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

“You’re taking his side?”

“We’re on the same side.”

“If that’s true, then why were all those people…” Jimmy curled his lip, “his people, roasting him? He must have done something to set them off.”

“It makes them feel better to burn me every generation or so.” Sawyer shrugged. “I let them.”

“You let them?” Jimmy snorted. “Sure you did.”

“You think mere humans could capture me?” Sawyer gave a delicate snort of his own. “They’ve seen me become my animals, watched me turn humans to ashes—”

“Why did they see you?”

Sawyer spread his hands. “Why not?”

“It adds to his legend,” I said. “Makes people fear him. Probably keeps them from burning him more than once a generation.”

“When they watch me die, then they see me a day, a week, a month later unharmed…” Sawyer didn’t exactly grin—I doubt he could—but his oddly light gray eyes sparkled. “It’s one of the few things that amuses me after all these years.”

“How many years?” Jimmy asked suspiciously.

“Sawyer’s as old as I am,” I said. “Maybe older.”

“This is Sawyer?”

Something in Jimmy’s voice made me turn, but he was already past me. I should have taken away that damn knife when I had the chance.

The blade descended, headed straight for Sawyer’s eye, but while Jimmy was fast, Sawyer was faster, and he snatched Jimmy’s wrist, giving it a quick, vicious twist. The sound of the bone snapping warred with the thud of the knife against the ground and my own startled gasp.

Jimmy let his injured hand flop at his side as he stepped in close. “She sobs your name in her sleep, you son of a bitch. What did you do to her?”

“What didn’t I?” Sawyer whispered, then flicked one hand through the air as if batting a fly.

By the time Jimmy landed, and I’d run to him, Sawyer was gone. I don’t know if he shape-shifted, or ran off on his own bare feet. Maybe he just went poof—with him, anything was possible. In truth, I didn’t care how he’d gone, I was just glad that he’d gone.

“You okay?” I asked, but Jimmy was already getting up.

He stared at the place Sawyer had recently stood; the only indication that the man had been real and not a mirage was the imprints of his toes in the dust.

“I don’t care what he is.” Jimmy retrieved his knife. The wrist Sawyer had broken still hung limply at his side, but the fingers had begun to move, curling into a fist I wasn’t even sure he knew he’d made. “I’m gonna kill him someday.”

Only one thing could make men—even those who weren’t completely men—behave like this.

“Who is she?” I asked, proud when my voice didn’t break even though my heart was.

Stupid to feel betrayed. I might have known Jimmy Sanducci intimately for eons, but he’d only met me yesterday. And, from the way he’d said she, another had already captured his heart.

“No one,” he murmured in a voice that clearly said the one.

He walked to the car and got in without glancing my way at all.

* * *

I pulled into the first motel I saw, a small, single-wing, once-white place with a neon sign that announced SLEEP EAP. It wasn’t until I parked beneath it that I saw that the C and the H had burned out.

“Why are we stopping?”

Those were the first words Jimmy had said in the hour we’d been on the road.