The Urban Fantasy Anthology (Peter S. Beagle) (Kitty Norville 1.50)

Something resettled in his gut. She hadn’t done it on purpose, she wasn’t using him.

“Is it harmful to me?”

She frowned. “Did it hurt?”

“No.”

“Either time?”

“Neither time.”

“Then it didn’t harm you.”

“All right,” he said. “Where do we go from here?”

She opened her right hand, the one with the gum in it. “Not us. Me. This is going to show us where Molly is—and Molly will know where your brother is.”

She closed her fingers, turned her hand palm down, then turned in a slow circle. She hit a break in the pavement and he grabbed her before she could do more than stumble. His hand touched her wrist and she turned her hand to grab him, as the kick of power flowed through his body once more.

“They’re in a boat,” she told him, and went limp in his arms.

She awoke with the familiar headache that usually accompanied the overuse of magic, and absolutely no idea of where she was. It smelled wrong to be her apartment, but she was lying on a couch with a blanket covering her.

Panic rose in her chest—sometimes she hated being blind.

“Back in the land of the living?”

“Tom?”

He must have heard the distress in her voice because when he spoke again, he was much closer and his voice was softer. “You’re on a couch in my apartment. We were as close to mine as we were to yours, and I knew I could get us into my apartment. Yours is probably sealed with hocus-pocus. Are you all right?”

She sat up and put her feet on the floor and her erstwhile bed proved itself to be a couch. “Do you have something with sugar in it? Sweet tea or fruit juice?”

“Hot cocoa or tea,” he told her.

“Tea.”

He must have had water already hot because he was quickly back with a hot cup. She drank the sweet stuff down as fast as she could and the heat did as much as the sugar to clear her headache.

“Sorry,” she said.

“For what, exactly,” he said.

“For using you. I think you don’t have any barriers,” she told him slowly. “We all have safeguards, walls that keep out intruders. It’s what keeps us safe.”

In his silence she heard him consider that.

“So, I’m vulnerable to witches?”

She didn’t know what to do with her empty cup, so she set it on the couch beside her. Then she used her left hand, her seeking hand, to look at him again.

“No, I don’t think so. Your barriers seem solid…even stronger than usual as I’d expect from a wolf as far up the command structure as you are. I think you are only vulnerable to me.”

“Which means?”

“Which means when I touch you I can see magic through your eyes…with practice I might even be able just to see. It means that you can feed my magic with your skin.” She swallowed. “You’re not going to like this.”

“Tell me.”