a good thing,” I told him. “Dust is bad for computers and people.”
“Have you ever tried making a mess, Catalina?”
“I don’t make messes, I clean them up.” And now I was sounding like a renegade detective from some edgy cop drama.
Alessandro shuddered. “Ooh, so hardcore.”
I ignored him. It was that or throw something, and the chief of police said next time it would be my badge.
I pushed past him and walked out to my car. He followed. I couldn’t see him behind me, but I knew exactly how much space separated us. Sometimes Matilda and I took Zeus to her aunt’s property on the edge of Houston, to walk the trails through the woods. The moment we let him out of the car, Zeus melted into the brush. He would follow us while we took the path, invisible but always there, a dangerous predatory presence gliding through the woods like a ghost, watching us. Walking with Alessandro behind me was just like that.
I took my gladius and slid it into its sheath. The holster was next. I didn’t feel any need to hide it from Moody. I fitted the Beretta into its holster, locked my car, and went to Runa’s Nissan.
Alessandro held out his hand. “Keys.”
I made a face at him, popped the locks open with the fob, and put my coat and sword in its sheath in the backseat.
“Catalina.”
I got into the driver’s seat and shut the door.
Alessandro knocked on my window. I could just drive off, but then I would have to go to Moody’s office by myself. It wasn’t like he could follow me in his car. Oh, oh, that was good.
I rolled the window down. “I thought you’d follow in your Jeep.”
Alessandro leaned his right arm on the top of the car and bent forward, so our faces were close. The urge to scoot out of the way gripped me.
“I get it,” he said. “You had to put on a show for your family. But it’s just us now. I’ll drop you off at a coffee shop, go see Moody, and pick you up on the way back.”
Who the hell did he think he was? “Amazing.”
“Give me the keys,” he said.
“You have two choices. You can get in the passenger seat or you can stand there looking stupid as I drive away.” I rolled the window up and started the car.
He didn’t move. I wiggled my fingers at him in a little bye-bye wave, put the car into reverse, and eased my foot off the brake. The Nissan rolled a bit. He stepped back to save his feet.
I let the car move back another foot.
He looked like he wanted to take the door off the Nissan with his bare hands and pull me out of it.
Another foot. Last chance, Alessandro. I really didn’t want to go there without him. Thinking about it turned my insides cold. But I would if he left me no choice.
Alessandro circled around the front to the passenger side. I unlocked the door. He got in, and suddenly there wasn’t enough air. He stole it all, saturating the car with menace. It rolled off him in waves.
I pulled my phone out and snapped a picture of him. Mine.
He glared at me, his eyes full of orange flames.
“For my private collection,” I told him. “Seat belt, please.”
Moody ran his business from an office building on Bering Drive, sandwiched between the multimillion-dollar mansions of the Villages in the west and the less luxurious but still prosperous neighborhoods of Tanglewood in the east. The traffic was decent for Houston, and the eight-mile drive to Bering took us only twenty minutes.
I turned right and continued down the street. We were almost there.
Alessandro hadn’t said a word since he had buckled his seat belt.
Any other time, the prospect of spending twenty minutes in a car with Alessandro would have petrified me. He filled the vehicle, his presence much larger than his physical body, and his magic simmered just above his skin. I felt it, a volatile power ready to lash out. The faint scent of his shampoo or soap, herbal and slightly spicy, curled around me, enticing and distracting. It was just me and him, together in the car, with the night wrapping around us like a length of smoky velvet.
It would have been shockingly intimate, except that the memories of slitting a human throat with my sword cycled through my head. I saw myself kill over and over, I smelled the blood, I heard the hoarse