Asylum (Causal Enchantment #2)(67)

As if my words had permitted her to feel pain, she flinched. She held up her wrist and stared at it with wide, shocked eyes. “How . . . how’d I do that?”

“Glass.” The lie rolled easily off my tongue. Lying had become second-nature to me many years ago.

“Glass?” she repeated, scanning the floor around her for the evidence.

Mage appeared beside me, holding up a broken shard of a wine glass from who knows where. “Yes, see?”

Jasmine stared blankly back at her. I felt a twinge of guilt for putting her through this.

“Here, this should help.” Mage swiftly went to work winding gauze around her wrist—plucked from the never-before-used emergency kit under one of the seats. She handed the woman an ice pack from the freezer. “Press this up against it,” she instructed, offering her a warm smile. “It should help stop the bleeding.”

“Yes, it will be as good as new with that,” I added, placing my hand over the pack and quickly weaving a few threads of magic into her wrist to close up the wound and speed up the healing. We didn’t need her bleeding out in the cockpit.

“Oh, okay. Thanks,” Jasmine murmured, slowly walking back toward the cockpit, glancing over her shoulder at all of us several times.

Not until I heard the door lock click did I smile. “And now we know,” I said. Caden returned a grin of his own, his relief unmistakable. Relief that matched my own. I could trust Caden with Evangeline.

Satisfied, I strolled past him to take a seat in a vacant corner, grabbing a blood bag on my way. I needed time to strategize. How would I get Evangeline out of there? And where in this world could we go to hide from Viggo and Mortimer?

Unfortunately I didn’t get much strategizing time, as Mage slid into the chair across from me. “Well, that must make you happy. One less threat to Evangeline?” she asked almost tentatively, as if testing the waters. Likely wanting to see how I would react to her, now that we were not busy hunting mutants or fighting off witches. Now that I knew what she was, the powers she held, the danger she presented. Frankly, I wasn’t sure what to make of Mage anymore. For someone I openly claimed not to trust, there was a large part of me that felt betrayed when she revealed her secret, as if she should have told me sooner. It was stupid, really . . . and yet it was impossible to ignore. I searched her face for an inkling of what she was thinking. Nothing. Unreadable. “Yes. One less danger.”

“So what are we going to do now?”

“We?” Such a small, unassuming word, and yet it weighed so heavily, coming from her. It implied we were a team.

“Yes, I thought . . . ” Mage stumbled over her words, an odd thing to witness the five thousand-year-old vampire doing. And then it happened. As she looked down at her hands folded in her lap, I saw the mask drop. It was fleeting, but I saw underneath—saw grief; loss. It was a long moment before she looked up again. “There’s nothing I can say to make you trust me, is there?”

I felt my jaw set. “No. I don’t believe there is.”

She nodded, and determination flashed in her eyes. “Fine. Read me.”

“What?” I blurted.

“Read me,” she repeated.

But I was already shaking my head, feeling my forehead furrow deeply. “I heard you, but . . . what?”

Mage heaved a loud sigh. “Back on Ratheus, when I first found out about you—about a witch who was also a vampire—I had to admit that I was intrigued. And impressed. Then, when I met you . . . when I got to know you, I realized how alike the two of us are.”

“We are nothing alike!” I snapped.

“No?” The tiniest smile crooked her mouth. “Powerful women, witch heritage . . . Of course, I’m not a witch anymore, but I still remember those days. We both want to save this world. And neither of us enjoy killing innocent people.” The smile slid of her face. “We’ve both suffered terrible loss. We’re both lonely.”

“I’m not . . . ” My words drifted away, unable to form that one lie.

“Really? And where is your family? Your friends?”

I paused, the mention of friends reminding me of Leo. Pain ripped through me as I thought of my old companion for the first time since the witch attack, of the delivery of his message, of how the connection cut off so abruptly, so completely. There was only one way that could happen. Death.

“I have no one,” Mage offered when I didn’t speak. “Not one friend. Except you.”

I opened my mouth to deny her claim to this supposed “friendship,” but she was already talking again. “I should have told you. I should have trusted you.” She looked down at her hands. “I’m sorry.”

“Well . . . like you said. There are no words left to make me trust you.”

“I did say that.” That steady, confident “Mage voice” was back again. “So read me. You will know everything about me in thirty seconds.” She crooked her head, smiling. “Maybe a minute. Five thousand years is a lot of memory to rifle through. You will see that my intentions are genuine. You will see that I don’t have some grand scheme. I am here to help you protect Evangeline and this world.”

I wanted so much to believe her, I realized as I gazed at that tiny, pale, Asian face. At my . . . friend. I never would, though. Not until I uncovered what she could not hide.