behind the wheel, and merged into traffic as if he was born in Houston. Fatigue filled me, sand trickling into an hourglass. I lay back against the seat and closed my eyes.
“Catalina, are you all right?” he asked gently.
“I’m just thinking.”
“What about?”
“Lawrence’s hands. They didn’t look anything like the hand in Sigourney’s video, and his talent is completely different. I understand one warped person capable of magic. Strange things happen, and in life there are no absolutes. But two?”
He didn’t answer.
“And he was strong, Alessandro. Stronger than a normal summoner Prime. You said Diatheke had rapidly expanded over the last year. Are they manufacturing warped assassins somehow? Is that what’s fueling the expansion?”
“I don’t know.”
“Magic warped don’t occur naturally in significant numbers,” I recited from memory. I sounded tired even to myself. “The incidence of babies born with magic-induced birth defects is one per roughly nine hundred thousand. Almost all warped are the result of us meddling with inherent magic through experimentation. There is an Everest-size mountain of research on it, and none of it mentions them retaining any magical abilities post-transformation. Where would Diatheke get warped mages?”
“Again, I don’t know.”
“You can’t just cook up a warped human out of thin air. It requires fundamentally altering their talent. It requires years of research, complex arcane interaction, teams of mages working together. And money. A great deal of it.”
“Diatheke has the money,” Alessandro said.
“What about the rest of it?”
He shook his head, his gaze distant. “Every time I get close . . .”
“Close to what?”
He didn’t answer.
I should have probed deeper, but I was so tired, and thinking hurt. I wanted to feel him holding me again. I wanted him to pull over so I could climb into his seat and wrap myself in his strong arms again. I would put my head on his hard chest and let the steady pulse of his heart carry me off to sleep; safe, warm, and free of this oppressive sense of doom that hung over me like a storm cloud.
This could never happen. He and I could never happen. I was a siren. My magic would turn him into a lovesick zombie. He was an assassin. He killed people for a living. What did it say about him that he felt comfortable ending the life of a human being and getting paid for it?
What did it say about me? When he was with me, I felt alive. I had my family, I was never by myself unless I chose to be, but when he walked away, I suddenly felt alone, like someone had torn a vital part out of my life and I desperately needed it back. This wasn’t who I was.
I closed my eyes. The scarred hunter’s face surfaced from my memories, his eyes devoid of human emotion like the eyes of a gator. He and the man who’d put his arms around me on the roof were a world apart. The hunters had felt flat to me, as if some integral thing that made them fully human had withered and died, leaving only self-interest and bitter pragmatism. Alessandro felt vibrant and alive. When he talked about finding Halle, when he went out of his way to buy Shadow a treat, when he had asked me if I was all right a few minutes ago, he showed compassion. He had nothing to gain by doing any of these things. One couldn’t be compassionate and be a hired murderer.
Bits and pieces floated through my mind, trying to string themselves into a coherent whole. The derision in his voice when he called the assassins “they,” the dossier on Diatheke, the way he had explained how Sigourney hired him. I have a certain reputation, the kind people like Sigourney make a point to note. He wasn’t a simple assassin. There had to be more there.
Or perhaps I was deluding myself. I wanted him to be something more, because I wanted him. I would settle for the mere possibility of a future, a hope. Was it making me blind? Was I deliberately twisting the facts so I wouldn’t feel guilt about falling in love with a hired killer?
No, love was too strong of a word. Definitely too strong.
I had to stop thinking. Right now. “Why a shovel?”
“What?”
“On the rooftop when we fought the swarm, why did you conjure a shovel?”
He paused, obviously deciding how much to say. “It’s the way my magic works.”
“So it’s intention-based?”
He sighed, resigned. “Yes. I imagine the action, and the magic does