these two.
Rising from my chair, I descended the steps slowly to give the rage burning in my black heart time to cool.
The wards hummed as I neared them, but I had no intention of crossing the barrier and putting Colby at risk of capture. I stopped in front of Asa, rested my hands on the white picket fence, and let the claws at my fingertips extend into the wood to prevent me from raking them across his handsome face.
“The Silver Stag murdered that little girl.” I pitched my voice low. “She was his last victim.” I took a deep breath. “As he lay dying at my feet, he called her soul from her body and wrapped her in the form you just saw.” A creature unlike any in this world. “He chose a moth so he could summon her. He would have ordered her to fly to her own death at his command. He planned to consume her to heal himself, as if her essence was a fluff of cotton candy for him to pop into his mouth until it dissolved on his tongue.”
“I didn’t know.” Clay wiped a hand over his mouth. “You never said…”
“Your partner here thinks I kept Colby as a snack.” I mimed a casual shrug. “I can’t blame him.” I told him the truth. “I would think the worst of someone with my reputation too.” I held his gaze. “It’s earned.”
A tilt of his head transformed Asa’s aggression into curiosity. “Why did you resist?”
“She was afraid,” I rasped, a hole opening in my chest. “So very afraid.” I retracted my claws. “I killed the Silver Stag, but his spell was draining her. A soul can’t survive outside its shell for long. She was dying all over again. Slowly. Painfully. As she clawed at any means to hold on to life.” I couldn’t look at either of them. “Even now, I hear those screams in my dreams.”
They reminded me so much of how I had sounded, begging for mercy as a child after…
“You took her as your familiar.” Clay understood first. “You bound her to you to save her.”
The link to me gave her substance, allowed her to become real, but it also trapped her as a moth.
“I did.” I rubbed my arms against a chill. “She was a child then, and she’s a child now.”
That moment of weakness, of compassion, might have been the culmination of my darkest act yet.
A familiar mingled its life force with its witch. That was why it was taboo to bond with a child. They quit aging, physically. They were fixed for the rest of their lives—and witches lived for a long time—at the exact developmental point in which the link was forged. The bond that saved Colby locked her mental age too.
For as long as we both lived, Colby would be a child in my care, and that was an enormous responsibility.
One I would happily take on all over again for the chance to learn what it was to love another person.
Even if she was, well, an insect.
“She can’t function as a proper familiar.” Asa dipped his chin. “You knew, and you did it anyway.”
The pinch in Clay’s brows eased a fraction. “That’s why you went white.”
“A girl killed by black magic shouldn’t have to live with someone who practices it.”
“I owe you an apology.” Asa bowed his head in a show of respect. “I shouldn’t have assumed—”
“I left Black Hat.” I stood my ground. “I’m not going back.”
“You would let more children die?” Asa slid his gaze past my shoulder. “Can you live with that?”
“More children like Colby.” I filled in the blanks for him. “That’s what you mean.”
The appeal to my better nature would have been laughable a decade earlier. Now I was…softer.
“I can’t go back.” I stared at the ground as if the right answers might sprout. “I can’t risk Colby.”
Black Hat might have found me, but Colby had gobsmacked Clay and Asa, which meant she was still a secret.
“We need your expertise on this case.” Asa took a step away. “Will you sleep on it?”
“It won’t change my answer,” I warned him. “I have to do what’s best for Colby.”
“I understand.” He made a gesture at the level of his navel. “Until tomorrow, Rue Hollis.”
Backing away from the fence, he pivoted on his heel then returned to the SUV.
“I wish you had told me.” Clay stuck his hands in his pockets. “I could have helped you.”
Because this was Clay, I could admit, “I was afraid