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“As are you.”
“It’s not the same. You know it, you know it! It’s mixed in me, with everything else.”
“You feared him.”
“Damn right I did. Do.”
“There’s no shame in that. But you thought of your fear, your worry, your doubts, and didn’t act.”
“I did act.”
“Not with what’s inside you, with your keenest weapon. What did you say to me when you put the arrows in the center of the target?”
“What did you say to me?” she countered.
“I’m saying now I was wrong. And I’m saying the fault, at least some of the fault, for what happened today is mine.”
That put a hitch in her mad stride. “How?”
“I’m responsible for your training, and I found you bleeding on the ground. What he sent shouldn’t have been enough to harm you, not like that, and yet… So I’ve done a poor job with your training.”
“Oh, that’s bullshit.” She started to lift the pot out of the sink, but he nudged her aside, hefted it out himself.
“Where does it go?”
She stared at him. “Guess.”
With a shrug, he set it on the stove. She added salt to the water, as Marco did, then turned on the burner.
She pressed her fingers to her eyes, then picked up her glass again. “If you were any better at training, I’d be black and blue from head to toe every stupid day. No, no, that’s backward. I used to be black and blue every stupid day. I’m better at avoiding that now because of the training. And I do study, Keegan. I study the magicks as hard as I train.”
“That was, perhaps, harsh.”
“Perhaps?” She sighed again, then stirred the pot of sauce. And itdid smell good, damn it. “If I don’t know enough about the black magicks, I will study harder and deeper.”
“I was wrong to say that. I was angry at what happened.”
She moved past him to get the cheeses for the filling. “I’m going to say you weren’t completely wrong.”
He took a slow sip of his beer. “I wasn’t, no.”
“I was distracted, thinking about Marco and Brian, and it was such a gorgeous day. I can’t live on edge every minute, Keegan. No one can. Not even you. But.”
She turned to him again. “I did think too much. When I saw his eyes, heard his voice… I thought too much when I should’ve met power with power. But I thought, wraith, and it—he—they—couldn’t really hurt me.”
“Yet you stood in front of the dog, you said. There you acted.”
“You’re right. That was instinct. And it was instinct—and shock—that had me using power after he hurt me. I wasn’t fooled by his lies, but the illusion? Well, a trick’s a trick, and this was a damn good one. I fell for it.”
“He’ll have other tricks, other ways to try.”
“But I saw him. And I saw, felt, a kind of desperation along with the greed, and the pride and the need. He doesn’t know what I see. When he looks at me, Keegan, he sees the prize, like you said. The key, the power he craves. But he doesn’t see me, just enough to know some weaknesses. Like Bollocks.”
Sensing him at the door, she waved a hand to open it for him. “Dry him off, will you? He knows I love, but he doesn’t understand love,” she continued. “It’s just a soft spot for him to exploit.”
After he’d dried the dog, Keegan filled his bowls.
She slid the pasta in to boil.
