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I put my eyes back on the road, and silence filled the jeep. Uncomfortable and tension-riddled silence.
After a couple of minutes, I could feel Kinsley’s gaze burning into the side of my face. “You never answered my question. You don’t have to tell us about you, but I deserve to know why you accused me of killing children.”
She wasn’t wrong about that, especially now that I was sure at least one of us was being set up for something else.
“A man named Johnathon sent me a request to find you, or kill you, if necessary,” I answered. “I don’t know who he is, but he would have to be working with a witch to have sent the message the way he did.”
Lia briefly touched two fingers to my neck, then jerked her hand away. “The message was tainted with dark magic. You had no choice in going after Kinsley.”
I slammed on the brakes and whipped my head around so I could see the unicorn. “What the fuck did you just say?”
“You were magically influenced to take the job,” Lia elaborated. “The dark energy is still there. That’s why you still want to go to No Man’s Land. That’s where they want Kinsley. You’re stronger than the energy, which helps you fight it, but the magic is still encouraging your actions.”
She seemed so fucking sure of her answer. Her certainty further irked me. How could I have not known someone was screwing with my head? I was one of the strongest fucking supernaturals I knew. People didn’t fuck with me. Ever.
The steering wheel bent slightly within my hands. “Can you take the dark energy out?”
Fuck, I hated asking that. If she could, that meant I owed her, which wasn’t going to sit well with me.
She nodded. “But I’ll have to touch you again. If you try to bite me, I will put you down without a second thought.”
Our stares locked in a battle of dominance. I didn’t know everything that unicorns were capable of, and they’d been hunted to near extinction, so they couldn’t be all powerful, but something about the glee in Lia’s eyes told me she truly believed she could “put me down” without straining a muscle.
“Do it,” I demanded.
She raised a brow. “Say, ‘please.’”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?” she quickly countered.
This was why I lived in the middle of No Man’s Land. Alone.
With a slow exhale, I finally muttered, “Please.”
I almost thought she wasn’t going to accept that, but then she touched my forehead with her palm. A charge of something warm and quick-moving pierced through my skin, zipping through my body.
My body jerked in resistance from the foreign power, but Lia kept her hold on me for several seconds before she finally pulled away.
“You should be good now,” she said, then she leaned back, a slight sheen covering her forehead.
I didn’t need to ask to put the pieces together about my previous thoughts once I’d noticed her exhaustion.
Unicorns were formidable. They just didn’t have a deep enough well to protect themselves for the long haul.
Kinsley glanced between us. “So, what now? We can go to Fire and Fluorite?”
Sure enough, my drive to go back to my cabin wasn’t as strong, but I still wasn’t set on going to a House that was destroying itself from the inside out.
Before I could answer, Lia spoke. “If you don’t want to go to Fire and Fluorite yet, then we need to find somewhere we can go for Kinsley to get comfortable with her wolf. She’ll need to make sure there are no compatibility issues with her other half before we confront the House.”
Kinsley swiveled around in her seat. “You think I have a wolf after all this time? I was starting to assume that while I might not be a witch, I might still be broken. Why else would they have hidden me?”
Because she was fucking special. I already knew that and could see that even more now that Lia had removed whatever darker energy I’d been tainted with.
The unicorn met my gaze in the rearview mirror. She nodded, and I sighed out of frustration. Was I really going to agree with her?
Fuck.I was.
