“Friend of mine.” I paused, ducked my gaze. No need to be cagey, I supposed. “My fiancé. And don’t tell me he probably got cold feet and ditched me.”

“What happened?”

I told him.

Grant said, “It sounds like a perfectly mundane set of circumstances. I’m sure the mundane solutions—the police—will find him.”

He couldn’t help me. I wasn’t surprised. I’d just wanted to try everything. Leave no stone unturned. Time to hit the streets, then. But I didn’t want to leave. Somehow, even with his icy blue stare and the box that opened into a world of weirdness, I felt safe here. Feeling safe—that was a different kind of sexy. You got to a point where Prince Reliable was so much more attractive than Prince Charming. The thrill of living on the edge versus the warm glow of being cocooned and adored.

“Yeah, the cops’ll find him. But in one piece?” I sighed and looked away. “I’m sorry. I guess I believed those stories that there’s something. . . different about you a little too much. Box notwithstanding.”

“Do you know how wealthy I’d be if I could make people appear just by snapping my fingers?”

I snapped. “Poof, here’s Jimmy Hoffa?”

“Exactly. I’m not willing to pay the price for that kind of magic.”

I narrowed my gaze. “But that kind of magic exists?”

“What do you think?”

I thought that over the last few years I’d seen a lot of things that the rational mind said were impossible. A lot of magic. My whole life had become a mission to chronicle the impossible. It was how I kept myself anchored to some kind of reality, in a world where werewolves were real and I was one of them.

“I think there’s a whole lot of this world I still don’t understand,” I said.

He regarded me, a faint smile touching his lips, which gave him the most genuine—even warm—expression I’d ever seen on him. “You surprise me. Your kind tends to chaos. But not you.”

Kitty Norville, a force for order? Wild. I felt like I’d passed some kind of test with him.

“I like to pretend that everything’s going to be all right. That everything’s normal.”

“How is that working out for you?”

“Some days are better than others.”

Suddenly, he pulled himself from the wall, looking toward the theater door in the back of the house. Unconsciously, his hands straightened and re-straightened the deck of cards. He held them like I’d seen some people hold weapons. He looked like nothing so much as an animal who’d spotted danger.

I looked where he did, in the direction of the supposed danger, and didn’t see what he did, or what he sensed with whatever senses he had. But a moment later, I smelled it, the wild skin and musk of a lycanthrope.

Nick came sauntering in, hands in the pockets of his oh-so-tight jeans. A fitted T-shirt showed off his muscles. I tensed, wondering what he wanted. He barely glanced at me, just long enough to acknowledge me with a wink, before he stopped about halfway down the theater to regard Grant. The magician glared back with an icy gaze, his lips pressed in a line, hands tensed around his deck of cards.

“I see how it is,” Nick said, behind a laugh. “You have to lure us here because you don’t have the guts to come after us.”

Grant’s jaw tightened, like he had to keep anger in check. Then he smiled faintly, but it was cold, challenging. “A dozen of you against one of me? I’m not foolish.”

“Sure, right,” Nick said. “And what are you doing with her? Think you can use her to cut some kind of deal?”

“Nobody uses me for anything,” I said, though I was clearly out of my depth. This was a long-running argument, a rivalry that went deeper than I could see from my vantage. But if I stuck around, maybe I’d learn something.

“We were just having a conversation. Like reasonable people do,” Grant said.

“This is stupid,” Nick said. He’d begun pacing, fists clenched at his side, going a few steps up and down the aisle, like a tiger. “We could bring you down. If we went public, people would know we were monsters—and celebrate us for it. While you’d still be a two-bit magician.” He jabbed a finger at Grant, who didn’t flinch.

“You only think that,” Grant said, ever calm. “If you went public, you’d be nothing more than a freakshow. You’d lose every advantage you have. Balthasar knows that.”

I said, “Ah, do either of you want to explain to me what’s going on here?”

“Not your concern,” Grant said. “I’m sorry you had to see this much of it.”

Tags: Carrie Vaughn Kitty Norville Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net