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“Yeah. It sucked.”
A car honked as it drove past us, and I frowned. Taavi’s fingers tightened around mine, and I didn’t need a shifter’s sense of smell to tell he was scared.
“Just a car horn,” I told him gently.
He let out a long breath. “That’s how—when they hit me,” he whispered, eyes still wide.
Oh.I glanced back over my shoulder, but the car hadn’t circled or turned back. “It’s okay. They’re gone—and it might not have been us.” Or it might have been that I was an elf or that we were both guys. But I wasn’t going to suggest those options out loud. First of all, Taavi knew damn well that both were options. Second, as my mother has pointed out more than once in my life, there’s no need to go looking for trouble where it isn’t.
But now Taavi was on edge and, quite frankly, so was I. Nothing like a car horn to give you a jolt of adrenaline, whether it’s aimed at you or not. I let Taavi pick up the pace as we headed away from the park and into the neighborhoods, aiming toward Carytown.
Back on one of the main roads, I still felt uneasy, like there was too muchsomethingin the air. I tried to tell myself it was Taavi’s nervousness rubbing off on me—and with what he’d been through, he was fully justified in being nervous.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more to it than that.
Let’s just say that when we turned a last corner and I saw Ward and Beck at the outdoor patio set up in an old parking lot outside Bev’s Ice Cream, I felt a lot more relief than I probably needed to. I left Taavi with them to go inside the tiny shop, where Doc and Jackson—Doc’s eleven-year-old nephew who I swear got taller every time I saw him—were at the back of the line. Jackson was debating the merits of pumpkin ice cream versus orange with chocolate chips, and I interrupted to point out that cinnamon was clearly the best choice.
Dan showed up after we got back outside, then Fiona, whose horns were decorated with little tiny wire-frame bats. Beck spent a good five minutes squealing over them until Fiona took one off and gave it to her.
Mays arrived last, a frown on his face.
“What?” both Dan and I asked him at the same time.
Mays shook his head. “Nothing we need to deal with,” he replied, although his expression stayed serious.
“It’s the damn rally, isn’t it?” Dan asked.
“What rally?” Ward wanted to know.
Doc and I exchanged a look over his head.
“What fucking rally?” the medium repeated, clearly annoyed now.
I wasn’t going to get in the middle of this one, so I let Doc explain about the Magic-Free Movement rally on the State House grounds. I deliberately hadn’t brought it up, and when Doc mentioned it I could feel Taavi’s eyes burning a hole in the side of my face.
“You knew,” he hissed at me.
“And we went nowhere near it,” I replied, trying to keep my voice calm and steady. “On purpose.”
“Val.” There was a warning in his tone.
I sighed. “Yes, I knew it was happening. But I don’twantto go down there, I have no reason to go down there, and it wasn’t happening near here, so there really wasn’t much point in bringing it up.”
“Other than the fact that if there are out-of-town MFM assholes, they go to touristy things like movies at the Byrd,” Ward snapped irritably. “So it seems like not the best idea to get a whole bunch of us together and make a target.”
Jackson looked scared now, leaning into Doc’s side and all but ignoring his ice cream.
“It’s still mid-afternoon, and we aren’t near the rally point,” Doc replied calmly. “They’ll still be there until nightfall, and we’ll be done by then.”
Doc and I had actually talked about this—not because either of us thought that we were in particular danger, since both Doc and I can fucking handle ourselves, but because both of us had people we cared about who were a lot more vulnerable than we were: Ward, Jackson, Taavi. Although to be fair to Taavi and Ward, they’d both proven more than once to be more than a handful for anyone stupid enough to try to hurt them.
Jackson was a kid, though, so I totally understood why Doc would worry about his safety. And about exposing him to violence. So we’d talked about it, and we’d decided it was probably fine.
The lesson we were currently learning was that we both probably needed to havealsodiscussed that with our respective significant others, at least if we were judging by the absolute stormcloud that was Ward’s expression.
Taavi was tense beside me, but he didn’t look angry. Worried, possibly upset, but not like he was going to strangle me with magic.
Ward, on the other hand, was fucking pissed.
