Kitty Saves the World (Kitty Norville 14)

“Have you figured out if they do anything?”

“Nope,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they don’t.”

I picked them up. Didn’t put them on, because that would have felt really weird—best not meddle with items stolen from very dangerous demon women. But I held them to the window, looking distantly through the shaded lenses. They were almost opaque. I couldn’t see a thing.

“You want to see what Tina makes of ’em?” Cormac asked, nodding at the psychic.

I offered them to her. Wisely, she approached with caution. “You want to tell me about them first?”

“I’m more interested in what you can tell me,” Cormac answered.

She raised her hand, and I set the goggles across her palm. She wouldn’t close her fingers around them. Eyes shut, her brow furrowed and her lips pursed. Not just worried, she seemed almost in pain.

“No,” she murmured. “I don’t think I want to go there.” She hurried to set them back on the table, then backed away. Hugging herself, she shivered.

Cormac shrugged and put them back into the box.

I didn’t recognize t

he third item on the table. It was a Maltese cross, a couple of inches across, made of polished bronze, simple and roughly made, strung on a leather cord.

“What’s that?” I asked.

He held it up. It glinted in the faint morning light coming in through the window blinds. “That is an amulet that turns magic spells back on themselves.”

Huh. “That sounds useful.”

“Yeah, could be.”

“And where did you pick that up?”

He turned a rare, wry grin. “Long story,” he said. Experience told me that was all I was going to get out of him.

He considered the items on the table for another long moment, and finally murmured softly. If I hadn’t been a werewolf I wouldn’t have heard it at all. “Bring everything. We never know what we’ll need, so bring it all.” The diction was careful, formal, different from his usual curt speech. “Right, then, in you all go.” He—she—packed the items back into the lockbox.

Tina leaned close to me. “That’s Amelia, isn’t it? That’s who I’m pretending to be?” Her daunted expression no doubt came from thinking about trying to replicate that precise, old-school diction.

“Just be yourself,” Cormac said, and it was definitely him this time, brusque and to the point. “Roman won’t know the difference.”

She seemed thoughtful. “It’s not straightforward possession, is it? There are two people there, two beings. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Amelia and I worked out a deal,” he said.

“Deal—what kind of deal?”

Cormac was loading items from the table—the lockbox, various satchels of crystal and herbs and jars presumably containing potions and whatnot—into a duffel bag and pretended to ignore her. Tina knew better than to push.

We piled outside while Cormac put on his leather jacket, took one last look around the apartment, and locked the door behind him.

I was about to call Hardin when her car, an unmarked sedan, pulled into the parking lot. I went out to meet her.

“This feels like the start of a movie where everything goes horribly wrong,” she said in greeting. She had both hands wrapped tight around a tall cup of coffee. She smelled of office work, too much coffee, breath mints.

“It does, doesn’t it?” I said, grinning. “You’re just in time to get in on deciding what car you want to ride in.”

“Tina’s with me,” Cormac said. “We can figure out just how we’re going to play this.”

That meant the rest of us were not with him.