Taming the Beast

“Which part?”

“The sharing part.”

“Do I seem like such a giving person?”

“You’re a witch of a certain sort. We don’t isolate ourselves, do we? We need community to thrive.”

“Don’t you isolate?”

“Irrelevant.”

“Quite relevant. You’ve just accused me of being an aberration to our kind, and yet your magic doesn’t seem quite right for a Fallon Viking, and people rarely ever see you in public.”

“Let’s get back on topic, shall we?”

“So, you can dish it, but you can’t take it, huh?”

He closed his eyes. “Hmm. To answer your question, yes, I do believe Mr. Jordan had sufficient time and space to steer around Mr. Darrow. It was ten in the morning. Most people were at work, and the streets were fairly empty.”

“I see.” She traced the line of the street on the map and pictured the movements of the vehicles. The front left bumper of Mr. Jordan’s car had collided with the front left bumper of Mr. Darrow’s. Equal distribution of damage, and no clear indication of blame. If Mr. Jordan had been inattentive at the wheel and could have avoided Mr. Darrow, he may not have had much of a case. With Mr. Darrow swerving out of the way of the bicyclist, who he probably hadn’t been able to see until he’d made the legal turn, he had a fair reason to have been near the line. Based on the damage, he couldn’t have even been that far over the line when they’d crashed. His story held water.

She picked up her pen so she could tap the end some more. The fidgeting helped her order her thoughts. Her mother had tried to break her of the habit as a child, but her father had interceded. Our kind fidgets. You know that, he’d said.

Her mother had rolled her eyes and walked away.

“Okay,” she said, looking up at Andreas. He stared at her with such open curiosity, and she wasn’t used to that. Most men who stared at her were looking because they liked the way she looked. She didn’t think that was the only reason Andreas was watching her so intently, however. The limited amount of psychic information she gleaned from him hinted that he was just…interested.

She didn’t know what to do with that. She wasn’t interesting. Her father had been the compelling one in their duo. Her mother had hated how close they were before she went away. She hadn’t returned. Mary had always asked her father why, and he’d only say that some answers weren’t worth digging for. In Fallon, her situation was hardly unique. Couples there just didn’t stick like they used to.

“What’s wrong?” Andreas asked.

Mary sketched a crude diagram of the accident on her map and then slowly raised her gaze. “I suppose I shouldn’t bother asking what makes you think something actually is.”

“You’re sitting six inches from me. I’m not such a weak psychic that I wouldn’t be able to discern a change in your mood from that distance.”

“For a lot of Fallonites, this is far. Your feet are near me, not your head.”

“As I said. Not far.”

“Then you’re an outlier. Did your parents have similar ability to yours?”

He let down his hands from behind his head and leaned forward a bit. “I have no way of knowing. We didn’t discuss such things in great detail. They considered doing so to be gauche.”

“I see.”

Interesting.

Apparently, she could get him to answer questions freely if she didn’t ask him any about the accident. She still had a few she needed to ask, but was more interested at the moment in getting him to tell her other things. She wanted to figure him out.

She rotated the emerald band on her right middle finger and watched the blue cast from the gems dance atop her pure white paper. “Nothing is wrong. I just get a little…annoyed, sometimes, when I think about certain people. Not a new insult or slight, just history.”

“Melancholy.”

“I suppose so.”

“We don’t really do that here, do we?”

“Who, the witches in Fallon?”