“They can’t hurt you.” She clung to my shirt in six places. “I won’t let them.”
“Do you understand what she’s doing to you?” Asa’s glare cut like a razor. “She’s feeding on you.”
“Do you understand anything?” Colby twisted in my arms. “She saved me.”
“Let’s all take a breath.” Clay held up his hands. “Ace, dial it down, man.”
“I won’t allow this.” He rose in a fluid motion. “It goes against everything I believe in.”
His ripe disgust was nothing I hadn’t felt toward myself, but his condemnation slid off me this time.
I might not have done the right thing by Colby, but I had done what my conscience demanded of me.
Wings jittering with agitation, Colby puffed up her fur. “You don’t get a say.”
“Little one, you don’t understand.” He placed a hand over his heart. “I can help you find peace.”
Peacewas code for exorcising her spirit, her self, into whatever afterlife awaited her.
“Go inside and play your game.” I bent down to kiss the top of her head. “Please?”
Antennae quivering, bristling like bottle brushes, she growled, “I’m old enough to—”
“For me?”
“You owe me a new mount for this.” She twitched her butt at the agents then flew back in. “A dragon.”
That would set me back twenty-five dollars, but it was worth it to buy a moment alone with these two.
Rising from my chair, I descended the steps slowly to give the rage burning in my black heart time to cool.
The wards hummed as I neared them, but I had no intention of crossing the barrier and putting Colby at risk of capture. I stopped in front of Asa, rested my hands on the white picket fence, and let the claws at my fingertips extend into the wood to prevent me from raking them across his handsome face.
“The Silver Stag murdered that little girl.” I pitched my voice low. “She was his last victim.” I took a deep breath. “As he lay dying at my feet, he called her soul from her body and wrapped her in the form you just saw.” A creature unlike any in this world. “He chose a moth so he could summon her. He would have ordered her to fly to her own death at his command. He planned to consume her to heal himself, as if her essence was a fluff of cotton candy for him to pop into his mouth until it dissolved on his tongue.”
“I didn’t know.” Clay wiped a hand over his mouth. “You never said…”
“Your partner here thinks I kept Colby as a snack.” I mimed a casual shrug. “I can’t blame him.” I told him the truth. “I would think the worst of someone with my reputation too.” I held his gaze. “It’s earned.”
A tilt of his head transformed Asa’s aggression into curiosity. “Why did you resist?”
“She was afraid,” I rasped, a hole opening in my chest. “So very afraid.” I retracted my claws. “I killed the Silver Stag, but his spell was draining her. A soul can’t survive outside its shell for long. She was dying all over again. Slowly. Painfully. As she clawed at any means to hold on to life.” I couldn’t look at either of them. “Even now, I hear those screams in my dreams.”
They reminded me so much of how I had sounded, begging for mercy as a child after…
“You took her as your familiar.” Clay understood first. “You bound her to you to save her.”
The link to me gave her substance, allowed her to become real, but it also trapped her as a moth.
“I did.” I rubbed my arms against a chill. “She was a child then, and she’s a child now.”
That moment of weakness, of compassion, might have been the culmination of my darkest act yet.
A familiar mingled its life force with its witch. That was why it was taboo to bond with a child. They quit aging, physically. They were fixed for the rest of their lives—and witches lived for a long time—at the exact developmental point in which the link was forged. The bond that saved Colby locked her mental age too.
For as long as we both lived, Colby would be a child in my care, and that was an enormous responsibility.
One I would happily take on all over again for the chance to learn what it was to love another person.