As he carried her, he sniffed. An otter’s nose wasn’t like a wolf dual’s or even a cat dual’s but it still carried a lot of information that a normy wouldn’t catch. The young woman was terrified—but not of him and, he thought, not from her recent brush with death. The smell was sharp enough he’d have noticed it before, which meant it started when he mentioned the hospital. She was telling the truth when she said she’d rather die than go back to the Agency (or wherever she’d been). He wasn’t sure what the connection was between hospitals and the Agency, but he meant to find out.
Under the fear, Meaghan smelled like amber and ocean.
It made sense she’d smell a bit like salt water at the moment, but she carried the scent of the ocean in a deep, innate way, in her blood, not just on the surface of her skin. Normal for otter duals, but he’d only met a few humans who smelled like the ocean was part of their being, and only one he’d had the chance to sniff this intimately: Deck Donovan.
His ex.
Could he be an ex when they had never really been a couple? His once and future fuck buddy, maybe?
Whatever. He freely admitted he was obsessed with Deck, but this wasn’t the time to give in to the obsession.
And Kyle had caught that amber scent before when he was visiting Donovan’s Cove. Couldn’t place which witch carried that warm smell, let alone remember what it meant, but the connection was clear. If you smelled like amber even after a long, battering immersion in the Pacific, you were a witch.
All right then. Not a mentally ill person projecting her trauma onto the Agency. A witch who’d been traumatized by the Agency.
This was deeper than he’d meant to dive, but once you were in the water you might as well keep swimming.
“Shit.” His vocabulary wasn’t very creative at the moment, but some situations required expletives.
“What?” She’d cringed from the anger in Kyle’s voice and he wished he could take the word back, react more gently so he wouldn’t startle her. A protective instinct he didn’t know he had flared up, and he longed to comfort her.
He shook his head, then remembered that she couldn’t see him. “Just realized something. Nothing to do with you.”
“I already said you’re a lousy liar. You just proved it again.”
There was nothing he could say, not with his relatives staring at them, so he barked, “Jorie, don’t just stand there, open the damn van door. The girl’s getting the bed in the back.”
Meaghan laughed, then laughed again when he laid her down. “You have a bed in the back of your van?”
“It’s for camping,” he said quickly. “My family’s been camping this weekend.” That wasn’t a lie. It was for camping, and occasionally for other recreational activities, but he’d put on clean sheets before they’d headed out for a long weekend at the beach, and as far as he knew, everyone had stayed in otter form since getting there. He tossed his brother Rick his keys. “You’re driving to our place. Then you all have to fend for yourselves for a while. I need to take care of Meaghan.”
As he curled up next to the girl, who was still shivering, he felt rather than saw Rick’s gaping stare. His family didn’t much care for the decisive, take-charge side of Kyle—but he had to be that person sometimes. Herding otter duals was worse than herding cats. At least you didn’t expect much from actual, all-the-time-furry cats. “Drive!” he repeated. On the second order, Rick started the van and pulled out.
As Meaghan warmed up, the scents of amber and the heart of the ocean strengthened, became richer. Kyle’s body started to express its opinion about being curled up with her, and those opinions were far happier than they had any right to be under the circumstances. He was relieved when she spoke, distracting him from his own thoughts.
“How many people are here?” the girl asked. “I hear more moving and breathing than I’ve heard talking.”
“Eleven, including me.” He didn’t mention they were all naked except for Tim, who’d never gotten out of otter form.
“Can they hear us?”
Kyle glanced around. “I doubt they’re listening. They’re easily distracted.”
“Good.” Her voice was surprisingly firm for someone who’d nearly died. “Then you can tell me what I really said during the seizure. I know you were lying before.”
If she’d been a normy girl who’d babbled something nonsensical during a seizure, he wouldn’t say anything.
But she smelled like a witch, and she was scared to death of the Agency, and her “nonsense” seemed to involve people he cared about. “You talked about a baby.”
The Donovans were always having babies. It went with all the sex magic, and the way they seemed to fall in love harder than other people. (Except for Deck, who didn’t want to fall in love—at least not with Kyle. He reminded himself that he didn’t have time to swim in that particular current right now.)
Meaghan’s already pale face turned a starker color, translucent and sickly. Tears rose in her unseeing eyes, but she blinked them away and no more followed.
“It sounds like the baby might be in danger. It seems you’re in trouble with the Agency, so I’m guessing the threat to the baby is from the Agency.” Someone hissed. The sound of that hated name could get even his family’s scattered attention.
“I can’t go back.” Her voice was frantic, but the lines of her face were determined. “I’ve seen where the baby is, and if they find me again, they’ll find out. I can’t control what I say during seizures. You can’t take me to the hospital. The Agency knows I escaped into the ocean, so they’ll be monitoring hospitals for me. Hospitals and morgues. You can’t.”
She smelled like truth. Ocean and amber and truth. She needed more help than Kyle and his scatterbrained relatives could provide.
She needed Donovan-level help, the kind that involved both healing and an economy-size can of magical whoop ass. “You’re right. I can’t. Luckily I know who can help you. Hope you don’t mind a long car trip.”
Kyle expected her to ask questions. Instead, she nodded and said, “Well, that’s a better kind of new experience than drowning. Especially if there’s help for the baby on the other end of it. Bring it on.”
Chapter Three
Meaghan jolted awake. Panic set in immediately. The air smelled damp, salty and musky, not sharp and antiseptic. The sounds weren’t the familiar, soothing ones of her hospital room. Music was playing, a male singer she didn’t know singing something about a cowboy in the jungle. The tune was bright and lively, but the singer’s voice was edged with sadness. The bed she lay on smelled, she thought, like wet animals might. There were no railings or restraints, nothing to hold her safe if she seized.
And she was in a moving vehicle.
Several of Shaw’s more creative expressions exploded from her mouth.
“Easy there,” a man said. “You’re all right. You’re safe. It’s weird waking up in a strange place anyway, and it’s got to be scarier if you can’t see. We’re heading up to my friend’s house. He and his family should be able to help you. Might as well get comfortable. We’ve still got hours to go.”
The voice wasn’t one of the familiar ones she’d known forever—Garrett, Becky, the doctors—and yet it put her at ease. It reminded her of the singer’s in the way it was lively and good-humored and a little melancholy at the same time.
Kyle. His name was Kyle.
It all came back to her. Kyle and his family had pulled her from the arms of the ocean, had saved her life when she was trying to die. But that was all right. Kyle reminded her of the ocean, dangerous and welcoming at the same time. Kyle understood when she babbled about the Agency, said he could help her, said he knew somewhere she could be safe. They’d stopped briefly at his family’s house and then they’d gotten on the road. And she’d been asleep within minutes, as if Kyle’s presence were a lullaby.
Kyle was different fr
om anyone she’d ever known, not that she’d known all that many people. His voice tasted different. He felt different under her skin, his words singing in her blood, his touch, even when he checked her for injuries, nothing like a doctor’s or nurse’s, and nothing like Shaw’s had become either.
He felt stormy and saltsharp, cool and hot at the same time, fierce and caressing. He felt like the ocean, and she could hear waves in the rhythm of his words. And when he touched her, she felt fur.
She liked how he felt. She thought he might not be human, and she found that idea bitterly delightful, that the first ally and friend she’d made was one of those the Agency persecuted.
Kyle’s Pacific voice interrupted her reverie. “Brace yourself. I’m pulling off the road. You hungry?”
Meaghan wasn’t used to thinking about hunger. Food appeared at set times and she was expected to eat it whether her body prompted or not. But Kyle’s question made her aware of the hollowness in her belly. “Starving,” she said. “And I need to…”
Kyle laughed. The sound swam over her skin like he was touching her with it. “Why do you think I was pulling off?”
Kyle came around to the back to the van. She heard a large door open, felt a rush of cool, damp air scented with a hint of something that ought to be familiar.
Cigarettes and fried food?
Yes.
She hadn’t smelled cigarettes since she was a little girl, before the hospital. It wasn’t a pretty smell, but it now proved to her that she was Outside the Hospital, “with capital letters,” which was something Garrett would say sometimes, though Meaghan had needed him to explain what he meant.
It smelled like freedom.
As for the fried food, that simply smelled delicious. She didn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. She’d just picked at breakfast at the hospital. It hadn’t seemed worth the effort to eat much. But since it seemed she was going to live—at least until her brain blew up—she might as well enjoy a good lunch. Or dinner. Or whatever.
She hesitated at the door of the van. She suspected the door she was using was designed more for cargo than for people because it was wide, with nothing easy to grasp. “It seems like I’m far from the ground.”
“A couple of feet, a hop, not a step. I’m sorry. I know you can’t see, but I’m still figuring out what info you need.” Kyle chuckled, obviously at himself and not at her. The sound washed over her, warm and pleasant. Laughter wasn’t a completely unfamiliar sound, but nine times out of ten she’d heard it in a movie or an audiobook, not real life. Garrett and Becky and the other nurses had done their best, but life in the hospital wasn’t lighthearted.
And Shaw never laughed. Even in the middle of sex, he’d been stern, controlled.
Remembering that, she felt sick, not physically, but in her heart, knowing how fucked up it was to have let someone like Shaw into her body. She swayed slightly.
Kyle must have seen something was wrong—but not, thank goodness, what. “Let me help you down. That way you won’t have to leap into the unknown.”
“I’ve been doing enough of that lately.”
Strong arms grasped her around the waist. Kyle still smelled like the Pacific, even though she’d heard him showering before they left his house, after she had. He’d stayed in the bathroom while she’d showered, to make sure she was all right after her near drowning and seizure. He’d been apologetic, but it made her feel safe. They’d let her shower alone at the hospital, but there was always a nurse nearby in case of a seizure. It had been different with Kyle there, though. More intimate. She kept feeling fur and ocean pass over her skin as she bathed and knew he was watching her, and not just to make sure she was safe.
He enjoyed looking at her. She liked knowing that. Her freakishness must not show on the outside.
“Hop down,” he said.
She did, and for a second, she pretended she was flying in his arms.
No. Riding a wave, only on purpose this time. Not caught up in helpless terror, but knowing she could swim to safety and thus able to enjoy the sense of weightlessness.
Too soon, her feet touched pavement. She expected Kyle to let go then, but he didn’t, just changed the way he was touching her. “Is it okay if I take your arm?” he asked, as if he didn’t realize he was already holding it. “I’ll try to keep you from walking into walls.”
“Good idea. I’m not used to open space.”
Which sounded sad once she said it out loud. She knew her life had been odd, but hearing Kyle’s little intake of breath, she suspected that in the world outside the Agency, blind people had more opportunities to get around than she ever had.
She took a few steps, following Kyle’s lead, and realized they were leaning on each other. Maybe it felt as natural to him as it did to her.
That was a pleasant thought. She was a fugitive, and she was in seventy-two different kinds of trouble and she had a terminal illness, but she could pretend she was a normal girl out with an attractive young man. At least he sounded young and felt fit and strong, so she could imagine him as attractive.
Kyle couldn’t possibly be interested in her. If he’d enjoyed looking at her naked body while she showered, it was because he didn’t know she was broken. Defective, as Shaw told her toward the end, worth fucking only because of the magic. And Kyle wouldn’t be able to exploit the magic. He didn’t have that sulfur smell, didn’t give her a harsh, scraping sensation on the inside of her mind, like Shaw and his sorcerer colleagues had. So she’d be of no use to him.
Although he knew she was a Different, a freak, and didn’t seem to care.
Then again, he might be a Different himself.
Kyle stopped walking “You okay? You smell upset.”
She smelled upset? Garrett said she smelled and heard better than most people because her body was compensating for the blindness. Even so, she wouldn’t have been able to smell if someone was upset. “I’m just nervous,” she lied, “I’ve never been in a restaurant before.” She realized as she said it that it was true, though far from the whole truth. The pleasure of Kyle’s touch had overshadowed her jitters.
“You’ve never…” Kyle hugged her, quick and hard. “This is just a diner, simple, cheap food and lots of it. But as soon as I can, I’m taking you out for the meal of your life.”
She’d need new clothes first. Kyle had commandeered everything she was wearing, including her flip-flops, from his various relatives. Her still-damp bra was hanging somewhere in the back of the van to dry and she wasn’t wearing underpants under the oversized sweats. But the thought made her smile as Kyle very carefully escorted her through the door.
Noise and smells bowled her over. Disoriented, she clung to Kyle’s arm, trying to make sense of all the chattering, clanking and bustling. She clung to the reassuring scents of coffee and bacon in much the same way she held on to Kyle.
“Two?” an unfamiliar, raspy female voice said. Waitress.“This way.”
Kyle led her, obviously following the waitress, and guided her into a bench seat—a booth. She heard something flat smacking the table in front of her. Menu. She hoped Kyle would be okay with reading it to her, but Kyle had a different idea.
“What’s on special today?” he asked. “The board’s a little hard to read.”
“Sorry, Joe’s handwriting stinks but all the regulars know the Wednesday specials anyway.” The raspy-voiced waitress rattled off a list almost too fast for Meaghan to catch, but she settled on the meat loaf and Kyle ordered a fried fish sandwich. Both asked for coffee.
“I’m glad you got the meat loaf. I’m more of a fish guy, but I love a good meat loaf and that way I can steal a taste,” Kyle said.
“I’ve never had meat loaf, but it sounded good. Meat in a loaf, which is like bread. How could meat-bread be bad?”
“You’ve never had…” Kyle’s voice did a weird dive from a shout to a gentle
whisper over the course of those three words. “Well, you just disproved a theory. I thought every mom in America had a special meat loaf recipe, none of which are as good as my mom’s.”
“I don’t remember. I don’t remember my mom much. I’ve been at an Agency hospital since I was little.” To her horror, Meaghan felt her eyes fill up with tears. It had been years since she let herself cry over the loss of her family. She recalled so little of the time before the hospital that she could pretend there never was a time before. But in this comfortably alien environment with this comfortable stranger, she realized how odd and lonely her life had been.
A hand brushed her cheek. “I’d say ‘don’t cry’,” Kyle whispered, “but maybe you need to. You’ve gone through some bad shit, and it must be stressful being outside, even though it’s good. But I’ll keep you safe. I promise. Maybe my friends can help you find your parents. No promises on that, but if anyone can, it’s them.”
For a second, hope flared, along with memories of a woman’s gentle hands, a man singing to her, and vague memories of being able to see. Then she remembered other things: her parents fighting about what to do about a child who wasn’t normal. Fighting about her. Being left in a strange place with a stuffed rabbit and a tall, quiet man she found later was Shaw. She’d been terrified, and at the same time oddly relieved because the big man didn’t make the same low buzzing in her head that everyone else did. She had to touch him or hear his voice or his footsteps to know where he was. One of the first things she’d been taught at the Agency hospital was how to shield out the buzzing made by the hum of other people’s thoughts.
“No.” Her voice was firm enough it surprised her, considering how close to tears she was. “My parents gave me up, so I gave them up.”
Then something dawned on her. “Or maybe the Agency stole me. They probably told my parents they could help me with the seizures and they hid me away so they could use my visions to hurt other people. Maybe they even told my family I’d died. I wouldn’t put it past them. I know they’ve done worse things.”
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