by Tessa Adams
“I didn’t realize that was a difficult question.” Nate’s wry tone jerks my attention back to him.
“It’s not that. I just don’t know how to answer. I met him eight years ago and we spent an evening together. But I hadn’t seen or talked to him again until the other night.”
“Yet you left the police station with him. Even knowing that someone had just killed a woman he is connected to, a woman who looks an awful lot like you, you walked away from certain safety and got into a car with him?”
Put like that, it sounds ridiculous. No wonder Nate is looking at me like I’m crazy—and like he doesn’t believe a word I’ve just told him.
“It was a really intense night.”
“For most people finding a dead body is.”
“I meant the night eight years ago, when I first met him.” The words are out before I register that I’m going to say them. I wonder what he would say if I told him I’d found a dead body that night too? Declan would probably find himself in jail before he could say “Hocus Pocus.”
“What are you hiding?” Nate demands.
“About Declan? Nothing.”
“About yourself. I’ve been doing this job for over a decade, Xandra. I know when a witness is lying to me.”
“I haven’t told you anything that isn’t true.”
“Yeah, but you haven’t told me the real truth either, have you?” He tosses his pad and pen onto my coffee table, thrusts a hand through his hair in obvious frustration. “I’m trying to help you, Xandra. You need to get that through your thick head and start cooperating with me or…” He trails off.
“Or what?” My voice is too loud, my heart beating too fast.
He scoots closer to me on the couch, his hands wrapping around my upper arms in a grip that is firm but painless. The look in his eyes is wild but concerned and I know I’m not talking to the homicide cop anymore. I’m talking to Nate, the guy who came close to asking me out more times than either of us could count.
“Why were you at those murder scenes?” he demands. “You found the first body, and I’m guessing you were responsible for the second one being found as well. My gut tells me you don’t have anything to do with those women dying, but I can listen to it for only so long—especially when my brain, and the evidence, is screaming something else entirely.”
Panic crawls through me. This is it—do or die time. I need to decide how much to tell him, and fast. I can’t reveal my coven or Heka or the power that winds itself through me at the most inopportune of times. It’s part of my oath as a witch, and definitely part of my duty as a princess of Ipswitch. I am to safeguard the secrecy and the sanctity of my coven’s magic—not reveal it to the first cop who ever presses me for answers. At the same time, I have to tell him something because it’s fairly obvious he’s not going to let himself be brushed off. Not this time.
In the end, I skate as close to the truth as I can manage. Which isn’t very close, but maybe—just maybe—it will be enough to satisfy Nate.
“I’m psychic,” I tell him baldly.
His face goes completely blank. “Excuse me?”
“See? This is why I don’t tell people. You should see the way you’re looking at me.”
“Xandra, this is serious—”
“I am serious. I’m psychic,” I say again, though it isn’t exactly true. “I get…flashes of knowledge, usually about nothing important. But the other night when I was sitting in the theater, I picked up on Lina’s pain. On her death.”
Nate doesn’t say anything and I find myself biting my lip and jiggling my foot as I wait for him to answer. Does he believe me? Does he think I’m lying? Does he think I’m crazy? Not that I really care what he thinks about me, but being hauled to the hospital for a psych consult is not how I want to spend my day off. Especially with all this going on.
“You’re psychic?” he finally says, repeating my words back to me.
“Yes.”
“And you saw Lina?”
“Yes.”
“What about Jacqueline? You saw her too?”
“Yes.”
“So you talked your way into an after-hours tour of the Capitol grounds? Because you knew her body was there?”
I hesitate, not sure how much he knows. I don’t want to get Brett in trouble—
“He caved, Xandra. Started talking about the beautiful girl with the short dark hair within seconds of me questioning him.”
“That was me.”
Nate gives me a no-shit look. “And you expect me to believe you knew about the body because you’re psychic.”
“Actually, I don’t expect you to believe anything.” Suddenly, I’m angry. At him, at Declan, at my family, at Salima, and most specifically at the bastard who is doing this, who is killing women in the most brutal manner possible simply because he can. “This isn’t some trick I trot out at parties, Nate. I can’t control what I see or when I see it. I didn’t come to you because I know how crazy it sounds, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Believe me, if I could make it all go away, I would.”
I can’t stand the inactivity of just sitting for one second longer, so I push myself off of the couch. The agonizing pain from last night is gone—Declan took it all away—but I’m still sore, like I’ve pushed my muscles just a little too far.
I walk to my front window, gaze out at the street in front of the house. It’s another dreary day, dark and rainy and cold. It’s a holiday, so almost no one is out in it. There’s nothing to look at except for the rain itself, beating against the porch in windblown sheets of water.
“How much do you see?” Nate comes up behind me, and for a second I think he’s talking about the view outside my window.
“Not much, really. Just glimpses.”
“Do you see the killer?”
“No.”
“How about where he lives? Or where he takes the women to kill them?”
“No.”
“Do you see any landmarks or street names around where he does this?”
“No!” I’m beginning to feel useless, but then that’s not exactly a new feeling for me.
“Can you help me out here, Xandra?” Nate asks, exasperated. “If you don’t see any of that, what does happen?”
“I see them die, feel them die.” Nate sucks a deep breath in through his teeth, but when he doesn’t say anything, I continue. “And I don’t know how, but I always know where the bodies are. That’s it.”
“That sucks.”
“Believe me, I know. If I could have told you more, I would have found a way to come forward. I’m sorry I can’t be of more help—”
“No. I mean, it sucks for you.” He puts a hand on my arm, the friendly heat of him sinking through the thin cotton of my shirt. It warms me. His acceptance, his understanding, of me. “I’m sorry you have to go through that.”
“So am I.” I sag a little, so that my side is resting against his. He shifts, wraps an arm around my shoulder. There’s nothing sexual here, none of the pain or confusion or heat that I feel when Declan touches me. No spark. But the connection, the friendship, is nice. So is the comfort.
“I wish I could be more help,” I tell him after a few minutes. “But by the time I know about the body, it’s too late. He’s long gone.”
“Not really.” Nate pulls away. “The coroner put Jacqueline’s time of death at only an hour or so before you and Brett found her. So if we’d gotten there sooner, if we’d known about her as soon as you knew about her—”
“Then maybe you could have caught him.” I think back, try to figure out when the compulsion hit me. By the time I walked all the way to the Capitol and talked my way onto the grounds, it had probably been close to an hour.
“Do you believe me?” I ask Nate abruptly.
He shifts, runs an uncomfortable hand over his head. “I don’t disbelieve you. How’s that?”
I think about it. “Good enough.” Especially since I’m telling him only a little bit of the truth. “The ne
xt time I feel something, I’ll call you if I can.”
“Not if you can. You will call me. You can’t keep traipsing all over the murder scenes, Xandra. You’re going to get hurt.”
I think of the cuts and bruises Declan removed from me in the early hours of the new year, and nod. I will call Nate as soon as the compulsion hits me—if it lets me. Not that I think he’ll be able to protect me from reliving the women’s deaths, but if calling him sooner actually gives him a chance to catch this bastard, then I am all for it.
“Good.” He glances at his watch. “I have to go—I’m doing a briefing in an hour.”
I walk him to the door.
He steps onto the porch, then turns back toward me. “You need to be careful,” he warns me. “I know you think that Declan and Ryder Chumomisto aren’t involved in this, but my gut says differently. And my instincts are rarely wrong.”
I don’t know what to say to that and by the time I figure it out, he’s halfway to his car.
“Nate!” I call after him.
He turns, an impatient look on his face. I know he expects me to plead Declan’s case again, but what I want to say is the opposite really. But how do you tell a man like Nate that if Declan is involved, he won’t stand a chance of stopping him? No one will.
In the end, I just shrug and lamely call, “You be careful, too.”
He grins and I realize it’s the first smile I’ve seen on his face in days. Not that there’s been so much to smile about lately. “Call me, Xandra.”
I nod, then watch as he pulls away. It’s freezing out and I’m dressed in only a thin shirt and jeans, but I’m not ready to go back inside yet. The air feels fresh, less stifling. If I close my eyes and try not to think, I can pretend my life hasn’t spiraled completely out of control. Can pretend that the walls aren’t closing in and that I still have choices.
But then Lily steps onto the porch and even that illusion is shattered.
Twenty-one
“Your mom just left a message on the answering machine. The witch whisperer is on her way over.”
I can’t help smiling at the way Lily’s latched on to my name for Salima even as annoyance shoots through me. “What does she want from me now?” I wonder. “She already gave me enough crap to study for a month.”
Lily smirks. “Maybe she wants to drop by some more of your mom’s special tea?”
I flip Lily off as I contemplate my options. The polite option would be to just wait here for Salima, so that she can make good on whatever scheme she and my mother have cooked up now. I can reassure her that I’m working on the exercises she gave me and she can report back to my mom that everything is exactly on schedule. It’s certainly the grown-up thing to do. The responsible thing. But then I think about the drama she’ll bring—along with goddess only knows what kind of poison this time around—and I hightail it to my room for my coat.
“Want to go grab a burger?” I ask Lily as she follows me.
“I was thinking pizza.” For the first time I realize her jacket is already in her hand. Just one of the many, many reasons she’s my best friend.
I start to grab my UGGs out of my closet—I can use the comfort of them today—but then I see the purple cowboy boots. They’re still sitting on the dresser where Salima put them, though the right one is now resting drunkenly against the left.
For the first time since I was a kid, I want to slide my feet into a pair of boots. At first I resist the urge, but then decide, what the hell? A little extra help sure wouldn’t hurt right about now.
When I step into the living room a couple of minutes later, Lily notices the boots right away—it’s kind of hard to miss them, after all. But she doesn’t say anything, just smirks at me. That’s when I realize she’s wearing her old, broken-in boots as well.
Great minds obviously think alike.
We head around the block to my favorite Italian restaurant, and as we do, my conscience niggles a little. Not because I’m ditching my mom and Salima—that’s just self-preservation—but I know Donovan will worry about me if my mom tells him I’m not home. But surely even he recognizes the folly of me hanging around the house waiting for Salima to show up.
I text him a quick message, let him know where I’m going to be. And then do my best to enjoy the brisk walk through the cold, my arm linked with Lily’s. This feels so normal, so right, after the nightmare of the last few days and I want to absorb every second of it.
But we’re barely seated at our favorite corner table before Lily says, “I think I found something.” She looks stressed, more stressed than I’ve ever seen her and I immediately tense up.
“About the killer?” I demand even as I wonder how that’s possible. Maybe her cards—
She shakes her head. “About you and Declan.” Her voice breaks a little.
I think back to Declan’s and my painful conversation last night, about how he’d been prepared to kill me in order to escape the magic that binds us together. Then I think of what I read in that book of Lily’s last night. I’d wanted to ask him about it, but had gotten sidetracked by the knowledge of just how close to death I’d come eight years ago. I won’t be sidetracked today, not when it feels like everything hangs on the answer to this one question. “Does it have anything to do with being soulbound?”
She looks at me, surprised. There’s something else in her eyes, too, something I can’t quite identify, though it looks an awful lot like fear. “You already know?”
“I saw the book you were reading last night. You fell asleep with it open to a page that mentions it.”
“Oh, right.” She relaxes, then smiles at the waiter who approaches to take our order.
I’m on tenterhooks the whole time, now that I know the answers to my questions are just within reach. The second the waiter walks away, I grab Lily’s hand and demand, “Tell me.”
She clears her throat, shoves a lock of curly hair behind her ear. Rearranges her silverware. Basically does everything but look at me. “Just tell me!” I demand harshly. After everything that’s happened, I feel like I’m about to shatter. I need to know the truth.
“It’s an Anathema,” she whispers and everything inside me freezes.
An Anathema. My eyes close and I shudder in horror. This is so much worse than I thought. “From the Council?” I whisper.
“Who else?” Lily answers impatiently, and I know she’s right. No one else is powerful enough to lock an Anathema on to a warlock of Declan’s power. Maybe my family could manage it, but it would take my mom, dad, Donovan and Rachael all working together to make something like this stick. And it can’t be them for two reasons.
One, my parents don’t dabble in things like this. And two, they would never deliberately do something to hurt me—and everything inside me is screaming that before this is over, I’m going to suffer a lot more than I already have. We both are.
I think back on what Declan told me in the middle of the night and for the first time, truly understand why he came to kill me all those years ago. Anathemas are dark, dark magic. The most powerful curses in existence, they are strictly forbidden in my coven and all the others we associate with. They are also forbidden by the ACW (except, it seems, by their own hand), outlawed centuries ago because of the magic it takes to conjure them—and the blackness they bring to the wizards, witches or warlocks struck by them.
I think of Declan, of the darkness that surrounds him all the time. And I want to scream, to rage at the ACW for doing such an awful thing to him. I’ve researched him, talked to him, held him in my arms and I know that there is nothing he could have done to deserve such a curse.
Yes, he’s shadowed. Yes, he sometimes walks the line between right and wrong, but how could he not with an Anathema hanging over him? How much strength, how much power, does it take for him to resist the black call of it every single moment of every single day of his life?
And yet he’s done it. For twenty-seven years, he’s done it, when he could have ended it years ago by sim
ply murdering me. By taking my soul out of the equation. That he hasn’t, even with its darkness embedded so completely inside him, is the mark of greater strength than I have ever known.
“You have to stay away from him.” The urgency in Lily’s voice pulls me out of the horrified stupor I’ve descended into. “If he recognizes you, if he knows—”
“He does,” I tell her. “He already knows that we’re bound.”
“Then he’ll kill you,” she breathes, and this time the hand she reaches out for me is trembling wildly. “Declan Chumomisto isn’t known for his compassion.”
And yet he should be. For the hundredth time, I find myself reliving those long, slow, torturous moments with Declan last night. He’d healed me, comforted me, aroused me…and taken nothing for himself. “He’s had plenty of opportunities to hurt me and he hasn’t yet, Lily.”
“Then he must want something from you, Xandra. There’s no other explanation. No other reason that a warlock with Declan’s magic would keep you around when you have the power to hurt him.”
“Me? Hurt him? With what? My magic isn’t exactly in the same class as his.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” She shakes her head. “I’ve been researching all morning—I even called my grandma and talked to her about being soulbound. And she told me the same thing all the books did. That there’s no way for both partners to escape being soulbound. The only way the curse breaks is for one of you to die.”
“And if we don’t try to break the curse? If we just live with it?”
“Then the curse breaks you.” She looks sick. “One of the books I was reading last night said that people who are soulbound hurt each other over and over again, until they are completely destroyed, their souls utterly consumed by each other. It’s one of the worst parts of the curse.”
“One of the worst parts? What could possibly be worse than that?”
“The fact that even then you don’t die.”
“How is that possible? How do you live without a soul?” But even as I ask the question, I know. I’ve seen them. We all have. Empty-eyed witches and warlocks who have sold their souls, who spend the rest of their wasted, empty lives weaving shadowy spells to skim power, magic, emotion, from those who have not forsaken their gifts.