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We were a long way away from being accepted, in spite of the fact we’d coexisted with humans for literally hundreds of years and posed no risk to them whatsoever.
As soon as I turned the television off, Cash returned. He had changed for class and looked extra handsome with his close-cropped goatee and dark charcoal blazer. I got up and adjusted his tie to give myself an excuse to touch him. He pressed a kiss to my forehead and smiled, but this time it wasn’t a genuine smile.
“Pack calls?” The way he said pack made it seem like a foreign word he hadn’t yet learned to pronounce properly.
“Yeah. Callum’s worried about this new church problem, so I’m going to go home for a couple of days to put his mind at ease. Once he realizes there’s no threat, I’ll be back. You can stay here if you want.” Cash lived in an apartment with a buddy of his from his undergrad frat days, but Everett tended to have a revolving door of ladies over, and Cash found the constant sexcapades distracting. He had a key to my place, and I didn’t share the space with anyone else. He might as well enjoy the silence while I was away.
He kissed each cheek and my forehead. “I may take you up on that.”
“If you do, just replace the milk, ’kay? I think it’s on the verge of going bad.”
This time his grin was real, his teeth gleaming white and the lines around his eyes crinkling merrily. “Next thing I know you’ll be asking for rent.”
I gave his ass a squeeze and kissed him softly. “Nah. You pay me in other ways.”
Chapter Three
The drive from New Orleans to St. Francisville was slightly less than two hours, but the whole way I was a writhing bundle of nerves. I’d had to turn off the radio because the news kept talking about the new threat from the Church of Morning. Apparently everyone was convinced they planned to make good on it, and thanks to Maureen’s appearance on the news that morning, people were also sure CAPA was endorsing the action.
What a mess.
I was so distracted, my blue Dodge Dart kept edging over the center line of the highway before I’d catch myself and steer back onto the right side. Drama and danger were things I’d had my fill of during my twenty-one years alive. I didn’t need any more death threats or excitement, thank you. If I could make it through the remainder of my years without any stress outside of my exam schedule, I’d be perfectly content.
Fat chance in hell I was going to get so lucky.
The sun was almost blotted out by a thick covering of trees, the shimmering green light offering the only solace I’d felt since leaving the city. I resisted the urge to take a detour to the local swamps that were more like home to me than Callum’s estate, in spite of the last several years spent back in civilized society.
For four years, following my disastrous first attempts at shifting into my wolf form, I’d gone to live with my great-grandmother in the bayou. She’d helped me control my magic to a point I was able to be both a wolf and a witch without any dangerous fallout. I hadn’t been back to see La Sorcière since I was seventeen, but in spite of her advanced years I didn’t worry whether she was still alive. The witch would outlast us all.
With things being such a mess I could have used a bit of great-grandmotherly wisdom. The cool, detached way she handled the worst kind of situations meant she would probably have a solution for this. Or at least she’d know a few good wards to keep would-be assassins at bay.
I snorted and gave my head a shake. How ridiculous was it to want my eighty-something-year-old great-grandmother to save my ass?
The funnier part was knowing she could.
If I thought I might be able to get away with trawling through the swamp looking for a crazy magical senior and not terrify the rest of my family with worry, I would. But the bayou had a strange way of shifting and moving, and though the land itself didn’t change, I’d been gone long enough I would probably get lost if I went after her right now. I couldn’t afford those extra hours.
Nothing felt like home anymore. Not the swamp, not New Orleans. I’d become disconnected from my moorings, and nothing felt like terra firma these days. Feeling lost was one of the oh-so-fun side effects of almost dying. I’d been thrown down an open elevator shaft from over twenty floors up. No shit. And the only thing that had saved me was magic. Now part of me felt like I was supposed to be dead, but I was still haunting the world in a living form.
Near-death was weird.
I turned the radio back on, but the stations had gone fuzzy thanks to my distance from anything resembling civilized society, so I switched over to the default CD in my deck. Tom Waits’s eerie voice crooned about lost love, and I glued my attention back on the road. “Focus, Genie,” I whispered. Today would be a bad day to get into a car accident just because I was a hopeless flake.
A car appeared in my rearview mirror, coming out of nowhere, giving my pulse a kick-start. I’d been driving over an hour with almost no other signs of life, and the black sedan stuck out like a sore thumb against the green-and-gray backdrop of the previously empty highway.
He was driving awfully close to me, wasn’t he?
“Just pass,” I grumbled, cutting my gaze from the road to my mirror and back. He was riding my ass now, the front end of the sedan dangerously near to my bumper. What was this asshole thinking? The opposite lane was wide open, and he could have whizzed past me no problem if he was in such a damn hurry.
The sedan bumped me, and the realization of what was happening struck me at the same moment. He didn’t want to go by me.
He was trying to run me off the road.
My heart pounded, and my palms were instantly damp and itchy with nervous energy. Of all the things I’d prepared contingencies for, this wasn’t among them. I’d foolishly assumed when someone came to kill me, they’d do it when I was standing on solid ground so I’d have a chance to fight back. Ramming me off the road with a two-ton hunk of steel wasn’t playing fair.
Not that assassins cared much for fair play.
I gripped the wheel as my car jerked towards the shoulder of the road, and steadied myself, steering closer to the center to allow more rebound room. This plan would bite me in the ass if a car came towards me, but I was hoping to have enough time to react if that happened.
