Arrayed on the sidewalk, Lani, Brian, and Jenni Raymond chatted. Brian was carrying the bulk of the conversation, including emphatic hand gestures. They glanced back at me in turn. Lani’s gaze lingered the longest.
I spooned cubes of potatoes out of the soup, savoring how they’d soaked up the creamy chicken stock and spices.
Outside, the conversation broke up. Officer Raymond turned toward the diner, but Lani and Brian lingered on the sidewalk, keeping a general eye on the sorcerer, who was still unconscious in the back seat of the locked cruiser.
Jenni Raymond could certainly swagger when she wanted to, though as far as I’d figured out, it was mostly false bravado. She milked the twenty paces it took to step inside and cross to my booth, greeting the locals, accepting a coffee and a pastry from Melissa Wilson, Brian’s partner in the diner and in life. She must have stepped out of the kitchen at some point after I’d taken the sorcerer down.
The RCMP officer’s dark-brown hair was slicked back in a severe bun. She was about five foot nine, slim and muscular — with an ease of movement and a coiled energy that came with the shifter magic she idiotically tried to ignore. She slid into the booth in front of me, blocking my view of the front door.
I shifted to the right, clearing my sight line.
She frowned, obviously not understanding.
I didn’t enlighten her. It was a waste of my time. Experience told me she didn’t want to learn anything more than she already knew. The shifter had actually thought Christopher and I were witches when she’d come to beg for help finding Hannah Stewart. A small town where little happened had probably been the perfect posting for her — until Christopher and I had relocated. Luckily for her, I’d avoided any conversations she’d attempted to start since we’d found Hannah.
Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t avoid the current face-to-face.
I met her light-brown eyes steadily.
Officer Raymond dropped her gaze. Anger flitted across her face. She took a swig of her coffee, sucking in air to ease the burn that came with it.
A more observant person would have noticed the steam still coming off the white mug.
“So who is he?” she asked, covering not meeting my gaze by taking a bite of the icing-crusted danish Melissa had given her.
“No idea.” I pushed my half-eaten soup aside, downing the rest of my water.
“Well, that’s difficult to believe,” she drawled, all bravado again. “Seeing as you obviously share an ancestry.”
“I hope you mean magic, shifter. Since it’s obvious I look nothing like the sorcerer, nor do I command the same power he does.”
I kept my voice low enough that no one but her could have heard me, but she still hissed angrily. Since she apparently had no idea about the extent of her abilities, it seemed likely that she’d never fully tested her hearing, or compared it to that of a regular human.
I smiled. I enjoyed goading the shifter. Which was idiotic, really. It meant I was too invested, too engaged. Her lack of discipline mattered to me for some reason that I hadn’t taken the time to figure out.
“I’m not playing games, Emma Johnson,” she snarled. “If you won’t talk here, I’ll come to the farm.”
“And when you get your head out of your ass and realize he’s actually a stranger to me? Then what?”
She curled her lip.
I leaned toward her. “You do know you can smell a lie, right?”
“That’s … that’s just an urban myth.”
I laughed, leaning back. “Maybe you should report the sorcerer. Bring the Vancouver coven into it. I don’t think the League has a chapter in Canada, or on the west coast, so the Convocation would claim jurisdiction.” I eyed her. She had no idea what I was talking about. “Or maybe you’d prefer to call the West Coast pack?”
Jenni Raymond took another sip of her coffee. Another bite of the pastry. Calming herself, ignoring my attempt to goad her. It was a good effort. Perhaps I’d been wrong about her ability to learn — managing me was an onerous task.
“If you don’t know him, why is he here? Why try to strangle you?”
I lifted my chin, displaying what I was sure was unmarked pale skin. “He didn’t put much effort into it.”
She leveled a look at me, trying to be a hard-ass. “Why?”
I didn’t laugh, but it was an effort.
“Why did you come to the farm and ask for our help to find Hannah?” I asked, being deliberately oblique because Lani and Brian were both in the process of crossing back through the diner.
Brian stepped behind the counter. Lani settled on her stool by the counter, within hearing range if she made an effort.
Officer Raymond nodded, acknowledging that she understood. I was intimating that the sorcerer had been attracted to my magic.
That was the simplest explanation.
Of course, it didn’t even remotely answer a plethora of other questions. Such as what was a magically drained sorcerer doing wandering around in a tiny town barely on the map? A town literally on the edge of this part of the world? What were the chances he wasn’t connected to me or Christopher, the only other newcomers with abundant magic?
Jenni Raymond narrowed her eyes at me thoughtfully. “I’ll see what I can get from him when he wakes up.”
I nodded, grabbing my plate and glass, then slipping out of the booth to hand them to Brian over the counter.
The balding man clucked his tongue. He hated it when I cleared my place. But he took the dirty dishes from me. “Wait here. Melissa has something for Christopher.”
Officer Raymond stood behind me. I kept my back to her — an insult to most shapeshifters. But my disrespect of her fierceness, her position of superiority, didn’t garner any magical reaction from her.
As expected.
“I’ll call if I need you to come to the station,” she said. “For an official statement.”
I didn’t bother acknowledging her. She was speaking for everyone else’s benefit anyway. I wasn’t under Officer Raymond’s jurisdiction. I wasn’t even under the RCMP’s jurisdiction, though following the rules of the mundanes simply made sense when attempting to keep a low profile.
Yes, there was some higher Adept power governing all magic users. Beings whispered about in the dark, creatures of mythology. Few believed in fairy tales.
But I did.
Not because I’d ever met anyone of that ilk. But because I’d been bred in the first place. Bred to be powerful enough to stand between such creatures and those who had created me. The Collective. Unfortunately for the Collective, I’d rejected their control seven years ago when the organization’s then-current overseer, a black witch, tried to kill me and the four others of my generation.
So if some higher power ever did swoop down on the Collective, I wouldn’t be there to see it. And I was more than okay with that.
“You okay, Emma?” Lani asked quietly.
I’d been staring off into space.
That wasn’t good, wasn’t normal behavior.
I made a show of shaking my head. “Fine, thanks. Just a little …” I let the sentence trail off, not knowing how I was supposed to finish it anyway.
She nodded, lifting her hand as if she was going to touch my arm.
Melissa bustled out from the kitchen, holding a brown paper bag. I reached for it across the counter slightly too early, so that the gesture would put me naturally out of Lani’s reach.
Her hand hovered in the air. Then she placed it back on the counter with a soft sigh.
“For you and Christopher,” Melissa said commandingly, releasing the bag to my hold. “You call if you need me, Emma. Don’t be brave. Unburdening the soul is underrated.”
“Okay.”
She smiled. Blond curls bounced around her face as she reached across the counter to pat my cheek in a motherly fashion, even though she was barely old enough to play the part.
“Thank you.”
Melissa took Lani’s plate, her meal only half eaten, an
d hustled away.
A shiver of magic slipped up my spine. I turned, meeting the sorcerer’s inscrutable gaze through the window of the diner and the back window of the cruiser. He’d woken.
“You don’t actually know him, do you?” Lani asked.
I didn’t answer, though saying no would have been the simplest explanation. Easier. Except I was fairly certain that Lani’s latent magic manifested as some sort of intuition. And a half-truth or an outright lie would draw her attention. Or at least draw it more tightly than it already was.
“But you let him touch you.” This observation was delivered without heat or condemnation.
I looked at the dark-haired mechanic. “Do you know your parents, Lani?”
Her brow creased, but she answered readily enough. “Of course. Don’t you?”
I hesitated. “No.”
“Ah.” She glanced back out the window. “That makes sense.”
Officer Raymond pulled the cruiser away from the curb. The sorcerer kept his gaze on me until I lost sight of him.
“Why?” I whispered, oddly afraid of her answer. “Why does that make sense?”
Lani looked startled. “Because you and Chris, though both epically gorgeous, look nothing alike.”
Relief flooded through me — a completely irrational reaction. But for a moment, I’d thought she’d been commenting on me … on my inability to interact like a normal person.
“Actually,” she said, “if we’re being completely specific, I’m adopted. So I don’t know my birth parents. Don’t want to know.”
I nodded. Some sort of magical lineage was deeply embedded in Lani’s DNA, carried by one of her birth parents. Witch magic, according to Christopher. But untriggered and unfostered, that power had never fully manifested for Lani.
So if I reached out and stoked that buried energy, could I bring it to the surface? Could I ignite it?
I stepped away from the counter, moving so swiftly that Lani flinched. Because I didn’t want to entertain such thoughts. I didn’t want to be beguiled into using my own magic to amplify. Especially not without permission. The encounter with the drained sorcerer had affected me strangely, and that unrequited desire was urging me to unleash.
But in that direction lay the ruin of everything I was trying to build.
“Text me, Emma,” Lani called after me as I headed for the door. “I’ll bring pizza and beer if you want someone around.”
I had someone around. Always. I was never alone. But I smiled and waved over my shoulder because that was how I was supposed to act.
Actually, now that I had a moment to think about it, a regular person probably would have been shaken, been upset at almost being strangled by a stranger.
I pushed through the glass door, exiting the diner as I realized I’d reacted completely inappropriately.
Well … shit.
There was just too much to keep track of whenever I tried to interact with mundanes. I was supposed to smile when someone smiled at me, say please and thank you, praise the food or service, appear weaker than I was. Being a sociopath in a small town was difficult. It was easier to hide my social shortcomings in a city.
But Christopher did badly in cities. So I’d found Lake Cowichan and the property for him, and for Paisley and me.
And now the sorcerer.
Now the sorcerer.
I should have killed him. He was so close to the edge that I might have been able to give him a heart attack if I’d hit him with enough magic all at once. No one in the diner would have even suspected that I was responsible.
Except I didn’t just go around murdering people.
Not anymore.
And there was something about the sorcerer.
Something had happened when I’d laid eyes on him, and then again when I’d felt the confusion and shift of his emotions. Something that the sociopath in me couldn’t put together, couldn’t resolve into a concise, detached mission report. Something that my years of training hadn’t prepared me for in the least.
I could have blamed magic — claiming that he ensnared me, enchanted me somehow. Except that I would have felt it if he’d carried any object that held enough power to affect me — never mind that I was practically immune to such spells. It was an immunity that had been forced upon me, taken — stolen — from countless Adepts. ‘Vessels,’ the Collective had called them.
“Emma! Oh, Emma!”
Someone was calling my name. A name I had briefly forgotten belonged to me. It was only a momentary slip, but it felt longer. I glanced to my right. A young woman was waving at me as she held open the door to the thrift shop.
Light-brown hair. Blue eyes. Around five foot six, smiling tentatively.
Hannah Stewart.
“Emma! I … ah … I set aside a couple of shirts for Christopher.”
Hannah no longer bore any of the bruises she’d had when I carried her out of the forest seven months before. But in the time it took for me to glance both ways along the main road, I recalled the weight of her in my arms, and the strange, fierce pride I’d felt in the knowledge that she’d saved herself. That she had said no to her abuser. That she had run.
Just as I had. Just as I should have been doing at that very moment.
Instead, I was forging human connections. Commitments, relationships, that I had no chance or ability to maintain.
I jogged across the road, slipping in behind a slow-moving pickup truck.
Hannah held the door open as I stepped inside the thrift shop. Under her curation, it was really more of a secondhand clothing store paired with a smattering of antiques. The shop always smelled of some essential oil or another, but I couldn’t quite place its current citrusy scent.
Hannah hustled back through the shelving units and clothing racks, ducking around the short counter that held the cash register in the far corner and disappearing from sight.
I reached over and touched the handle of a china teacup I’d been secretly coveting for months. Grouped with a mix of other Royal Albert designs, the interior of the cup bore a black rose pattern on a white background. It had scalloped edges and a gold-trimmed handle, and the exterior and the saucer were a deep teal color. It was sixty-seven dollars, just for a single teacup. The pattern was called Masquerade.
Since the first time I’d laid eyes on the teacup, I had wanted to place it in the empty china cabinet in the dining room. Completely irrationally. Then I wanted to find more pieces of the pattern, one at a time, until I’d collected them all. Until I’d filled the cabinet the previous owners of the house had left behind. Until I’d made it my own.
But I didn’t live the kind of life that came with rare, collectible china. And now that the sorcerer had appeared, there was no chance I’d ever have that life.
I dropped my hand, stepping toward the counter as Hannah popped out of the back room holding two folded, collared shirts.
“I thought the blue would compliment Christopher’s … ah … eyes.” She flushed.
“I agree. Thank you. How much do I owe you?”
“Oh … maybe he should try them on first?”
Payment had become a strangely strained issue since Christopher and I had rescued Hannah, and not just at her thrift store. I’d had to start leaving cash at the diner because I’d never see a bill there. And I was fairly certain that Lani was drastically undercharging me every time she worked on the Mustang.
I pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of the pocket in my dress, handing it to Hannah. She grimaced, then gave me the shirts and took the money without protest.
“I’m going down to Victoria this weekend,” she said. “I was planning to poke around my mother’s shop. It’s end of season, so I think I might find you a great price on some dresses. And if the length isn’t right, I can hem them. But really, you’re so slim and … you … can pull off …”
Hannah dropped her gaze to the counter between us. She had thought Christopher and I were angels when we’d first found her in the forest, though I was fai
rly certain it was Christopher’s magic that she’d picked up on in that moment. I’d had no chance to clarify that, however, because doing so would have meant having to admit to a mundane that magic existed.
But the embarrassment of thinking we appeared otherworldly to her had lingered for Hannah. And I had no idea how to ease it for her.
“Something blue, maybe?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. A royal blue. Or you would look fantastic in greens. Emerald or olive green, with a floral print.”
“Sounds great.”
She bobbed her head. “Everything okay then, Emma? I saw Jenni over at the diner.”
I hesitated, not certain how to answer. I knew I should lie. Platitudes were expected in situations like these, weren’t they? “I don’t know.”
“Okay. If you need anything, you let me know.” She raised her chin, looking at me steadily.
And I believed her. I believed that Hannah Stewart would stand between me and any unknown that might occur. And that idea should have been hysterical to me. I was capable, when fully amplified, of wiping a small city from the face of the earth.
But it wasn’t funny. It was real. I didn’t have to touch Hannah, triggering my empathy, to understand that she was speaking with complete conviction.
I nodded, then smiled.
She laughed, quietly joyful. Then she gestured toward the brown paper bag I held in my other hand. “You’d better get whatever that is home to Christopher.”
“I’ll be lucky to get it past Paisley.”
Hannah laughed again, opening the cash register and tucking my twenty into its depths.
I allowed my gaze to rest on the teacup just once more as I exited the store. I allowed myself to imagine it sitting in the empty china cabinet in the dining room.
Then I hit the sidewalk, rearranged my burdens so that my right arm was free, and headed home.
For the last time.
I had already lingered too long. Christopher and I should have been out of town by now, headed toward a ferry or an airport. I should have slipped out the back of the diner. I should have forced Officer Raymond to come to the house to talk to me — and to find us already gone.
Demons and DNA (Amplifier 1) Page 2