“Open the box and then say that again.” I set it on the kitchen table. “Hurry, before I change my mind.”
No sooner had Colby peeled down one side of the wrapping paper than a sonic squeal burst out of her.
“You bought me a laptop.” She sprang from the table into my arms. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I kissed the top of her silky head. “You need something to keep you out of trouble on the road. Plus, I wouldn’t want your friends to think you’d died because you weren’t online every second of every day.”
“You bought it for me because you looove me.” She cuddled in, her head on my chest. “I love you too.”
Throat gone tight, I had to swallow before I could tease her without my eyes leaking in front of the guys.
“Yeah, yeah.” I set her back on the box. “Insert mushy feelings here.”
“That’s a sweet laptop.” Clay smiled down at her. “Want me to help with the unboxing?”
“Sure.” She finished tearing off the paper. “I can’t wait to tell my friends.”
Asa gathered the paper and threw it into the trash can, which I appreciated, but Colby didn’t thank him. I had lost her and Clay to conversation about the specs and download times for her must-have programs.
Leaving them to geek out together, I walked out onto the front porch and breathed in the night air.
I wasn’t surprised when Asa followed. Happy. But not shocked he had taken the hint.
We sat on the steps, under the bright moon, and let the cool wind tickle our cheeks.
Angling his head toward me, Asa studied my profile. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
As hard as I had hammered him earlier, I expected he would circle back to me. “Knock yourself out.”
“You were thirteen when you were recruited by Black Hat.”
“Officially, yes. That was the age I started working cases with a partner. Not Clay, but another witch.”
“I’ve never heard of the Bureau recruiting that young.”
“You’re not the only special snowflake around here,” I teased, but he didn’t take the bait, and I sobered “My mother was a white witch, and my father was a black witch.” I wasn’t sure how much of my past he knew, so I left it at that. “Theirs was an unusual pairing, especially with their combined power threshold, and it made people nervous. Mom’s people worried Dad would eat her heart. Dad’s people worried Mom would make him weak.” I studied the thick clouds. “Then I came along.” I pitched my tone like a movie voiceover. “A mongrel with the potential for greatness, destined to bridge the gap between dark and light practitioners, a true power the likes of which no one has ever seen.”
He waited, still and quiet, to see what else I would say. Maybe that was why I told him more.
“But I came into those powers early.” Or so the director told me. “And…I killed my parents.”
A hollow ache rang through my chest, a pain I hadn’t let reach me since those earliest days.
“That earned me Black Hat’s full attention,” I continued, “but my age factored into their ruling.” I paused before blurting out the rest. “I was seven, so the Bureau didn’t put me down. The director took me in as his ward to keep an eye on me. He trained me himself.”
The catastrophic show of power had sparked his interest in me, made him wonder if crossing bloodlines wasn’t such a bad idea. But the trauma of my parents’ deaths smothered whatever spark had kindled in me. I went on to have an unremarkable childhood, left mostly to my own devices, until puberty hit and unlocked my full potential.
For my thirteenth birthday, I was given a gift. A hunt. I caught and killed my first victim under the moon.
Initiation for Black Hat awaited me the next morning, along with much tutting from the director, as if he hadn’t dipped my hands in blood the night before. And lectures, for the sake of those watching his every move, about how I should have been put down as a child. How I lived then and now at his mercy.
“I’m sorry.” Asa covered my hand with his warm one. “Rogue magic isn’t a criminal offense in children.”
Had I been anyone else, I could have gotten off the hook, but I was me, and the director chose to put me in his custody until the day he judged me old enough to take a life with intent, by my own hand, of my own choice, and earn for myself what he wanted for me all along.
Eternal indenture to Black Hat.
“I didn’t know that at the time.” The director kept me carefully ignorant to instill gratitude for him taking me in. “By the time I did, I had killed in cold blood, and I belonged in the Bureau.”