the time and space to work things out. We’d simply have to roll with it if Zack ended up screwing us over as he became himself.
“Thanks.” Trent sighed, his shoulders slumping. “I’m going to ask Zack to help me explore why elven magic isn’t working,” he said. “Unless you think it’s a bad idea.”
“No, it’s a good one.” I took the bowl he was rinsing. If someone had told me last year that I’d be standing in Trent’s kitchen doing KP duty, I’d have said they were crazy. “Just be careful,” I added as I stacked the bowl where it belonged.
“Aren’t I always?” He smiled at me, rinsing the big cook pot and setting it to drip-dry.
“No. What’s this about Jenks telling me about you burning your eyebrows off?”
Trent’s lips parted, and then his brow furrowed. “What’s the point of having a curse to fix yourself if you don’t use it?”
He was smiling, but I still didn’t like the idea of Zack inside Trent’s first defenses, down one floor. “Trent, I know I brought him over here, and I see why you’re doing it, but Quen has a point. What happens when I leave tomorrow and you’re here with the girls?”
Mood soft, Trent laced his hands behind my back and tugged me into him. “Quen will be here, and Jon. Add Jenks to that, and I’m safer than you, half a city away. He needs to believe in something, Rachel. He wants to believe. Let me give him a choice. That’s all he wants. Who am I to deny him that?”
“That doesn’t make him trustworthy,” I said, my hands now behind his neck. “He could be working for Landon and not even know it. Have you looked for bugs?”
Trent’s grip on me eased. “That’s why Jenks is taking him downstairs.”
“Okay, but—”
I blinked, not expecting it when Trent leaned in and kissed me. For an instant, there was just him and me, and my arms around his neck, and then he drew back, his head tilted as he worked to meet my eyes. “It will be okay,” he said, but it still felt like a wish. “We’re both going to be awake all night. What could happen?”
I sighed, feeling alone when he stepped back and my hands slipped from him. What could happen? Exactly my question.
CHAPTER
19
My fingers felt slow as I set the yellowed journal on the coffee table atop the rest. After a night of dipping into Trent’s mom’s thoughts, I had a feeling that I’d have liked the woman if she still lived. Trent had once told me that my dad had been with her the night she died trying to get an ancient elven DNA sample. Honestly, it was amazing that Trent even liked me.
It was nearing seven a.m. Seven was an ungodly time to be up if you were a witch, especially one who hadn’t slept at all. How Trent did this every day was beyond me, but I didn’t nap for four hours at noon, either.
The entire compound was quiet with Zack at the pool and Trent in the kitchen, cheerfully making waffles. My hair was damp from the shower I’d taken to try to wake up, and I’d put on the upscale casual-professional white-and-cream outfit I’d found in the closet. Ellasbeth had probably ordered it and never come to collect. Fatigue pulled at me despite the no-doze amulet, and I slumped in the living room with my back to Trent, staring at the huge black TV.
I hadn’t found anything new in Trisk’s journals. They made fascinating reading, though, mostly because of the weird relationship she’d had with Trent’s dad. Sort of an amorous disgust. She clearly had feelings for him even as she despised the man.
I yawned and shut my eyes, counting on the no-doze and Trent in the kitchen to keep me awake. It was hard not to see the parallels between Kal and Trisk, and Trent and myself, though I don’t think Trisk ever lost her anger that Kal never evolved into the man she thought he could be.
And was that his fault or hers? I wondered, my closed eyes twitching as the memory of Trent slamming my head into a tombstone and choking me swam up from nowhere. We’d narrowly escaped the ever-after, and Trent had learned not only that I was a demon, but that his father was to blame for me surviving. Killing me would’ve not only ended the demons’ rebirth, but probably started another war. He would’ve done it,