to my feet. I wandered into the kitchen and started preparing the coffeemaker. It was becoming clear that sleep was not going to happen today.
“Gage?”
“It’s because I’m a warlock. It’s because . . . I’m working for the Towers.”
“She can’t hold that against you! She knew what you were before you started dating,” Sofie argued angrily as she trotted into the kitchen after me. She jumped up on the counter. I immediately picked her up and put her on the floor again. Witch or not, I wasn’t going to have a cat on my kitchen counters. It was bad enough she liked to sprawl across my coffee table while watching TV.
“Yeah, well it’s different when it comes to a baby. She’s willing to take the risk herself, but not when it comes to the life of our child,” I explained as I filled the carafe with water.
The coffeemaker was old and one of the most basic models. No frills and no fancy gadgets to let me grind my own beans or whatever people did. All the same, I loved my coffeemaker because when I needed it, it produced liquid love filled with scalding heat and caffeine.
“But what about your rights? Don’t you have a say? Are you just going to let her leave?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. I see her point. It’s been dangerous to be around me. The Grim Reaper, Simon’s attacks, the half dozen Tower attacks this fall, Reave, and now I’m involved in two different murder investigations. My life has become a natural disaster. The president is going to send in the National Guard at any second!” I took a deep breath and hit the on button. “You can’t safely raise a baby in a mess like that.”
“So you’re just giving up?”
I flashed her a weak smile as I reached up into the cabinet to grab a mug. “I never said that. I’m still trying to figure things out. I need to either fall off the Towers’ radar completely . . .”
“Or?” she prompted when I fell silent.
“Or I get rid of the Towers.”
“Even if I thought you could get rid of the Ivory Towers, I don’t necessarily think that it would fix everything. What about all those kids born with abilities? Part of the reason the Towers were erected was to give some guidance to those kids for their own safety.”
Bracing both my hands on the counter in front of me, I stepped back, stretching the muscles in my legs and my back. After I was sucked back into the Towers in September, I’d started going to the gym again, more as a way of burning off some of my anger and frustration than to get in shape. The recent chaos was keeping me away from the gym now and I felt stiff. If I could spend an hour on some of the machines, the fog from my head would finally clear.
“I don’t have any answers, Sofie. I wish I did, but I don’t,” I straightened and folded my arms over my chest as I watched coffee slowly drip into the carafe. “But I’m looking.”
“Is there anything I can help with?”
I hesitated. This wasn’t something I could take to Gideon. Sofie was far from the straight and narrow, doing some nasty things in her past with magic. She might have my answers.
But she was trying to mend her ways. She had even shown remorse about trying to kill off all the elves by making them infertile. The cat was also becoming far too tight with Gideon and I didn’t need her running off to tell Gideon what I was sure he had already begun to suspect.
It didn’t change the fact that I needed answers and I couldn’t exactly trust the source that I was using. Demons might not be permitted to lie in some strange twist of fate, but they were tricky bastards.
“I have a question about the symbol you saw on the wall down in my basement,” I started, trying to sound nonchalant. I kept my eyes on the steadily filling carafe while watching Sofie out of the corner of my eye.
The cat stood in the doorway to the kitchen and gave a little shudder. “That’s some nasty business, Gage.”
“You’ve said that before. What kind of nastiness am I dealing with? I got the symbol from Simon when I was studying under him. What kind of magic was Simon dealing in? Something forbidden?”
The cat sat on the carpet for a moment