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“Technically, that’s true. And really, you’re going to criticize the white lies I told to protect me from you?”
“Not when you put it that way,” he said. “After I took it from you, I wanted to give that stupid plaque back to you so badly, but then I would think of my parents and all of my younger cousins who are just now going through the changes. I’m sorry, I had to put them first. What would you do, to help your family?”
“Damn it,” I groused. “If you hadn’t said that, I probably would have been able to stay pissed at you—which I still am, by the way, and will be for a while yet.”
I lifted his wrist, inspecting the burn mark on his forearm.
“It still hurts as bad as it did the day you gave it to me,” he said, wincing. “Not that I didn’t deserve it.”
“You really did,” I told him.
I was tempted to leave his arm in that state. I hadn’t been able to heal Zeb earlier in the evening, after all, and it felt as if Zeb deserved my help more than Jed did. But hearing Jed’s explanation seemed to shift the energy within me. I felt I was back in balance and might be able to make my energy follow my intentions in ways that would help him.
I curved my hand around the burn mark and closed my eyes. However irritated I might be with Jed, that mark was my fault. I needed to fix it. Nana had told me to think of the healing magic as if my cells were reaching out to the other person’s and fixing all imperfections. I put my hand over the burned skin and pictured it bright and pink and new as a baby’s. I saw cool, soothing waves of energy flowing over the burned tissue and taking away the sting. And when I opened my eyes, I was relieved and grateful to see that his skin indeed was pink and healthy.
I would visit Zeb’s hospital room as soon as I could.
“Thanks,” he said, twisting his hands and admiring his newly repaired flesh.
“That thing I can do, healing you with my hands? If the Kerrigans get the Elements, that goes away. My whole family’s magic goes away.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Not good enough,” I said, toying with my coffee cup. “So you’re a giant armadillo monster.”
“I kinda wish you would stop putting it that way.”
“Not going to stop me from saying it,” I shot back. “I don’t understand why your status as a supernatural creature should change my plans to keep you as far away from the Elements as possible.”
“Because I can help you find what you’re looking for.”
He dragged an old-fashioned trunk into the kitchen and opened it. It was filled with small leather-bound notebooks, covered in dust. I gaped at the sheer number of volumes. “What?”
“They’re travel journals,” he said. “Mr. Wainwright seemed to travel a lot. I found this trunk while we were fixing some pipes in the basement.”
“So in addition to lying to me, you stole family heirlooms. You are just a charmer, aren’t you?”
“No!” he exclaimed. “OK, yeah, but I would have returned them to you eventually.”
“That’s a comfort,” I muttered. “Jane said Mr. Wainwright spent a lot of time looking for were-creatures and vampires, after he came back from World War II. She said he actually knows Sasquatch, who is Canadian, by the way.”
“That makes sense.”
I opened the first one I touched. The paper was dry and brittle, and tiny grains of sand actually shook out of the pages as I moved them. Here and there, pictures of a young Gilbert Wainwright in a pith helmet were tacked onto the pages. And the entries were carefully, meticulously written in—
“Are these hieroglyphics?” I asked, lifting an eyebrow.
“Your grandpa seemed to take learnin’ the local languages pretty damn seriously when he traveled.” He handed me journals, pointing out the language used in each. “Sanskrit, Chinese, Greek, and what I think is Old Norse. Other than looking at the photos and making a guess, I can’t tell where he was or what he wrote. He switches languages a few times in each journal. I’ve been through a dozen of them with different language guides, and I can’t make heads or tails of them.”
“Are you showing me these for a particular reason or just to give me fresh reasons not to trust you? Why didn’t you just turn these over to the Kerrigans?” I asked.
“If I just gave them the information, I couldn’t trust them to keep their word. I figured if I found the items first, I had a better shot.”
“Really nice people you’re dealing with,” I told him.
“What part of ‘desperate cursed man’ are you not getting? But I think you’re more likely to meet the terms of our agreement. And I want to help you, to show you how sorry I am about how things have worked out. I’m sorry, Nola,” he said. “I’m sorry I betrayed your trust. And I’m so sorry that I hurt you.”
“So what do you want from me now?”
