Black Soul, White Heart (Black Hat Bureau 3.50)

“What does it mean?” I smoothed my hands down my pants, wishing for the ribbons and beads on my skirts to distract my fingers. “Who is he?”

“A regular, as of a month ago,” John told me. “And a dangerous one at that.”

Fingers twitching, I eyed the bag in his hand. “What is he?”

“A witch.”

“White witches aren’t dangerous.” I had never seen John so tense. “What is he really?”

The air had vibrated around him, electric as a coming storm, and no white witch held that much power.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” John twisted to return the stock to its place. “Stay—”

“Thanks.” I snatched the packet of herbs, rounded the stall, and darted after the boy. “Be right back.”

John hollered behind me, and Meg laughed uproariously. She was always delighted when I was bad. It was one of the reasons why we were such good friends and terrible influences on one another.

Ahead I caught sight of a tall silhouette wrapped in expensive black fabrics, striding as if he were on the verge of breaking into a sprint. Poor thing had no hope of escaping me. I ran with Meg’s pack each full moon. It was terribly unladylike, but it had given me stamina. Without cumbersome skirts, I was the wind itself in pursuit of him.

“Sir.”

I skidded through an intersection, avoiding a carriage and its great white horses by inches.

“Sir.”

The boy refused to turn. Either he hadn’t heard me, or he was determined to ignore me.

Hard as I pursued him, he evaded with equal fervor, leaving me one choice that would tell me more than any conversation about his intentions toward me.

“If you don’t stop,” I threatened, earning a few odd looks from passersby, “I’ll remove my hat.”

The boy froze on the spot, heaved a sigh, then slowly turned to face me.

To reveal myself as a woman running the streets in men’s clothing was to sign my own internment papers for the sanitorium. Perhaps a nunnery, but I preferred madness to piety.

I was a heathen, after all.

Ask either of my parents, or my siblings, or my best friend.

Heathen or not, I would be ruined if my deceit were discovered by the townsfolk. I would be unmarriable in polite society. Though I was certain I could find a warg boy willing to take me on. Or, as I had been musing, Meg herself.

Charles and I did make a striking couple, and wasn’t it said that you ought to marry your best friend?

The boy held his ground as I caught up to him, and he was even more handsome in profile.

“Who are you?”

His lips pinched into a white line that caused my fingertips to itch with the urge to trace their bitter contour.

“Hiram.”

I waited, eyebrows raised in expectation, but he didn’t finish the introduction.

“Hiram,” I prompted. “Hiram No Last Name?”

“Why did you follow me?”

Glad for the package in my hand, my hasty excuse, I thrust it out to him. “You forgot this.”