on my sweater in the face of her penetrating onyx gaze.
“Jesse,” she said in the sort of smoky voice that made me think of sex. God only knew what effect it must have on Saldana. Her accent rang faintly with an island flavor. Haiti, perhaps. “It’s been too long. Who have you brought me?”
I didn’t like her phrasing. Typically, offerings got tied to a rock and left for a hungry dragon. I eyed the door over my shoulder. Dammit, I shouldn’t have worn the wedge heels.
“Hello, Twila.” To my astonishment, Saldana bent and kissed her knuckles in a courtly gesture.
“Nice to meet you,” I murmured.
“Sit down, won’t you?” She indicated the leather chairs across from her desk.
Since this was Saldana’s show, I sat back while he performed the introductions.
Twila studied me for a moment before turning to him. “I see why you brought her. Fascinating.” In her eyes I saw she already knew my secrets, all of them, great and small. But how could she? “You smell of fire. I see it licking at your aura.”
I swallowed. Quite uncomfortable to have your secrets laid bare. “Do I?”
“You fear your gift,” she went on. “You fear everything you touch will turn to ash.”
“Such a long shadow, falling on you year after year.” I glimpsed distance in her eyes then, as if she saw beyond the office walls. “It shaped what has been and what will be, but you can part your path from it, if you make the right choices.”
Color me cynical. “I suppose you’re going to tell me what those are.”
To my surprise, she shook her head. “Only you can decide your course, child. Seldom have I seen two such divergent futures. One is dark indeed. But this much I can tell you: those who broke your heart so long ago did not act of their own volition. They too were shadow-touched.”
I felt raw, exposed, but I had to ask. “You’re saying something made them want to hurt my mother?”
“Suspicion and jealousy, mere embers fanned to violent life. Yes. If you want the truth, you must return to Kilmer.”
I shuddered. Before, there had remained to me a kernel of doubt. Saldana might have brought me here for some bizarre reason of his own, intending to impress me. There might not be any truth to his claims of a gifted secret society. But my skepticism dissolved. There was no orthodox way she could know about my hometown, and she hadn’t gleaned her knowledge via any ritual I recognized. According to my mother’s books, a spell like that took time.
“How do you know such things?”
With a faint, feral smile, Twila shook her head. “No. You get nothing more for free. If you expect more of me, you must earn it.”
I glanced at Saldana, who sat beside me quiet and impassive. “What do you want?”
She slid a dagger toward me. “Read this and tell me what you see.”
So it would be a sacrifice, after all.
Though it meant another scar, I didn’t hesitate. I wrapped my fingers around the blade, braced for the pain. It came in long, red waves, worse than usual, and by the time I let go, I felt sick. The knife clattered to the desk.
“You used it to kill a man,” I managed. “Stabbed him through the heart.”
Her gaze flickered to the cop beside me, as if wondering whether she could be arrested on that basis alone. “Some men need killing.”
I couldn’t argue with that, as I wrapped my wounded palm around my iced glass. Jesse reached for my hand and I don’t know why I let him take it, possibly because he could feel my nausea and pain. For a moment he merely studied the livid burn.
“I’ll get you some ice,” he said, and left me alone with her.
“You are real.” Her tone reflected a peculiar sort of wonder. “People would kill to make use of you.” That much I knew. “I’ve only met one before you. He came from a family of gifted, though, so his talent didn’t carry the same price.”
“Lucky him,” I muttered. “How come it sucks so much for me?” It was mostly a rhetorical question.
I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to call on this ability effortlessly. No pain. No fire. Sometimes I wanted nothing more than for it to burn itself out, leaving me
She seemed to think I really wanted an answer. “Think of it this way. Your power doesn’t come natural. When you use it, you’re exercising a limb where the transplant didn’t quite take. That’s why it wounds you.”
An unexpected quirk of the spell—I can’t imagine my mother meant for me to suffer. I don’t think she wanted me to feel her pain every time I touched a charged object, but some things even a good witch can’t foresee. I’d probably never know what went wrong in her final moments.
I sighed. “I guess there’s no cure for that.”
“I’m afraid not.”
Saldana returned with a dishcloth full of ice, which I took. He sank down beside me, somehow expectant. Then I realized I should tell her about the sending. Perhaps she could shed some light on things. Quickly I summarized the details.
“Unfortunately, I’m not the one to ask. Like yours, my ability doesn’t rely on ritual.”
“You have the Sight?”
“That’s one word for it. In exchange for certain... tribute, the Loa let me see threads of fate. It’s not... linear, as you know it, and not entirely reliable. I see the larger patterns in play, forces influencing the balance.” The light glazed her dusky skin, made of her eyes twin shadows that drank the light. “It hasn’t been this bad since the Black Death.”
A chill ran over me, dead man’s hands.
“Do you know what’s causing it?”
“I could speculate.” She tilted her head, cast a meaningful look at Saldana. “To find your enemy, you should see Maris, but I don’t think she’s in tonight. She’ll know who could manage such a powerful sending.”
“I know where she lives,” Saldana said quietly.
I caught the undercurrent.
A half smile curved her mouth. “I suppose you do. I don’t recommend you risk a hotel, though. You’ll need protection and there’s nowhere safer than right here. You can borrow the guest apartment upstairs.”
“Why are you being so nice?” There had to be a catch.
Saldana frowned at me even as she replied, “It often proves helpful to have people in my debt, Corine. You would do well to remember that.”
Right. Her kindness concealed a mercenary bent. Oddly that reassured me. Since I didn’t want to be awakened by flying glass, I decided to accept her offer.
Before standing, I downed my drink. “I’m pretty tired. Can we go up?”
“Certainly. Jesse knows the way. It was a pleasure meeting you.” As I reached the door, following Saldana, she added, “By the way, you’ve carried the weight of a lie your whole life. Your father didn’t leave. He was taken. More patterns than you know bind you and your former lover.”
I would have turned, asked more, but Saldana took hold of my arm, leading me along the dark hallway toward some stairs. “That was meant to tempt you,” he explained, “but to get more information from her now, you’d need to offer something else. I don’t think you’re in any shape to do another reading, and anything else would be...” He trailed off, letting me interpret the kind of thing Twila might ask.
I shivered. “Thanks.”
Between residual nausea and the tequila spiking through my veins, I felt both euphoric and shaky. Saldana kept his hand on me as we climbed to the next landing, where he opened the first door. We stepped through to a flat I could only describe as witchy, full of cut crystal figurines and blue velvet.
Two more steps and I collapsed on the overstuffed couch. Jesse sank down beside me, his hand hovering as
