both wearing lab coats, and my plastic smile went even more stilted as I realized they were probably Quen's doctors. The younger one had very straight black hair and the tired look of an intern. The other was clearly the superior of the two, older and with the upright posture and stiffness that I'd seen in professionals who thought too much of themselves. I looked closer at the tall woman with her silvered hair back in an ugly bun, then looked again. Apparently Trent had gotten his wish for a ley line witch after all.
"Holy crap," I said. "I thought you were dead."
Dr. Anders stiffened, her face rising to give me a smile utterly lacking in warmth. Glancing at her companion, she shifted her head to get a wisp of her silver hair out of her eyes. She was tall and thin, her narrow face having no makeup or charm spell to make her look younger than she was. She'd probably been born around the turn of the century. Most witches born then were reluctant to show their magic, and that she had become a teacher of it was unusual.
I'd had the distasteful woman for an instructor, twice. The first time she flunked me the first week of class for no good reason, and the second time she threatened to do the same if I didn't take a familiar. She had been a murder suspect I was checking out, and her car had gone over a bridge during the investigation, eliminating her as a suspect. But I'd known she hadn't committed the crimes. Dr. Anders was nasty, but murder wasn't on her syllabus.
Yet seeing her having coffee in Trent's private kitchen, I wondered if she was learning new skills. Apparently Trent had helped her stage her death so the real ley line witch murderer wouldn't target her and she could safely come to work for him.
She reminded me of Jonathan, her disdain for earth magic as palpable as Jonathan's dislike for me. I ran my gaze over her too-thin form as I neared. It had to be her. Who would want to dress up in costume and pretend to be a woman that plain looking?
"Rachel," the woman said as she turned, her legs crossing now that they were out from under the table. She glanced inquiringly at the heavy-magic detection amulet around my bruised and bitten neck, and my eye twitched when her voice brought back oodles and oodles of good memories of being embarrassed in class.
"How nice to see you doing so well," she continued as her intern glanced between us, weighing our moods. "I understand you managed to break the familiar bond with your boyfriend." She smiled with the warmth of a penguin. "Can I ask how? Another curse, perhaps? Your aura is smutty." She sniffed as if her long nose could smell the blackness on my soul. "What have you been doing to it?"
I stopped three feet back, hip cocked, and imagined how good it would feel to plug my foot in her gut and send her chair crashing back. She had faked her own death, leaving me to try to figure out how to break the bond on my own - the harpy. "The familiar bond broke spontaneously when a demon made me his familiar," I said, hoping to shock her.
The intern gasped, his almond-shaped eyes widening as he sat back in his seat, the tips of his black hair shifting.
Feeling like a smartass, I pulled out a chair and propped my foot on it instead of sitting down. "When the bond didn't work through the lines," I said lightly, enjoying the man's horror, "he forced a tighter connection by making me take some of his aura. That broke the original bond with Nick. It also made him my familiar. He didn't expect that."
"You have a demon for a familiar?" The young man stammered, and Dr. Anders gave him a look to tell him to shut up.
I was tired of this, and as Takata shifted to one of his few ballads, I shook my head. "No. We agreed that because the familiar bonds were unenforceable, so was the deal. I'm no one's familiar but my own."
Dr. Anders's expression changed, her long face becoming greedy. "Tell me how," she demanded as she leaned forward slightly. "I've read about this. You can spindle line energy in your thoughts. Can't you?"
I looked at her in disgust. She had belittled and shamed me in front of two entire classes because