“Fine,” he mutters. “But only if we work on the dossier first.”
“Yeah, yeah, let’s do it.” I crack my knuckles and rock back on my heels. Alistair is too sexy to be a hopeless nerd. This shouldn’t take long at all.
I’ve never been more wrong about anything in my life.
Alistair is the biggest nerd alive. His ability to focus for hours at a time is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. He’s barely moved, transferring information from the book to his laptop with fingers that move in a blur as they type.
He asks for my input occasionally, and I give it gladly. Desperately. Fuck, anything to alleviate the boredom. When I check my phone for the thirty-second time in half an hour, I can’t stifle my sigh.
“If you’re tired, we can attempt the magical combination some other time.”
I snap my head up, preparing to steal his laptop—damn the consequences—when I catch the smirk on his face. The tips of his fangs poke over his lower lip, and I shake my head and mutter, “Bastard.”
“I suppose I am,” he says.
My eyes flit to his face, and I prepare to apologize,but there’s no sign that I’ve offended him. There’s even some color in his pale cheeks, as if Alistair is energized by digging through a mountain of boring information.Yep, major nerd.
“I’m assuming you can compel people?” I ask.
He nods.
“But you don’t have any neighbors we could practice on?”
His answering glare is ferocious, and I grin.
“We need someone else then. Otherwise, we won’t be able to tell if it works. You know who’s the perfect test subject?”
“She doesn’t want to be around either of us,” Alistair snarls, scrubbing his hand over his face angrily.
“No. Not Celine. Gods, she would kick our asses for trying, and with the truth thing, she’d be too difficult to convince, anyway.” I let my smile stretch across my whole face. “We need Luca. He’s perfect.”
Alistair cocks his head and nods shortly. “I’ll see if he’s free.” He types a message on his phone, blue eyes studying me even as his fingers move across the screen. “You aren’t supposed to know about Celine’s magic.”
I raise one eyebrow. “You forget I lived in that tiny apartment with all three of you for days, and you blurted it at the Fang. I know about Celine’s magicand Luca’s, although his was harder to figure out.”
“He still pretends I don’t know about that,” Alistair says, giving me his full attention.
“And it should stay that way,” I say seriously. “With omni shifters around, the last thing we need is a bunch of people able to use his powers without the benefit of his lifetime of restraint.”
Gideon and his family are as ethical as they come, but they can’t resist adding new animals to their shifting options. All it would take is for one of them to see Luca in his shifted form and they’d be able to transform into a basilisk whenever they want.
Alistair’s phone buzzes, and he glances at it, his black eyebrows lifting high on his forehead. “Luca’s coming over.”
A rush of excitement hits me. I tell myself it has everything to do with the fact that we’re about to test something cool and nothing to do with Luca. Lying again.
Within ten minutes, he knocks on the door. It’s not a moment too soon.
Sullenly, Alistair stops arguing with me about the best way forward and retreats down the hall, away from the sun. I open the apartment door, pasting a cheerful grin on my face. “Welcome, lab rat.”
Luca shakes his head and shoulders past me, his body grazing mine.
I shut the door behind him, and Alistair reappears in a rush of stale air that smells faintly of copper, salt, and disinfectant.
“What’s this about?” Luca asks him. “Why did Casanell call me a lab rat?”
“You didn’t explain?” I laugh.
Alistair sneers at me, flashing his fangs. I shudder and don’t bother to hide it. He’s hot, and I haven’t forgotten how it felt to have his teeth buried inside me. “We’re attempting to combine our magic. We need someone to test it on.”
