed.”
“You are going to spoil me, Professor MacCallan.” I poured a cup of coffee and sat down at the table, still littered in our readings and plottings.
He followed me across the room and sat in his chair from last night. “Well, point of education. Not being hungry keeps me in a fairly good mood.”
“You or the wolf?”
“Both.”
I pushed through the photos again, the map we had made of the dead bodies. I closed a couple of books and read their titles. Spellcraft and the Modern Witch. And something in Russian that looked ominous. But all Russian looked ominous.
It really was the same as writing an article. The subject was different, way different, but the process was the same. Dig in for a few days to really get the dirt, the case would crack, and the truth would always come to me. Sometimes like a sweet whisper and sometime like a punch to the gut, but I would always figure it out. But was that figuring it out me, or the magical power? Did the Charm bring the answer to me, or did I really crack the cases myself? Would I be as good a reporter if I wasn’t a Wanderer? Or was it some mix of both?
I felt the frown etch into my face as I glared down at the books before me.
“What’s the medallion around your neck?” Rafe pointed.
I took Ethan’s charm between my fingers and flipped it around, over and over, the motion soothing me. “Something Ethan gave me.”
“Can I see it?”
I pulled it toward him, but didn’t take it off. He leaned in to inspect the strange symbols. I had to look away; the heat was radiating off of him with such strength that it burned my eyes. And I guessed he hadn’t showered, since his musk was even more potent than usual.
He hmmmed as he pulled away and went back to sipping his coffee.
“Don’t suppose you know what it says?” I asked as I went back to flipping through the book. I could still feel the burn of him on my face and no amount of dusty books could take away his smell.
“I recognize the sign for protection, but that’s all I know. If you really want me to, I can decipher it.”
The timer for the cinnamon rolls went off before I could respond, and Rafe retrieved breakfast with a potholder. Who knew I had a potholder? And one with a chicken on it to boot.
I cleared a place on the table for the amazing smelling rolls. I didn’t care that they were a little extra crispy around the edges. When he put the icing on the top, I wanted all of them to myself.
He refreshed our coffees, grabbed two plates and forks, and joined me. “What are you looking at me for?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. I’m … just …”
“Merci Lanard lost for words?” He smiled.
I spit out the words even though they were slightly embarrassing. “I don’t often share breakfast with someone.”
“Well,” he said as he divvied out the lot, “I know Ethan’s slept in that bed within the past three months.”
I accepted my sticky pile of carbohydrates and wonderfulness. “Ethan crashed here a few times, but he never made breakfast.”
“Score bonus points for me then.”
I snorted. “It isn’t a competition. Ethan and I weren’t like that.” I took a big bite out of a roll.
“So what are you and I like then?”
I shoved the rest of a cinnamon roll in my mouth and pointedly ignored the question, turning instead to the research. Suddenly the notion of dead bodies and the city map was very interesting. I pulled the map to me and studied the locations we’d plotted the night before, the spots where the bodies were discovered, and bit into a fresh cinnamon roll.
Rafe didn’t give me a pass. “What was it like between you two? I only got one side of the story.”
“And what was that side of the story?” I asked with a full mouth.
“Mostly it was about your work, your insistence on finding the truth, your ability to get in and out of trouble. Sounded as if the two of you were thick as thieves, he’d follow you anywhere.”
I swallowed. It was a little early in the morning for honesty, but the truth really would be easier to remember after the caffeine and sugar hit my system. “Ethan was my rock. And since I didn’t have a lot of family, he sort of became everything for me. The two of us saving the world.”
“Did you love him?”
I snorted. “No.”
The lie tasted like how burnt hair smelled, and I gulped down the coffee to wash it away. “Well, not in the romantic sense. He was my family. But I realize now our whole friendship was one-sided, because he had Emily, and a pack, and you. I just had him.”
Rafe turned his mug around in his hands. “After Da left my mum, I didn’t talk to him. I didn’t even know Ethan existed until he showed up at my door. I was already living in Philly, and he was this Midwestern kid without a pack with my father’s legacy. He had a letter from my Da about how we were brothers and blood was important and …” His sentence dropped off and I didn’t push him.
I knew most of the story, though Ethan had told me he moved out here after college and met Emily camping. I guess hadn’t technically been a lie. For all I knew he met her on a pleasant stroll through wolf-infested woods.
“What was his relationship with his mom? Ethan never mentioned her.” I wasn’t even sure if she had been at the funeral.
Rafe did smile at that one. “Daisy is a massive hippy, in fact. Emily called her for the funeral and she was in India. Is all about following the Mother. I guess when Da died and Ethan felt the call to find his brother, she was all for letting him follow his wolf. He packed up everything after he graduated college and moved to be closer to me. He joined the pack, and then he and Emily happened and, then he found you. We were just really hitting a stride of being brothers, when …”
I put some math together in my head as I sipped my coffee and let my questions distract him from the painful memory. “What came first, the paper or the pack’s need for information about the city?”
Rafe sucked on his bottom lip for a moment, his tell that he was holding back some truth but it eventually same out. “The need for information came first. Ethan volunteered to see what he could do at the paper to prove himself worthy of marrying the Primo’s sister.”
I took in a deep breath. And then I shoved another cinnamon roll in my mouth.
“But he did value your time together. He probably told you things, thoughts, that he never told me. Things more important than ma
gic and shifting.”
“Pretty sure it was a proximity thing. It gets really boring on stakeouts.”
Rafe almost smiled, and I felt a pang in my chest. When he was alive, I thought I’d known everything about Ethan. But maybe he had just split himself in two, like Rafe had said. Split himself into two people, one half the journalistic photographer and my best friend, and the other half a dutiful pack member who howled under a full moon.
I watched as the furrowed in Rafe’s brow got deeper as he looked into his coffee. I knew where that spiral would lead, where that line of mental questioning would go, and I was running low on whiskey. And it seriously was too early to start drinking. We had a mystery to solve.
I ran my finger along the map charting out the dead bodies, the neutral territory where our pasts didn’t matter, just the here and now. We’d marked out the dead bodies, trying to predict the next location in the pattern, but without more information about the spell, we didn’t know what else to do. The three red Xs created a demented smiling face staring up at me with the river as a crooked mouth.
My thoughts were interrupted by my ringing cellphone. I fished it out of the bottom of my bag. “Lanard.”
“Got a catch for you,” Hayne started before he even said hello. “Building fire on Sixth.”
“Hayne, come on. It’s barely seven a.m.”
“Go. Now. You need more inches this month to justify what I pay you.”
“Fine.” I sighed as I ended the call and tossed the phone back into my bag. “I have to go.” I started to gulp my coffee and shoved another roll in my mouth.
Rafe stood with me as I slung my bag over my shoulder and dropped my notebook and recorder into its bottomless depths. “Mind if I tag along? I really don’t have anything else to do today.”
I could only raise an eyebrow with my mouth full.
Rafe smiled. “I could man the camera?”
As Rafe and I walked toward the crowd already gathered, I made a mental note that Hayne needed to verify his sources next time. It wasn’t a building fire, it was building explosion. The second floor of the brick office building was gone, blown to pieces that littered a one-block radius, and it was still burning. Emergency service had already blocked off the streets, but no firefighters were manning hoses to stop the blaze.
I pushed my way to the barricade and smiled when I saw a familiar face manning crowd control. “Rutherford!” I waved as I quickly ducked under the wooden barricades.
Rutherford jogged over to where I was, a deep furrow in his brow for so early in the morning.
“How the hell do you …” he trailed off as he pushed me back over to the public side of the barricade. He ran his hands along the flat wooden side facing the fire, and stared at in intently, like he was reading something across it that I couldn’t see.
He finally turned his glare to me. “Are you the only reporter at that newspaper?”
“Are you the only cop on the streets?” I fired back. “What’s going on?”
“What does it look like?”
I studied the scene again and let the questions start to sizzle and spin. “Gas fire? Burning so hot that the fireman can’t fight it?”
He glared down at me.
I matched that glare with my own and reveled in that deliciously familiar chill down my spine. After the little trek down emotions lane this morning, I was energized by the storm clouds in my brain that always preceded a story. As new and strange as knowing why this always happened, magic was starting to fit into my life, becoming perhaps a little too familiar.
“Is it a natural gas fire?”
He gulped as my magic took hold. “We already called the gas company to stop the flow to this area. Don’t want to blow the whole neighborhood.”
“So residents are in danger?”
“Seems contained.”
“Anything weird happen before the explosions?”
“A few people reported an earthquake. Windows shook, and it would explain a gas line rupture explosion.” The man smacked his dry mouth and gulped again.
I released him from the Charm. As I had a million times before. Just looked away, like releasing a balloon on string.
Rutherford backed up from the barricade. “I shouldn’t be talking to you.”
“Always a pleasure, Julie.”
I scratched down a few notes to myself, making sure to get his phrasing right. I surveyed the crowd for another person to corroborate his story. There was a woman eating her breakfast on her front stoop who looked like she might talk. I turned to Rafe, who was right at my back. “Can you sniff around the back of the building, see if anything’s strange?
“Like sniff around for clues or actually sniff around?” he asked, trying to be serious, but the twinkle in his eye was unmistakable.
“I don’t see why they need to be mutually exclusive.”
He smiled and worked his way in the other direction.
I was jotting down the rest of the woman’s words when Rafe walked up behind me. I thanked the woman and gave her my card in case she ever needed to report anything like this again.
I turned around to Rafe, grabbed his elbow, and headed to the back of the crowd, away from prying ears. “Did you get anything?”
“Oh yeah. You?”
“An earthquake happened before the explosion.”
“In Philadelphia?” Rafe asked.
“Resident said there have been a series of them recently, starting about a month back. Building shaking and birds acting strange. Cop said windows rattled with the explosion today, which totally makes sense. But the witness says a big one hit about good ten minutes before.”
I watched his lips as he spoke fast, breathless. “The building behind is a warehouse. It’s nothing, an old storage place with a big loading dock in the back. But the place is covered in magic.”
“What? What happened?”
Rafe shook his head. “I don’t know. I wanted to grab you before I went in to really look.”
I nodded as I jammed my notepad in my messenger bag and followed after him.
The space was open and reminded me of a rave I went to in college. A dock at the front stood a good six feet higher than the rest of the open area. It was all concrete and metal rafters, decorated with graffiti and shreds of plastic tarp.
“Do you feel anything here?”
“What do you mean?”
He walked closer to me and dropped his voice, as if someone could be listening. “Like any weird sensations. Something that wouldn’t be attributed to a drafty warehouse in winter.”
I focused. Right now, all I was feeling was the warmth of his figure.
It was hard to turn my brain off, silence the questions long enough to get a sense of the place. I shook my head. No other super powers for me. Bummer. “Not really. It’s just cold.”
“Right. But what kind of cold?” he pressed.
I raised an eyebrow. “There is more than one kind?”
“There are a million kinds. What kind is it to you?”
I sighed, but closed my eyes. Different kinds of cold? Wasn’t sure I read about that in the Idiot’s Guide.
His voice was in my ear. “Do you trust me?”
My eyes flew open and I whipped my head around to lock eyes with him over my shoulder. “Barely.”
Rafe held up his hand and gently put it on my shoulder. “You know how the Primo exchanges energy with the pack?”
I nodded. The pow-wow under the full moon, where Levi communed with his pack. Whatever Piper did to make the place smell like cinnamon.
“I should be able to share my energy with you, enhance you so you can physically sense what I am sensing. It’s one of my perks.”
“There was a should in that sentence.”
“Please, Merci. Try?”
It was the please that grabbed me around the middle and squeezed. My breath caught in my throat and I couldn’t say no. I closed my eyes and turned to face forward. It was easy to relax with him so close to me, with
that intense heat pressing against my back.
When the slip of fur surrounded me, my knees went weak, but I didn’t fall. Rafe’s other hand rested on my waist to steady me, and I could feel his words curl around my ear lobe.
“I’ve linked my power into your senses. Can you still feel the cold?”
I could barely focus on anything that wasn’t his body at my back and his hand on my waist. I opened my eyes. The lights in the warehouse were brighter, the morning sun cutting sharper lines across the concrete floor. The place smelled worse than before, like rotten eggs and dead fish. “Is this how you experience things?” I whispered.
I wasn’t sure I would ever feel cold again with the memory of his heat around me, even stronger now we were connected. But that was not why we were walking through this exercise. I needed to find the cold spot.
And it was there, this cold eating at my right side. That corner of the warehouse was dark. Though by the light in the place, it should appear like all the other corners. Yet darkness was gathered there. I pointed to the spot. “Like sticking your hand into a refrigerator.”
But Rafe didn’t respond. He pulled away from me and with him went his warmth, the slide of fur against me. I gasped when our powers fully disconnected, my head spinning.
When the world stopped, when I turned back toward him, I was caught in the full force of his Aegean-blue eyes and suddenly I knew exactly how all the people I charmed felt. Trapped, held, and completely unable to look away no matter what was said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“Tell you what?”
His brows crooked into a jagged furrow. “Tell me that you wander.”
Of course he knew now. I let him tap into my energy and he must have felt magic there, the other half of me I had been hiding from him. I licked my lips and still tasted cinnamon. Surely that couldn’t be from breakfast. Was it his power?
“I didn’t know until Piper told me.”
There was a question on his lips. Hanging there, and he fought it. I could see it in those wide blue eyes. He wanted to ask it, but he didn’t want the answer.
So I shifted to the matter at hand, hoping he would follow, hoping we could avoid this little tiny omission. “Is that cold spot what you felt at Tay-Tay’s apartment when you said the place had been sucked dry of energy? Could a spell have been done here large enough to cause earthquakes that eventually ruptured a gas line?”
The Truth About Night Page 16