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He growled when I said the last. “No.”
“I know. But their deaths are still on my soul, and I need to stop them.”
He put his hand over my heart. “We will. Together. But I’m afraid we have a much bigger problem now that the secret is out.”
“One problem at a time. We need to speak to the priestess and see exactly how bad it is first.” I was resolved. It didn’t change the weight of the guilt, but there was a path to handling it. “If she’ll talk to us.”
“I’m going to kill her if she doesn’t.” He said it so matter-of-factly and walked past me to slip back into the car.
“She’s not going to do us any good dead.”
“I’ll feel better.”
THIRTY
VINKETTIN
Dominic insisted on driving my car the rest of the way. I gave in against my better judgment, but I didn’t want to drive him over the edge. It gave me time to ponder the situation while flipping through another ancient text. He didn’t head for the city but around it. To the vast empty lands that lay still untouched by human hands. So much of the Pacific Northwest was unspoiled.
I’d been out here for clients. I went where they needed me, and a lot of those places were unsavory. I’d seen the worst of humanity while acquiring artifacts; many were buried in the underbelly of the oldest and poorest communities around the world. Those people still believed the myths the cities had hammered out of the rest of mankind.
They held these homesteads in families for generations where the dirt knew the people, and the people knew the land like the living creature it was. They kept the relics as memories even if they didn’t understand the power they held any longer, and that’s where I came in. To suss them out. Only a small part of my job, but a part nonetheless.
The number of religious talismans with long-forgotten meanings I’d procured from Billy-Bob Hillbilly’s great-grandmother carried over from the old country. It wasn’t the majority of my business, but they usually paid the best. One reason it had been easy to stay close to Dominic all these years. The fact I could trace ancestry and lineage to find them was one of my greater joys.
I’d been all over these lands, so I found myself utterly confused when Dominic took a turnoff I’d never noticed before, like I was blind to the existence of an entire area of land. I pulled out the map I kept in the glove box, trying to find the existence of it. I knew who owned all the land surrounding it. There wasn’t property here.
Or there shouldn’t be.
Witchcraft. Old-world magic, mostly forgotten by mortals, and one type I didn’t understand entirely. This wasn’t a panhandler reading palms in a city. This was the real deal.
“I feel your fear.”
“It’s not merely fear. It’s a healthy appreciation for what I know we’re getting ourselves into.”
“Whatever it is, she’s not going to kill us.”
I stared at Dominic. “I don’t believe that for a second.”
“She likes me.”
“And when you tell her what we know she did?” I loved Dominic, but at the heart of it, his age showed in these situations. I’d learned to not trust my feelings about people. Those could be manipulated.
If every part of my brain screamed someone was harmless, there was manipulation involved. Magic could tell lies right to our brains and fool our scenes. Dominic’s natural intuition should be better. He was more animal than human, after all. Instincts were real. I was jealous of them. I had to work for those instincts.
“I don’t know.” He shot a glance over at me. “I don’t know anything anymore.”
I believed him. Neither did I. “How’d you find her?”
I hated how much we had to learn about one another. I felt like I barely knew him. How was one lifetime enough for anyone truly in love? I didn’t think a hundred lifetimes would be enough time with him.
“She found me.” He didn’t elaborate.
“What do you mean?”
“Our relationship started with a favor. She needed me.”
I coughed, and my brows pulled. “You had a priestess in your debt?”
