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“I’m not about to hurt you,” he said quietly. His eyes were resigned, as if he expected everyone to fear him. “I don’t do that anymore.”
Anymore. I swallowed. As if that didn’t sound menacing. I could see the magic rolling around him, and unlike the shifters’ sunny yellow and the vampires’ red, it was a dark purple with streaks of light.
“Are you a witch?” I asked, even though I knew it was rude to ask about people’s magic.
He scowled. “Yes, of a sort. I’m descended from Viking magicians.”
“Oh, do you know Pepper’s Vikings?”
He shook his head. “Real Vikings disappeared from the world a long time ago.”
“That’s her house.” I jerked my finger back the way we’d come. “She rescued her Vikings from the underworld. Something about them being cursed by Loki.”
“Actual Vikings?” He looked at me suspiciously.
“Yup.”
“That’s incredible.” He didn’t seem like he quite believed me.
“This is Silver Springs,” I said.
He chuckled, low and deep, and I swallowed. I was regretting not taking his arm now, because everything in me called out for me to touch him. I barely knew him, but I wanted to jump his bones right there on the sidewalk. I eyed the houses around us and restrained myself. Was this what being mated was like? Pepper had told me once that she’d been unable to restrain herself around her Vikings, that the mate bond came with “a horniness like you wouldn’t believe.” Was this what she meant? A warmth rose in my cheeks.
“So why’d you open the aquarium?” I forced myself to ask. I stumbled over the words, but I hoped he wouldn’t notice. He had me all off balance.
He frowned. “I came here to ask you questions, not to be interrogated myself.”
“You’re here to interrogate me?” My mouth dropped open in surprise. “I told you how my magic works at the aquarium.”
“Well, there have been a lot of strange happenings lately.”
“And you think I might be involved?” I couldn’t even wrap my head around what he was trying to say. My magic only did one thing: stop other magic from working around me. I tried to remember anything else happening when I was at the aquarium. Oh, there had been that thing with the stingray tank. “Like the ravens?”
“Yes, like the stingrays turning into ravens, and the dolphins ending up in the shark tank.”
“That wasn’t Polly’s tank?” I gasped. “Will she be alright? The sharks didn’t hurt her, did they?”
“Sharks don’t attack dolphins,” he said.
I think I vaguely remembered that from one of my nature shows. “Why?”
He scratched his head. “Well, I don’t know, really. You’d have to ask Roman. He’s the creature expert.”
“Okay.”
He grabbed my arm and pulled us to a stop. “Wait a minute. I had questions for you.”
“Well, I couldn’t have done those other things,” I said with a shrug. “That’s not how my magic works.” No matter how aggressive he got, that was the truth.
“How do you know?”
I smirked. “I’ve lived with it my whole life. My family is all witches, and they tried everything to figure out my magic, so they would have known if it did anything but null magic.”
“And how can I trust you?”
My mouth fell open for the second time. I’d never done anything to make him think he couldn’t trust me. I’d been honest with them right from the start. I could have just walked out of the aquarium and ignored the mess, but I’d stayed. I’d taken responsibility and told them how to fix it. And now he didn’t trust me? I was speechless.
“When did you arrive in town? Before the Vee party, right?”
