“I haven’t changed. Not when it comes to coffee, anyway.”
Meaning he’d changed in other ways? Somehow I doubted it. I punched in an order of coffee and cake for us both and swiped my credit card through the slot to pay for it. Then I faced him again. “I want a favor.”
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “I would have thought I’d be the last person on earth you’d ask a favor of.”
“You are,” I snapped, then mentally clawed back the escaping anger. “But you’re the only reporter I know, and you happen to specialize in paranormal and occult news and investigations.”
“I do.” He studied me for several moments, his gaze still wary. As if he’d been the injured party in the whole sordid mess. “And what do I get in return for granting this favor?”
“A story that could blow anything else you’ve written out of the water.”
Excitement flared briefly in his dark eyes before he managed to control it. But I’d expected nothing less. For a man like Jak, the story was all.
“Does this favor involve doing anything illegal?”
“I doubt it.” I paused, but couldn’t help adding, “Although we both know that wouldn’t exactly faze you.”
Amusement teased his lips and an ache stuttered through my heart. Not over him. Not by a long shot. Or rather, not over the memory of what we’d once shared. Even the hurt of his deception couldn’t erase all that had once been good. And that sucked.
“You and I both know the childhood your mother presented to the world was a lie,” he said evenly. “I had sworn statements that proved it, and your mother never did refute them.”
I gave him a somewhat bitter smile. “The people who mattered knew the truth about my mother’s past. No one else needed to. Not then, not now.”
“What about the public she was defrauding?”
A waitress approached with our coffees and cakes. I gave her a smile of thanks and waited until she left before saying, “My mother’s psychic powers were real, and they helped a lot of people. Shame you didn’t do a story about that rather than besmirching her name.”
He reached for his coffee. “I don’t do good-news stories. I prefer the dark and dirty underbelly of things.”
“Which is exactly why I’m here.” I wrapped my hands around my coffee and hoped like hell I was making the right decision to confide in him. But even if I wasn’t, I still had to chance it. It wasn’t like I had a whole lot of options right now. “How much do you know about witchcraft and ley lines?”
He frowned. “I know some people think the lines and their intersections resonate with a special psychic or mystical energy, but the jury is out as to whether there’s any truth to it.”
“What if I told you they’re not only more powerful than you could ever imagine, but there’s a major ley-line intersection here in Melbourne?”
“I’d have to say, so?”
“So, a consortium has used extreme force in an effort to gain control of the area around that intersection.”
His gaze searched mine for a moment. “Why say ‘has used’ rather than ‘is using’? No one is interested in old news.”
“It’s not old news if only two of the three men have been captured. The Directorate are pushing resources behind the hunt for the third man, but so far they have been unable to locate him. The man is a ghost, existing only on paper.”
Of course, the Directorate—or Directorate of Other Races, as they were officially known—also had bigger problems on their hands. They were, after all, responsible for going after all non-humans who crossed the line and killed.
He studied me for a moment, one finger tapping the table lightly. A sure sign I’d snagged his interest. “For the Directorate to be pushing all resources behind such a hunt, these men had to have done something pretty bad.”
“They raised a soul stealer and set it after the relatives or friends of anyone who wouldn’t sell them the properties that surrounded the intersection. One of those who died was a little girl.” A little girl whose soul would never move on, never be reborn. Hers was a life lost to the world forever.
“You always were a sucker when it came to children.” His voice hinted at the warmth of old. “Is that what this is about? Revenge for a little girl?”
“Both the thing responsible for the little girl’s death and the witch who raised it have been dealt with.” And both of them were dead, sent to the fiery realms of hell itself—although who actually knew if hell was fiery. “This is about finding the third member of that consortium.”
He sipped his coffee for several moments, his expression giving little away. But I knew from past experience that behind the neutral expression there was a clever mind going at full tilt, chewing over information, working out possible angles. “Why does this consortium controlling the intersection worry you so much? You’re not a witch. You aren’t even as psychically powerful as your mother.”
“I have different gifts than my mom had, but that doesn’t make them any less powerful.” Although admittedly, being able to walk the gray fields—the unseen lands that divide this world from the next—talk to souls, and see the reapers who guided the souls on to the next life weren’t exactly the most usable psychic gifts in a normal, everyday life. But my life of late was as far from normal and everyday as you could get.