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A shiver ran through her. She hoped there never would be a next time. “What’s that got to do with the reason we’re still here? Shouldn’t we go before Felicity gets back?”
“She left me here to die, so I don’t think she’ll be back for a while. It’s too obvious.”
She raised an eyebrow. “So we’re here because it’s safe?”
“No, we’re here because you collapsed with a high fever, and I had no other choice but to stay here.”
And he’d been worried about her, really worried. The thought warmed her. Maybe he wasn’t just attracted in a physical sense …
“It’s way beyond physical, and I’ve already told you that.”
He had? When? She stared at him, more than a little troubled by his words. How could any emotion be real after little more than twenty-four hours? “Doyle, we barely know each other.”
He shrugged. “Sometimes you don’t have to know to care.”
Care, not love. She looked away for a moment, inexplicably hurt by his choice of words. “Your boss told me I should ask about your father and grandfather.”
“The old witch should mind her own business.”
“Does that mean you’re not going to tell me?” She sipped her coffee and regarded him steadily over the rim of the mug.
He sighed again. “My father asked my mother to marry him after knowing her for precisely ten minutes. My grandfather waited a whole hour before he did the same with my grandmother.”
She grinned. “You’re kidding.”
He shook his head. “Of course, in my mother’s case, she thought my father was crazy, and at one stage she asked her brother the policeman to threaten him. But in the end she came around.”
“And your grandmother?”
“Shoved my grandfather in the car and headed for Las Vegas as fast as her old Ford would go.”
Her grin widened. “So this sort of insanity runs in your family, huh?”
“Apparently so.” He considered her for a moment, then said, “Do you remember what happened last night?”
She blinked and wondered why he had suddenly changed the subject. It was almost as if he didn’t want to talk about his family, but why? “No. What happened last night? I thought you said I had a fever.”
“You did, but it broke around midnight. At three, you were up and talking to the wind.”
A sense of dread ran through her. She wasn’t a storm witch, and the wind had never talked to her before, so why would it be doing so now?
“Can you remember any of it?”
“No.” She hesitated. Images ran through her mind, fractured remnants of dreams that had assailed her during the night. The wind had not featured in any of them, but Helen had.
She frowned. “I dreamt about Helen. Dreamt that I was dancing with her in the wildness of a storm. She talked to me.”
Even though it sounded crazy, he appeared to take her dreams seriously. “Can you remember what she said?”
She sorted through the memories, trying to catch fragments of conversations. “She was trying to warn me about something—or someone. I’m not sure. And she said I had to open the present and perform the spell tonight, at midnight.”
“Did she say why?”
“No. All she said was that I must complete the circle.” Kirby frowned. The coldness was back in the pit of her stomach, and she was beginning to wish she hadn’t eaten so much. “Why would she be asking me to perform a spell? I’ve never had anything to do with magic, even when she was performing it.”
He hesitated. “Camille went to the morgue and checked out Helen’s body. Her magic was gone, but unlike our killer’s other victim, it had not been ripped from her but rather spelled away. Maybe Helen’s final gift to you is her magic.”
“No.” She wouldn’t—couldn’t—accept such a gift. “Surely something like that is impossible.” Yet life, time and again, had shown her nothing in this world was impossible.
