Firewalker (Worldwalker 2)

“He’s dead,” Tristan said, closing Scot’s vacant eyes.

* * *

“I should have claimed him,” Lily said. They’d been sitting in the snow for twenty minutes, the fire popping behind them, trying to come up with a plan.

“I should have known he was following us when we saw that car back up behind us on Winter Street,” Tristan said.

“How?” Una asked, grimacing. “You’re not Jason frigging Bourne.”

“There’s no point in trying to assign blame to anyone but the murderer,” Rowan said. “Scot is dead because Carrick killed him. The end.”

“What do we do?” Breakfast asked.

“We could bury him here. Hide the body,” Una suggested weakly.

Tristan shook his head, laughing bitterly under his breath. “It doesn’t matter if they find the body or not, Una. If he goes missing, who are the police going to think is responsible? Probably the last person who got into a huge fight with him, threatened to kill him, and then sent him to the hospital.”

“They’re going to suspect all of us, not just you, Tristan,” Lily said, holding up a hand before Una could say something sarcastic. “They already do suspect us. Agent Simms isn’t going to quit. Ever.”

“Yeah,” Breakfast said quietly. “They’ll keep looking until they find his body and once they do, we’re all screwed.” He looked at Scot’s corpse, which was covered with bits of their clothes, fingerprints, and who-knows-what DNA. “Even if we burn him, we’d probably leave something behind on accident.”

“I’m not going to jail,” Tristan said, his voice leaden.

“Me neither,” Una agreed.

“I don’t know if we can avoid it at this point,” Breakfast said. “I mean, we might get an insanity plea to work if we all start babbling about magic and parallel universes.”

“No,” Lily said sharply. “No one in this world can know about magic.” She conveyed one brief image of the battle she fought against Lillian. She showed them how—with her power in them—her army of Outlanders had fought with impossible strength, speed, and ferocity. “Can you imagine our jacked-up world with those kinds of soldiers in it?”

“It would be a bloodbath,” Rowan said. “The Woven aren’t the only reason my world is so sparsely populated. There was an era in our history when witches regularly sent out their armies to fight each other.”

“Over what?” Breakfast asked.

Rowan gave a half smile. “You’ve felt what it’s like to have a witch in you, but you haven’t felt the Gift yet,” he said in a deep voice. “When you do, you’ll understand.”

“We don’t have to show them warrior magic. We can just show them medicine and kitchen magic,” Breakfast said hopefully. “And it could be a good thing. Do you know how many burn victims would be saved because of what you taught us the other day, Rowan?”

“No. No magic in this world. The shaman was very clear about this when he taught me how to spirit walk,” Lily said. “You can’t steal advanced technology from one world and bring it to another without something terrible happening. It doesn’t matter what your intentions are. Just think it through. It’d be like introducing the plague to a bunch of people who’ve never even had the sniffles. I won’t be responsible for genocide just because I don’t want to go to jail.”

“So we can’t tell the truth.” Una looked at Lily, her cat-like eyes narrowed. “Our only hope is to run, but there’s no place in this world we can hide. Not for long.”

Rowan looked up from the ground and around at the group, the first to catch on to what Una was suggesting. “You can’t leave Lily,” he said fearfully.

“Hang on,” Breakfast said, his brow furrowed. “Una, are you saying we should go with Rowan to his world?”

“Doesn’t it make more sense than staying here?” she said, her excitement building.

“No. It doesn’t,” Breakfast said.

“Stuart, I just found out who I really am inside. For the first time in my life I feel like I understand where I fit. I’m not giving that up,” she said, eyes blazing. “And anyway, we’re mechanics. We are magic, so we don’t belong in this world. We might even be a threat to it because eventually someone is going to find out about us.”

“But if we go, we won’t be able to do much magic without our witch,” Tristan said.

“Then she should come,” Una said.

“No,” Rowan said sharply. “It’s too dangerous.”

“More dangerous than this?” Una argued, gesturing to Scot’s dead body.