Hex Appeal (P.N. Elrod) (Kitty Norville 4.60)

“Drink your juice box and let your parents handle it.”

“Never met ’em. I was on the streets when I was—” He paused, shrugged. “I was always on the streets. Until Ruthie.”

Ruthie Kane—seer, Leader of the Light, mother to all in need of a mother. For a price.

She and I needed to have a little talk.

I grabbed my cell phone from the nightstand and escaped into the bathroom, locking the door behind me before turning the shower on full blast for cover. Although—

If the kid was something special—and I was pretty sure he was—he could hear a pin drop at Niagara Falls. I could.

I left the water on anyway. It dispelled the scent of mold that the closed door enhanced. I could conjure money and stay at a better hotel. However, I’d found over the centuries that the creepy, crawly creatures I hunted usually lived far from the amenities. So I stayed wherever I found a place and magicked that place to my liking.

I hit number one on my speed dial, and five rings later, the phone was picked up in Milwaukee.

“He there already?” Ruthie asked before I could even say hello.

Ruthie didn’t have caller ID. Ruthie didn’t need it.

“What the hell were you thinking?” I demanded.

Silence settled over the line, broken only by the distant wail of a child. Ruthie ran a group home on the south side of Milwaukee, where she took in all the kids no one else wanted. What the powers that be didn’t know was that the kids no one wanted—the ones that trouble followed—were usually the ones Ruthie was searching for.

“I don’t think I heard that quite right.”

Ruthie’s voice was soft, but there was steel beneath. Cold steel. She

’d see me dead if I didn’t watch myself. Ruthie might look like everyone’s favorite African-American granny, but she wasn’t. Ruthie led the group of seers and demon killers known as the Federation, and she hadn’t gotten to that position by being kind.

“I can’t work with him, Ruthie,” I whispered. “I just can’t.”

“I know you like to work alone. But I don’t wanna send him out solo just yet. You don’t gotta worry. Fact is he’s scary good. One day, he might even be better than you.”

From what I’d seen in my dreams, he would be. And yet, still, according to those dreams, he would die.

“I can’t,” I repeated.

At last Ruthie heard what I wasn’t saying. “What did you see?”

I might be a demon killer, but I also had the sight. This should have put me in the seer line. However, instead of seeing demons, I saw the future—or at least possible futures.

I’d come to understand that free will fucked up everything. Everyone had it, which meant they could choose to turn left instead of right, take a bike instead of a car, sleep five extra minutes that morning, leave work five minutes late that night, and every choice altered my visions.

“He’ll die,” I said.

“Jimmy? How?”

“I don’t know. I’ve seen it happen a hundred different ways. But it always happens.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know who he was. Even if he was. I do actually have dreams that are just … dreams.”

And the other ones I’d had—of Jimmy and me all tangled in the sheets, sweaty and panting, my pale skin glowing like pearls sliding just beneath dusky water as he touched me in ways that just had to be wrong, even though nothing had ever felt so right …

Those I was never going to tell anyone about. Especially Ruthie.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said at last.