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I was still standing there when Rose came down the stairs. She smiled, seeing me, but the gesture didn’t remove the sadness from her eyes. I had the feeling that emotion was going to linger in her face for a long, long time. What even happened if someone a witch was consorted to just left? I hadn’t wanted to break her heart more by asking, and that wasn’t a question I could ask an internet search engine.
“Hey,” she said. “Finished with your interviews?”
“Yep,” I said, putting on my best optimistic expression even if it didn’t reflect how I was feeling.
“Do you want to run through some of the practice forms—the dual ones? I was thinking we should keep that up. I mean, especially now…” She let herself trail off, her jaw tightening.
After one of her consorts had proven so thoroughly he didn’t trust her. I opened my mouth, knowing the right thing to say was yes. That was what she needed from me. But my body balked, with a ribbon of resistance that constricted around my ribs.
I was too wound up, too overwhelmed. I’d probably screw up the forms too and just make her even more unsettled.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea right now,” I said cautiously. “I’m all…” I made a spinning gesture with my hand by my head. “Trying to put all the pieces together, to find a connection we can use. I don’t know. I don’t think I can concentrate on much else right now.”
Part of me, the part that had cringed watching her torture Courtland, braced itself for her to be upset with me. But all that happened was her smile slanted and she took my hand to squeeze it.
“You’ve been running around working on that for weeks,” she said. “Maybe what you need is a break. Take a little time for yourself, get away from all the craziness here for a bit. Just… be careful if you leave the estate, all right?”
Love swelled in my chest in answer to the love she’d just shown me. My smile came a little easier. I tapped the token I was wearing under my shirt. “I’ve got you protecting me wherever I go. You might be right. Just a quick walk to see if I can clear my head and get somewhere.”
I headed out thinking maybe I’d swing by my parents’ place again. Dad had seemed to be recovering fine when Seth and I had visited yesterday, but it was hard not to worry. Of course, visiting Dad also meant visiting Mom, and she’d pulled the two of us aside yesterday to rant for a few minutes about where we’d been and who we might have been with until Seth had managed to extricate us.
No, I didn’t want to be harped on about my choice in lovers today. I’d already chatted with Dad a bit on the phone this morning.
Instead I ambled down the main road and onto the main street through town. The water was burbling from the fountain in the square. I walked up to it and stood by the base, enjoying the cool flecks that dabbled my skin while the sun glared down. Damn, it’d be nice to just soak myself in that pool.
There was that pond on Rose’s property—the one where we’d used to go swimming when we were kids. It’d always been the perfect temperature in the summer. I should revive that tradition… if her protections could extend that far. It was a bit of a hike into the woods.
That thought dampened my enjoyment of the moment. I wandered on through the square, playing a game with myself of identifying the tourists and guessing where they’d come from. A few of the locals tipped their heads to me. A couple others watched me warily. Wondering if I’d brought oddness cooties with me from the Hallowell manor? I didn’t roll my eyes at them, but it was a near thing.
The summer heat wafted off the cobblestones too. Sweat started to bead on my forehead and beneath my shirt. I ducked into the little bookstore just off the square with a wave to Marsha at the front counter. She made a hesitant gesture with her hand, her eyes going a little round beneath her bun of white hair.
Oh, good Lord, don’t tell meshewas hearing—and listening to—rumors too. I’d been coming in here for reading material for two decades, whenever there was a topic the internet wasn’t supplying me quite enough info on.
I walked down the aisle, skimming my fingers over the spines of the books. The chill of the air conditioner drove away the heat that had soaked into my skin. Other than a few new popular novels that weren’t really my thing, there was nothing here I hadn’t seen before. I was going to turn around and head out again when my gaze caught on the guy at the far end of the shop.
He was standing in the corner where Marsha wouldn’t have been able to see him, taking books off the shelf, paging through them, and sticking them back in their spots. But there was a twitchiness to his movements, the way he scanned the aisle periodically, that rubbed me the wrong way. And who the hell would wear a vest, even a thin one, over their shirt on a day this hot?
I meandered around to the other aisle and peeked at him through the gap in the bookcase between the rows of books. He glanced at a couple more volumes and then reached for one he’d already put back. With one more jerk of his head to check for witnesses, he slipped the book into an inner pocket on his vest.
My eyebrows shot up. What a jerk. I didn’t know him—he was either a tourist or a newcomer in town. Maybe a local from a neighboring town who went elsewhere for his criminal activities.
I leaned on the counter on my way out and murmured to Marsha, “You might want to check that guy’s vest. Just saying.”
She blinked at me, startled, and then the guy came around the corner. I gave her another wave and went out.
The blast of heat didn’t diminish my sense of accomplishment, minor as it might be. I might not be able to take on any real villains, but I’d protected our neighborhood bookstore from a little petty theft.
My feet stalled halfway down the street. The idea beamed through my head as if it’d been a literal light bulb.
I’d been thinking about my other problems all wrong. Or not wrong, just forgetting a whole huge aspect of them. Our enemies were magical, so I’d been trying to find something within their world to take them down: a crime of the witching sort. But everyone in Rose’s society still lived in the real world with all us unsparked people—and our unsparked law enforcement—too. They had to follow the laws of this nation as well as their own.
And I’d bet the clothes off my back that if the Frankfords’ allies had been breaking their own people’s rules, they’d been finding ways to cheat the unsparked systems too. They’d have just as much trouble enslaving witches like Imogen to demons from the inside of a regular prison cell. The business dealings Frankford had mentioned in his files would give me the perfect jumping off point to investigate.
A grin stretched across my face. I set off again, back toward the Hallowell estate, with more sense of purpose than I’d had since I’d stolen that hard drive in the first place.
Chapter Eighteen
Rose
