Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(51)

“I don’t know.”

He recognized her panic, having seen it in his own mirror upon occasion. It was always frightening when something you thought was firmly under control broke free to run where it would. With him, it was the wolf.

Something resettled in his gut. She hadn’t done it on purpose; she wasn’t using him.

“Is it harmful to me?”

She frowned. “Did it hurt?”

“No.”

“Either time?”

“Neither time.”

“Then it didn’t harm you.”

“All right,” he said. “Where do we go from here?”

She opened her right hand, the one with the gum in it. “Not us. Me. This is going to show us where Molly is—and Molly will know where your brother is.”

She closed her fingers, twisted her hand palm down, then turned herself in a slow circle. She hit a break in the pavement, and he grabbed her before she could do more than stumble. His hand touched her wrist, and she turned her hand to grab him as the kick of power flowed through his body once more.

“They’re in a boat,” she told him, and went limp in his arms.

•   •   •

She awoke with the familiar headache that usually accompanied the overuse of magic—and absolutely no idea where she was. It smelled wrong to be her apartment, but she was lying on a soft surface with a blanket covering her.

Panic rose in her chest—sometimes she hated being blind.

“Back in the land of the living?”

“Tom?”

He must have heard the distress in her voice, because when he spoke again, he was much closer and his voice was softer. “You’re on a couch in my apartment. We were as close to mine as we were to yours, and I knew I could get us into my apartment. Yours is probably sealed with hocus-pocus. Are you all right?”

She sat up and put her feet on the floor, and her erstwhile bed indeed proved itself to be a couch. “Do you have something with sugar in it? Sweet tea or fruit juice?”

“Hot cocoa or tea,” he told her.

“Tea.”

He must have had water already heated, because he was quickly back with a cup. She drank the sweet stuff down as fast as she could, and the warmth did as much as the sugar to clear her headache.

“Sorry,” she said.

“For what, exactly?” he said.

“For using you. I think you don’t have any barriers,” she told him slowly. “We all have safeguards, walls that keep out intruders. It’s what keeps us safe.”

In his silence, she heard him consider that.

“So, I’m vulnerable to witches?”

She didn’t know what to do with her empty cup, so she set it on the couch beside her. Then she used her left hand, her seeking hand, to look at him again.

“No, I don’t think so. Your barriers seem solid . . . even stronger than usual, as I’d expect from a wolf as far up the command structure as you are. I think you are vulnerable only to me.”

“Which means?”

“Which means when I touch you, I can see magic through your eyes . . . with practice, I might even be able just to see. It means that you can feed my magic with your skin.” She swallowed. “You’re not going to like this.”

“Tell me.”

“You are acting like my familiar.” She couldn’t feel a thing from him. “If I had a familiar.”

Floorboards creaked under his feet as his weight shifted. His shoulder brushed her as he picked up the empty cup. She heard him walk away from her and set the cup on a hard surface. “Do you need more tea?”

“No,” she said, needing suddenly to be home, somewhere she wasn’t so dependent upon him. “I’m fine. If you would call me a taxi, I’d appreciate it.” She stood up, too. Then realized she had no idea where the door was or what obstacles might be hiding on the floor. In her own apartment, redolent with her magic, she was never so helpless.

“Can you find my brother?”

She hadn’t heard him move, not a creak, not a breath, but his voice told her he was no more than a few inches from her. Disoriented and vulnerable, she was afraid of him for the first time.

He took a big step away from her. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Sorry,” she told him. “You startled me. Do we still have the gum?”

“Yes. You said she was on a boat.”

She’d forgotten, but as soon as he said it, she could picture the boat in her head. That hadn’t been the way the spell was supposed to work. It was more of a “hot and cold” spell, but she could still see the boat in her mind’s eye.

Nothing had really changed, except that she’d used someone without asking. There was still a policeman to be saved and her father to kill.

“If we still have the gum, I can find Molly—the girl on your brother’s phone call.”

“I have a buddy whose boat we can borrow.”

“All right,” she told him after a moment. “Do you have some aspirin?”

•   •   •

She hated boating. The rocking motion disrupted her sense of direction, the engine’s roar obscured softer sounds, and the scent of the ocean covered the subtler scents she used to negotiate everyday life. Worse than all of that, though, was the thought of trying to swim without knowing where she was going. The damp air chilled her already cold skin.