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“Hey stranger! How are you?” I kept my voice light and chatty, even though I was studying him with eagle-eyed precision.
He had dark circles under his eyes, but besides a general weariness he didn’t seemtoomuch the worse for wear. (I was especially encouraged that his clothes seemed clean-ish. Pat was infamous for sacrificing hygiene for work. His namesake of Patience perhaps hadn’t been as perfectly in tune as Joy’s.)
“Hey, Chloe.” He smiled at me and tossed his cellphone into a cupholder, where it bounced off fast food wrappers and used napkins and ricocheted into my lap. “Sorry—I should clean the car out. One of the gophers from the Cloisters could be stowing away in here and I’d never know it.”
“Don’t worry, you’ve had bigger concerns. Except for the gophers, that is. The groundskeeper still hasn’t caught them?”
“Nope. He tried spraying the lawn with castor oil and they still tore the place up. He’s starting to get desperate enough that he asked one of my werewolf coworkers to hunt them down, but none of the shifters want to get near the holes since he threw some mothballs down them and that scent is too strong for their noses to take.”
I buckled my seatbelt—Pat wouldn’t move until I did—then adjusted the dagger strapped to my side so it didn’t dig into my stomach. “If the groundskeeper is asking you guys for help, I take it that means things are finally slowing down?”
“Finally,” Pat grunted as he put the car into drive and pulled away from the apartment building. “How’s it going with your training?”
“Good.” I flipped my satchel open, brandishing the huge three-ring-binder—after testing, I’d discovered neither of my siblings could see its real size, either—that had become my constant companion. “I’m finding there aren’t many powers I wasn’t already aware of, it’s more like I didn’t necessarily know the scale.”
Pat turned on his blinker, then checked over his shoulder like the perfect driver he was before making the turn. “Like falling from heights?”
“Yes,” I slowly answered, again feeling a pang of guilt for not telling my siblings about the hours Noctus and I had spent clocktower diving.
Thankfully, I’d finally been able to tell them about the ability—Charon had included an incredibly detailed section on the physics behind the ability, complete with drawings of a fuzzy little black cat I was pretty sure Noctus had made based on how big the cat’s eyes were and that it appeared to be losing fur while jumping.
“There are opportunities for me to hone some skills.” I set the binder in my lap, but refrained from opening it. “As of now I can just sense magic and supernaturals since most of them ooze some form of it. I should be able to better sensewhereandwhothe sensations are coming from. I also should be able to get my powers to work on others as long as I’m touching them,” I said.
My relay race with the elves had proven that I could do it with my ability to escape notice, but what I really wanted was to see if I could get my immunity to magic to spread to others. So far, my practice said no, but I couldn’t find anything in Noctus’s notes that said I couldn’t.
“Any advice for your cat form?” Pat asked.
We were downtown now, so the streetlights lit up his blond hair and washed away the dark circles under his eyes.
“No.” My forehead puckered as I tried not to judge my ancestors. “It seems like they didn’t value the cat form for much more than sneaking around.”
“That’s short sighted.” Pat flicked on the windshield wipers when a drizzly mist began to fall. “You use that power more than any of your other abilities.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “You would have thought they would have at least noted it makes it super easy to smuggle weapons or food or something if you swap between shapes.”
“Remember how we used to use you to transport piles of leaves?” Pat laughed as he turned off main street, heading south toward Book Nookery.
“Yes.” I laughed at the memory.
Pat and Joy used to rake the leaves onto a tarp, then bundle it up so I could barely hold it off the ground before turning into a cat and one of them carried me to the collection spot farther down our street where I’d turn human and dump the leaves with no effort.
“If a couple of humans and a kid shadow figured out how to exploit your cat form, I imagine your ancestors must have, too. Even if it wasn’t recorded.” Pat glanced up at the clocktower as we passed by it on our way into the southern neighborhoods.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Though something tells me they probably weren’t using their abilities to make yardwork easier.”
I felt a prickle of elf magic, followed by an overwhelming sense of fear that rattled my bones.
“Pat! The tracker—”
Before I could finish the warning, something slammed into the front of Pat’s car,crushingthe bumper.
Pat’s airbag inflated with a blasting pop that made my ears ring, though I could still hear Pat’s mutters.
“Tracker,” I repeated as I struggled to unbuckle my seat belt and yank my leather harness and short sword from my backpack.
My danger instincts were lighting up my brain—but it was a little late for that.
“Understood.” Pat grabbed his cellphone from me, his thumb almost scraping the call button when elf magic burned in my mind, and seconds later the window of his car door shattered, showering us with glass.
