Patricia Briggs: Strange Brew

Witches gather more power from hurting those with magic, she'd said… more or less. People just like him—but it hadn't hurt, not that he'd noticed.

He wasn't afraid of her, not really. Witch or not, she was no match for him. Even in human form, he could break her human-fragile body in mere moments. But if she was using him…

"Why are you helping me?" he asked as he had earlier, but the question seemed more important now. He'd known what she was, but witch meant something different to him now. He knew enough about witches not to ask the obvious question, though—like what it was she'd done to him. Witches, in his experience, were secretive about their spells—like junkyard dogs are secretive about their bones.

She'd taken something from him by using him that way… broken the trust he'd felt building between them. He needed to reestablish what he could expect out of her. Needed to know exactly what she was getting him into, beyond rescuing his brother. Witches were not altruistic. "What do you want out of this? Revenge for your blindness?"

She watched him… appeared to watch him, anyway, as she considered his question. There hadn't been many people who could lie to Tom before he Changed—cops learn all about lying the first year on the job. Afterwards… he could smell a lie a mile away an hour before it was spoken.

"Andy Choo sent you," she said finally. "That's one. Your brother's a policeman, and an investigation into his death might be awkward. That's two. He takes risks to help people he doesn't know—it's only right someone return the favor. That's three."

They weren't lies, but they weren't everything either. Her face was very still, as if the magic she worked had changed her view of him, too.

Then she tilted her head sideways and said in a totally different voice, hesitant and raw. "Sins of the fathers."

Here was absolute truth. Obscure as hell, but truth. "Sins of the fathers?"

"Kouros's real name is Lin Keller, though he hasn't used it in twenty years or more."

"He's your father." And then he added two and two. "Your father is running Samhain's Coven?" Her father had ruined her eye and—Tom could read between the lines—caused her to ruin the other? Her own father?

She drew in a deep breath—and for a moment he was afraid she was going to cry or something. But a stray gust of air brought the scent of her to him, and he realized she was angry. It tasted like a werewolf's rage, wild and biting.

"I am not a part of it," she said, her voice a half octave lower than it had been. "I'm not bringing you to his lair so he can dine upon werewolf, too. I am here because some jerk made me feel sorry for him. I am here because I want both him and his brother out of my hair and safely out of the hands of my rat-bastard father so I won't have their deaths on my conscience, too."

Someone else might have been scared of her, she being a witch and all. Tom wanted to apologize—and he couldn't remember the last time that impulse had touched him. It was even more amazing because he wasn't at fault: she'd misunderstood him. Maybe she'd picked up on how appalled he was that her own father had maimed her—he hadn't been implying she was one of them.

He didn't apologize, though, or explain himself. People said things when they were mad that they wouldn't tell you otherwise.

"What was it you did to me?"

"Did to you?" Arctic ice might be warmer.

"When you were looking for the gum. It felt like you hit me with a bolt of lightning." He was damned if he'd tell her everything he felt.

Her right eyebrow peeked out above her sunglasses. Interest replaced coldness. "You felt like I was doing something to you?" And then she held out her left hand. "Take my hand."

He looked at it.

After a moment, she smiled. He didn't know she had a smile like that in her. Bright and cheerful and sudden. Knowing. As if she had gained every thought that passed through his head. Her anger, the misunderstanding between them was gone as if it had never been.

"I don't know what happened," she told him gently. "Let me try re-creating it, and maybe I can tell you."

He gave her his hand. Instead of taking it, she put only two fingers on his palm. She stepped closer to him, dropped her head so he could see her scalp gleaming pale underneath her dark hair. The magic that touched him this time was gentler, sparklers instead of fireworks—and she jerked her fingers away as if his hand were a hot potato.

"What the heck…" She rubbed her hands on her arms with nervous speed.

"What?"

"You weren't acting as my focus—I can tell you that much."

"So what was going on?"

She shook her head, clearly uncomfortable. "I think I was using you to see . I shouldn't be able to do that."

He found himself smiling grimly. "So I'm your Seeing Eye wolf?"

"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 couch 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."