Chapter Four
We’d talk about what happened, but later, after I’d gotten cleaned up and was sitting at the dinner table with my people. We’d discuss it and we’d figure it out.
By the time I’d finished my bath, into which Nell had put something that smelled like a summer garden and helped my poor battered body recover from the brutal beating it had survived, I felt almost back to normal.
But I’d looked into the mirror. I didn’t look like I was back to normal. My shift hadn’t lasted long enough to help me, because I was so far gone when I’d attempted it.
“After you eat,” Jared murmured, watching me from the doorway, “we’ll shift and you’ll finish healing.”
“At least physically,” I said, but didn’t explain. Maybe he thought my trauma was all emotional, and that was certainly part of it. He’d have no idea that my magic, my shapeshifter, the angel’s scream, all of it was…dead.
He didn’t press for details. He understood that I’d talk when I was ready. I wanted all of them around me when I did, because I didn’t want to have to go over it again.
Of course I’d have to explain it all to the council, but that was different. They probably knew more than I did about it already.
My people were waiting when I walked down the stairs and into the dining room, my blade secure in its belt around my hips, my ass-kicking boots on, my hair neatly in its braid. Maybe I didn’t look like I was ready to fight, but I felt like I was.
I paused in the doorway, taking in the sober picture they all made, wondering why they didn’t seem happier that I was up and about. Wondering how many more times we’d go through another moment just like this one. It happened too often.
Then Joe pushed his chair back, and though there was rage in his eyes, there was also joy. He didn’t say a word, just scooped me up and held me in a bone-crunching hug, his body vibrating with restrained emotions.
“Glad to see you, boss,” he said, finally releasing me.
I laughed somewhat shakily, not about to tell him that my body wasn’t up to his hugs just yet. “Back at you, Joe.”
I walked farther into the room. “Where’s my dog?”
“Lucy’s keeping him in the kitchen until we’re sure you can—” my mother started.
“Oh for God’s sake,” I said, then bellowed, “Lucille! Bring me my damn dog!”
Then everyone seemed to realize I was really okay, that I was still me, and they didn’t have to be careful. The detective slid his arms around me and pulled me against his body, his lips at my ear. “Damn you, Kait.”
I smiled. “Same thing Jared said. I am thoroughly damned.”
Next came Remy Simon, but he didn’t hug me. He gave me a nod and a half-smile, and there was relief in his eyes. Guilt, as well, and that was something I couldn’t ever remember seeing in the boogeyman’s eyes. “Sorry I didn’t have your back,” he said.
“You were a little busy fighting her goons,” I told him. “You don’t ever need to apologize for that, Remy.”
Max and Lucy and Ash all rushed me at the same time, and for a little while, my mind was occupied by only good things.
My mother beamed at us all.
Zach hung back until I went to him. I wrapped my arms around him and finally, the tension in his body eased and he returned the hug. “Kait,” he said. “I—”
“No,” I interrupted, pulling back to look into his eyes. “I was the most powerful thing in the room. None of you could know that a strange woman might walk in and best me.”
It was Lucy who pounced on the word, but then, Lucy had been the one having the dreams. And she knew. “Was?” she asked. “Was, Kait?”
Everyone fell silent.
I took a deep breath. “Let’s sit down and eat. Everything’s getting cold, and I have a fierce hunger. I’ll explain between bites.” I tried for a smile, but I could feel it was a little frayed at the edges.
I really needed food. I was halfway through my third plate when I finally started talking. I didn’t want to tell them, as though the loss of my magic was a secret shame I needed to hide. I didn’t want to admit aloud what had happened.
Because now they’d see me as weak, and I was going to have to prove myself all over again.
“Her name is Anika Draper,” I began. “And she took my magic.” Then, I sat up straight, shoved my plate away, and stopped wallowing in despair.
“When I attacked her, she…” I shook my head, unsure.
“She somehow sucked the magic from me and now it’s gone.
I have no magic.” I forced myself to look up from the tabletop.
“She stole it. I went into that fight like a novice and handed it right to her.”
Jared stiffened beside me, then slid his arm across the back of my chair. “Kait. Are you sure?”
I nodded. “I’m sure. I feel the emptiness. At the end, all I could do was try to shapeshift into her. I couldn’t even do that.” Then I tightened my hands into fists. “But I have my wolf. I have my wolf, and I have my blade.”
Shockingly, Max was the one to lose his calm. He burst into loud sobs, and Joe was quick to jump up and pull him into his arms. “There, there,” he said, patting Max so hard on his back that he beat the tears right out of him. Joe was never going to be the most comforting of individuals.
But his clumsy sweetness caused every one of us, including Max, to crack up, and the awful heaviness of the moment dissipated beneath that laughter.
“Okay,” I said, wiping tears of laughter off my face. “We’re all good. We’ll figure out how to find this bitch and the thugs she brought with her, and we’re going to take back what she stole. And if we can’t do that, we’re going to kill them all.”
“We’ll kill them anyway,” Zach said, returning my smile.
None of us ever worried about the human detective listening to our talk of killing. He was one of us now. And we weren’t killing humans.
I ran my fingertips over the raised scars I could feel beneath my shirt. “I’m going to take that blade from her,” I murmured.
Jared didn’t argue or say that without my magic, I had no hope of taking anything from her. He nodded. “You take her blade. I will take her life.”
I looked at him, and it didn’t matter that I knew him intimately, or that he loved me, or that he was Jared Walker, the wolf alpha who would defend me to his last breath. Something intense and dark and deadly lit his eerie blue stare, and for just an instant, I shrank away from him.
Jared was…fierce, and he was savage.
He leaned over to kiss my forehead. “You will not be afraid of me.”
I smiled, touching his face. “Sometimes I will, Alpha, but it’s only instinct. You can be a scary wolf.”
“For the enemy,” he told me. “Never for you.”
“Kait,” Max said, and there was something in his voice.
I sighed, regretful that things were about to get heavy again. “What’d you find, Max?”
Max was better than anyone I’d ever met at finding information and finding it fast. After his outburst and Joe’s attempts to comfort him, he’d thrown off his atypical emotions and buried his nose in his phone.
And now…
“I found her. She didn’t steal your magic to use.
That’s not possible for her. She’s a siphoner.
They’re rare.” There were no signs of his earlier tears.
He was excited, though, at his discovery.
Max loved nothing more than digging for information, finding clues, and impressing people with his skills.
“Siphoner,” Remy said. “I’ve heard the term. Never met one of them, though.”
“She came to Jakeston for Kait,” Jared said. “She came to take her power.”
Max nodded. “It’s what they do. Like humans who hunt vampires or ghost hunters who travel the world destroying ghosts.
Siphoners feel it when power is upsetting the balance.
No one person should contain that much power or magic.
It’s the siphoner’s mission to restore stability and…
” He frowned at his phone. “They see you as the evil. To a siphoner, Kait, you’d be a time bomb that she has to detonate before you go off and kill the city.
More than the city.” He raised his gaze to mine, and I didn’t like that his was actually…
considering. “She believes she protects innocents from people like you.”
Rick leaned back in his chair, his voice overly casual when he spoke. “You know that’s not true, don’t you, Max?”
And Max’s eyes cleared. “Oh, of course. I know Kait is the good guy.” Then he went back to his reading.
“Where are you getting all this information?” Lucy asked him, leaving her chair to peer over his shoulder.
He grinned. “She has a website.”
“A website,” I said. “A thieving, monstrous, cowardly supernat has a website talking about what she does.”
“Yes,” Max said pointedly. “Like you do.”
“You run my website, and you advertise our job of clearing haunted houses,” I told him. “I don’t tell the humans or the world that I’m a wolf with a whole lot of power.”
“Does she have any power,” Zach asked, “other than siphoning?”
Max tapped on his screen. “So when I ran a search, I found some interesting stuff. Siphoners are super strong, fast, and can take a lot of damage. It seems as though they’ve evolved to become a mixture of supernaturals—vampires and shifters, for starters—and some researchers believe there’s some fae in there somewhere.
If a siphoner comes for you, he or she is coming to fight.
They’ll kill your power and kick your ass while they’re at it. And Kait…”
I swallowed hard. “Yeah?”
“You said she cut you with her weapon.”
I nodded and once again ran my fingers over the slight ridges beneath my shirt. “I feel like the wounds are alive,” I murmured. “I believe I saw glowing green symbols on them. Just like the ones on her blade.” I looked at him. “What’d she do to me, Max?”
“She saved your life,” he said. “Or at least your sanity. The more power there is to lose, the emptier the victim. She cut you to—”
“Fill the empty spaces,” I whispered. “Because otherwise I would collapse in on myself like a crushed paper bag.”
The siphoner really believed she was hunting down the evil and getting rid of it.
She really believed I was the bad guy, and she was making sure I didn’t take over the world or some shit.
She didn’t care about getting to know the supernaturals she attacked and devastated.
She didn’t care about the trauma and destruction she left in her wake.
She believed she was doing the right thing. The necessary thing.
I believed she shouldn’t exist.
“She may hang around for a few days,” Max said. “The more power they have to destroy, the harder it is on them.”
“I also beat the hell out of her,” I told them. “I couldn’t believe she got up from what I did to her.”
Max looked up from his phone. “As I said. Super strong. Super fast. Able to take damage like a video game boss.”
“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t get hurt,” Joe said. “It just means she’s going to be harder to kill.”
“But not impossible?” Zach frowned. “She’s not immortal?”
“No,” Max told him. “She definitely can die.”
“All this talk about killing and dying,” my mother scolded. “Kait is back with us and she’ll heal. We should focus on that joy.”
And we would. We would.
I’d shift and run through the woods of Shadowfield with Jared and I would finish healing. But as soon as I was healed, I was going to track an injured siphoner.
I was going to kill her so she could never again do to another person what she’d done to me.