But this wasn’t one of them. My anger began to rise, spurred by his irritating stubbornness and blind desire to control every situation.
“You’re resolving this problem by pushing me away. You’re a four-hundred-year-old vampire and avoidance is the best solution you’ve got?”
“Until you’re at the mercy of someone else’s thoughts and whims, I’m not looking to you for advice.”
That bullet was aimed right at me, but I kept up my guard. “Ah,” I said, nodding. “So you’re going to take shots at me until I walk away? You know, we’ve been down this road before. It ended with your apologizing.”
“This is different.”
It wasn’t. Not really. But if he believed it, what could I do? He thought he was protecting me; how was I supposed to convince him his instincts were wrong?
Tears threatening to spill over my lashes, I strode to the office door. I would not cry in front of him.
“We weren’t done here,” he called out.
I risked a glance back, and I could see the panic flaring in his eyes. Maybe the consequences of his ridiculous position were finally occurring to him. Good. Maybe he’d come to his senses. But I wasn’t going to waste time arguing with someone who needed to be convinced I was an asset.
“According to you,” I said, “we are done here.”
Rarely had slamming a door felt so good.
CHAPTER TWELVE
HIS LIBRARY? WELL STOCKED
It was a good thing we weren’t telepathically connected, because he wouldn’t have enjoyed hearing my thoughts on the way back down to the Ops Room.
I decided my best option was to help the team with the investigation of Paulie Cermak’s death, but with my mind absorbed by Ethan’s stubbornness, I was pretty useless. Hoping to identify a specific motive for Paulie’s death, I’d printed off as much information on Paulie Cermak as I could find on the Web. The stack of papers sat on the table in front of me, but I hadn’t so much as glanced at them in half an hour.
All my brain cells were busy being furious at Ethan and wondering whether I could keep him from imploding our almost relationship. He was afraid he’d hurt me. It couldn’t have been easy to feel trapped in someone else’s neuroses, but that wasn’t Ethan—the man who’d taken a stake for me.
But what was I supposed to do? What was the right thing to do? Respect his wishes and keep my distance? Play the sexy minx and use seduction to get him to change his mind? Or just ignore him until we got Mallory’s mind meld squared away?
Getting her squared away was definitely the first thing on my revised agenda.
“Merit!”
I jolted to attention and found Lindsey, who was back from guard duty and sat across from me at the conference table, staring at me with amusement.
“What?”
“Your phone is ringing.”
For the first time, I heard the phone ring from the pocket of my jacket, which I’d slung over the back of my chair. I managed to grab the phone just before it stopped ringing.
“Hello?”
“Too busy to answer the phone?”
It was Catcher. “Sorry. I didn’t hear it ring. What’s up?”
“I talked to Mallory. She used a conjuration spell.”
“Which does what?”
“It conjures. Brings something into the space that hadn’t been there before. The spell was also in the Maleficium, just like the familiar spell. She copied it before they took the book away so she’d remember the steps.”
“Same magical theory as last time?” I wondered. “Use a bit of dark magic to upset the line between good and dark magic, and invoke the rest of the dark magic out of the Maleficium.”
“That seems to be what she was trying to do. And that explains the second Tate. She conjured him into existence.”
But had she? “I don’t understand. If she was conjuring something, shouldn’t something new have popped into the room? I mean, instead of Tate splitting in two?”
“That’s possible, I guess, but it’s hard to say. Tate touched the Maleficium. That’s like being shot at point-blank range by magic. It could have affected the outcome of the spell.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for the information.”
“Sure,” he said, and the line went dead.
I put the phone away, and when Luc rolled his office chair closer to the table for a report, I relayed what Catcher had said. But while I took Catcher’s point about Tate having touched the Maleficium, the magical math still didn’t make sense to me.
“He said conjuration is supposed to bring forth something new,” I said, my gaze shifting between Lindsey and Luc.