Scoring the second soul hadn’t been too hard. The Charmer wouldn’t be happy, but that was a problem for future Callie. Making the Soul Charmer mad tomorrow was better than making her mother dead. So fuck it. She’d shove these souls in Adam’s hands and take back her mother.
She scanned the steps in front of the cathedral and the pockets of light near each corner out front. “Zara doesn’t seem to be here.”
“I’m sure Nate’s watching,” Derek said.
“How can you be so confident?” She wasn’t.
Derek licked his lips quickly. “It’s what I would do. Smart business to watch over something important like this.”
“Oh.”
“Well, and he’s got a fucking hard-on for you, so he’ll be here to see you.” Derek spat the accusation. He’d intervened with Nate before on her behalf, but never mentioned it. Now his eyes narrowed. Jealousy wasn’t supposed to be hot, but Callie didn’t have time for supposed to.
“At least we won’t have to talk to him, and he’ll have to see you at my side.” She added the last part only to see his reaction. He licked his lips again, but slower this time.
“You’re not wrong, doll.”
Callie rested the flask in her lap, and pulled the jar with Nate’s soul from a pocket. The obsidian jar was opaque and the silver cap screwed on tight, but the sickly sweet call from within the container wasn’t dampened. It begged for entry into her body. Not a home. Not safety. It wanted to be in her.
She glared at the jar, and focused her thoughts, “Never happening.”
Callie reached to open the car door, but paused before pulling the handle. “I can’t give Nate the flask.”
“Shit. No, you can’t.”
Callie scanned the car’s interior for something, anything to put the extra souls into. Leave it to Derek to have a goddamn pristine ride. “Do you have anything in here?”
He flipped open the center console, and then pulled out a travel sized stick of deodorant.
If it weren’t so categorically unhelpful, she might have laughed. “That won’t work.”
C’mon brain.
“What about the jar?” Derek suggested.
“It’s already got Nate’s soul in it,” she said automatically.
“I’ve seen the Charmer slip a second soul in the same jar before.”
Callie couldn’t tell if he was lying. What would happen if more than one soul was stored together? Could the others be damaged by Nate’s soul? The dashboard clock gave her fifteen minutes to get the souls into Adam’s hand.
“Screw it.” Callie uncapped the flask. Her hands heated immediately. The souls were bound in the magic of the flask, but two of them together already had ash sloughing from her skin.
She pinned the flask upright between her thighs, and prayed her jeans wouldn’t singe before she could get this completed. She gripped the obsidian jar in one hand, and twisted the silver cap off with the other. Black flakes clung to the cap. She ignored the disintegration of her skin, and focused only on the thin tendrils of white swirling within the container. The soul immediately lurched toward the lid. Flames sprung from Callie’s knuckles. She ignored them. She didn’t ask or coax Nate’s soul. Even if he would have responded to that, he didn’t deserve her kindness. She shoved her power at the lid, choked the opening with a command to stay. A pulse of magic wobbled at the lip, and the flames on her fingers died.
Callie wasn’t sure how long she could hold this. Beads of sweat made her lower back sticky. She kept her gaze fixed on the mouth of the jar, but dropped one hand down to the top of the flask. She picked it up without leaving too much soot on her pants, and then delicately poured the souls into the jar.
She had to coo soft encouragement to them, but eventually they slid past the barrier and into the jar. Her hand holding the jar flashed a bright blue, and then smoldered with the heat of a cooktop. Her skin started to blacken, but she slapped the cap onto the jar as quickly as possible with her other hand. When it was secure, the flame died out, and her flesh began to repair to a rich brown. If only the wounds on her heart could heal so quickly.
She stared at the little jar. Tried to ignore the pleas from within. She swallowed hard.
“How are we going to do this?”
Derek took the jar from her, offering a reprieve from the worrying calls within. “Together.”
Callie and Derek walked around the back of the cathedral before approaching Adam. They didn’t need him getting an eye on the car or knowing how they’d exit, if they could help it. Derek’s exhales lit the air, a dragon on the war path. The November chill no longer bit at Callie. Simmering magic had staked its claim and denied entry to all other sensations.
Adam turned toward them, his coat shining like wet ink beneath the halo of the low-hanging street lamp. Acrid anger hit Callie at the sight of the cocky dealer grinning at them from a post fifty feet from the church. There was likely a law on the books to drive him further away from holy places and schools. Laws didn’t do a whole lot if they weren’t enforced, though. Hell, they didn’t do much for her. She couldn’t turn Nate in for kidnapping her mom. She couldn’t send the cops to his door. The cops hadn’t touched Ford, and she had no reason to think they’d want to move on Nate either, but more importantly, Nate knew too much. He had leverage. He could turn her in. When you acted outside the law, you couldn’t rely on it. Callie sniffed, but it didn’t dislodge the odor. Fighting to escape a home where crime was the norm had been hard, but now she was back consorting with criminals. She couldn’t even blame someone else for
