Since I knew I was blushing, I let go of his hand. I’d had quite enough of thought sharing. “Something about trees.”
We hadn’t said we loved each other yet. On-again, off-again magic had destroyed the likelihood of us ever having a normal relationship. It never seemed like the right time to tell him that I loved him. Or maybe it never seemed like the right time to admit it to myself.
How normal could a relationship be when at a casual touch you could hear the other person’s thoughts?
Zayvion stepped into me, put his hands on both sides of my face, his fingers sliding back through my hair. His palms were warm and callused, and I inhaled the sweet, familiar pine scent of him.
We kissed, letting our lips, our tongues, our bodies, say what our words dared not. He didn’t think anything while we were kissing, and neither did I. We didn’t have to.
He ended the kiss with soft, small kisses at the corners of my mouth, and pulled away, his arms still embracing me. He held me against him a little longer. “Be safe,” he breathed. “I don’t ever want to see you hurt again.”
I licked my lips, tasted the echo of him on me, in my mouth. “I’ll be fine. I promise.”
“Oh, for the love of all that’s holy. Get a room,” Shame said, “or I will bring out the ice.”
We stepped apart. “You throw any more ice at me, Shame,” Zay said as he stalked over to the trunk of the car, “and I will shove it up your hole.”
“No, no.” Terric said. “Flynn likes that.”
“Bite me, you flaming prick,” Shame said with absolutely no heat.
Terric grinned, and Shame flipped him off. They were both smiling.
I intended to keep it that way.
“Let’s leave our issues, and ice, at home,” I said. “We have hunting to get done.”
I stepped up on the other side of Zay, and took the machete he offered me. It was a good thing I’d brought my heavy coat, because otherwise I didn’t know how I’d hide this much steel.
And not just average steel. The wicked blade only mimicked a machete. It was really a bladed, deadly length of razor-edged metal and magical glyphs. One swing with this baby, and the right word or two, and you could cut an old-growth oak down with one smooth slice.
Next, I pulled a thin chain over my neck and felt the tongue-on-battery tingle of it rattling down around the void stone and resting against my skin. Not so much a weapon as a sort of enhancer for defensive spells, blocks, wards, those sorts of things.
I didn’t like to carry anything else. Had never gotten the hang of the bladed whip Zay wielded like he was skipping rope. Didn’t like the double axes that Chase, and apparently Terric, preferred. For me, a knife, a machete, and a magic chain were all I needed for a good time.
What could I say? It’s the simple things in life that make me happy.
“Right, then,” Shame said, lighting up another cigarette already. “That’s it. Who calls shotgun?”
“That is not it.” Zayvion pulled a cloth package out of the trunk and carefully unwrapped the contents. The contents were several leather wrist cuffs in small, glyphed boxes that were probably ancient and worth millions. He pulled out four round amulets. They weren’t the same size and heft of the disks my dad and Violet had invented, but I was pretty sure they had given my dad the idea that magic could be contained in something similar to these things.
Unlike the disks, these amulets could be used for only one thing—sensing the heartbeat of another person who wore the amulet. They were all carefully carved from a stone that had been found hundreds of years ago in China, I think. It was the stone itself that had been shaped by magic, infused in such a way to make it sensitive to itself and to the living things in contact with it.
Dad’s disks were pure technology that could hold magic, raw, uncast magic, for any amount of time, be used, and then, with the right spell, be reloaded again.
The disks Dad invented would make magic portable. They would allow magic to be called upon out at sea, or in unnetworked lands, and act as a battery for people like doctors and rescue crews who needed to access magic quickly, sometimes in out-of-the-way places, to save people’s lives.
Plus, there was absolutely no price to pay once the