need a quiet hand, Kitasa. I imagine you can appreciate that.”
Blood crept up the back of my neck, up my cheeks until I knew I all but glowed with it.
She was studiously looking the other way. “After all, you deal with many victims in your line of work.”
Nice lifeline to offer there. But I wasn’t buying it. Colleen had sensed the very same thing on me the day she’d met me. And just like Es here, she’d pretended otherwise.
Swallowing the shame and disgust rising inside me, I shouldered around her and headed for the front door. Damon was already at my back when she called out, “There are a few other witches you might want to speak with, aneira. This goes…deeper, I suspect, than you realize.”
I twitched at the sound of the formal title on her lips. Stopping in the middle of the hallway, I jammed my hands into my pockets and stared at the dirty toes of my boots. I wanted to leave. Hell, I wanted to just fade away, lose Damon and take off running. If I ran hard enough, I’d eventually lose them. I could get lost in the world. I’d done it before.
But the problem was sooner or later, one of them would find me.
My grandmother had been happy enough once I was out of her hair and she didn’t have to see me.
But the cat bitch wasn’t going to be so easily satisfied. She’d hired me to do a job.
If it had been any other job, I might have been willing to risk it.
Screw might.
I would have done it.
That kid’s sad, lost eyes haunted me, though.
Pulled me in.
Wearily, I turned around and found myself staring at the wall of Damon’s chest. “Can you move, please?” I said.
He stepped aside. But he didn’t stay there. As I headed down the hall, my ever-present shadow was at my back.
“Tate,” Es said, gesturing to the witch behind the two-way glass. “She’s got a way with fire. One of our younger ones and just so you know…she hates anybody who isn’t a witch. If it hadn’t been a witch child she saw, she wouldn’t have cared. Now, take notice…she would have seen it, but she wouldn’t have cared.”
“She saw a kid being kidnapped?” Damon demanded.
“No. She saw a kid getting into a car.” She gave him a sidelong glance. “Tate notices everything and she’ll notice more about you than you could possibly imagine, including what you had for breakfast, the fact that you’re in rut, and the fact that you hate your Alpha. If you don’t want her seeing anything that I just saw, you might want to lock it down so very tight, even you can’t see it.”
I snorted. “Es, you have to get your eyes, or your witch-whatever checked. He’s slavishly devoted to that woman.”
“Oh, he’s enslaved…to something,” Es murmured. “But that doesn’t mean the same as devotion.”
Then she turned those colorless, powerful eyes on me. “She might go kinder on you, but I don’t know. You’re not human and you smell like magic. She’s young and her mother was mortal…she might think you have some witch blood in you. She won’t know your bloodline.”
“Very few do.”
Es nodded. “True enough. But it may not matter. I’ll be there with you because if she gets angry, I’ll have to be the one to run interference.” She looked at Damon. “You’ll have to get her out if she gets angry.”
“If she’s that dangerous, why is she here?”
“Because we need our warriors,” Es said simply. “I hope to focus that energy. If I can’t, I’ll have to destroy it.”
She opened the door a moment later and a blast of heat licked over my flesh.
“Tate. We have company.”
“Company can get fucked,” the woman said. “I’m working.”
“You work all day.” Es smiled as she gestured at me. I walked into what felt like a smoldering, sweltering hell. “This woman only needs a few moments.”
Tate stopped for about five seconds. Her gaze lit on me. Her hair was buzzed, cut so close I could see her scalp. It was dark, though, very, very dark, and her skin was a warm, mellow gold. She wasn’t even sweating. Thirty seconds in there and I had already soaked my shirt through. Her eyes were bronzed, like melted pools of the metal, and energy crackled, snapped around her.
Damon came up behind me and his energy practically smothered me. I felt like I was drowning in it.
Tate snorted. “If the little dolly can’t talk to me without her