Chapter Seven
No one was surprised to see us walking into the office looking disheveled and bloody, but everyone was a little shocked to see us walking in very nearly on time.
I laughed when some of the waiting clients began applauding and a weak cheer went up.
Max hurried from behind his desk to check Joe’s nonexistent injuries, and it gratified me to see that at least Max wasn’t concerned that my lack of magic might make me weaker.
He was more concerned that a vampire might have gotten hurt.
Joe hadn’t said, but I knew he would have been terribly disappointed if he’d missed out on coming into the office. Funnily enough, he really loved his office time, and he loved going with me to clean houses just as much. I wasn’t taking that from him.
It was because of me that he was a vampire.
Max tended the front desk with a quirky assistant named Gracie Dawn Lockhart. He’d recently hired her after interviewing a dozen applicants, none of whom he believed would “appropriately appreciate the job” as much as Gracie Dawn.
She was a self-described country girl who’d moved to the city five years earlier when she’d begun to “pine for something different.” She talked a lot, was quite often unintentionally funny, and most of the time acted like she was seventy-two instead of twenty-two.
She worshipped Max and said he was the smartest boy she’d ever met—and her adoration may or may not have had something to do with him giving her the job.
She wasn’t the most competent person I’d ever met, but she gave it a damn good try, and she was like a white light in our dark world. She was also human, but then, so was Max.
A supernatural needed human allies in her world, no matter how often she told stories about a country life that were possibly—surely—exaggerated, or how often she began a sentence with, “mama says,” “my papaw always said,” or the oft repeated, “my dear sweet mamaw.”
I thought Huntersburg was country, but no.
Gracie Dawn’s Yellow Wade Hills, which she referred to simply as “the Hills,” had Huntersburg beat all to hell.
Apparently, the town had been named after a man named Wade Hurst, who’d either been a hero or a coward, or maybe a coward who became a hero.
I never could quite figure that out from her stories.
Over the years, it had grown to a population of around forty-five hundred “dear, sweet souls.”
Gracie Dawn was the one who called me when one of the walk-ins had an emergency that couldn’t wait. And she seemed to believe that everyone who walked through the door was an emergency, so she called me often.
Max took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Did you bring donuts?”
“You can see my hands are empty of donuts,” I pointed out.
“Hon,” Gracie Dawn said, opening a drawer in her mini desk that sat next to Max’s, “I can go get you some donuts. You want anything else?”
“Send in my first client, Max,” I said, striding to my office, “as soon as you’ve made Joe’s boo-boo all better.”
“I don’t have a boo-boo,” Joe growled, and followed me into my office.
I hurried to grab a clean shirt from a bag I kept in the office.
Two minutes later, I was ensconced behind my desk, ready for my first client of the night.
Joe stood against the wall with his machete, bald and fierce, just the way the customers liked him.
They were both intimidated and comforted by him. “Not even a ghost,” one of the clients had told me once, “would dare mess with our Joe.”
And that was before he’d become a vampire—which the clients didn’t know about, of course. But there was no denying that Joe was fierce.
Sometimes he was a marshmallow, but mostly, he was fierce.
I’d seen a dozen clients and made appointments to visit their homes to get rid of ghosts that may or may not have been haunting them when Sam walked in.
“So,” he said, dropping into the chair in front of my desk and giving Joe a wave, “what’s been happening while I’ve been away?”
My heart dropped into my stomach. Sam was in town, and in the Pocket, there was a blood-filled room and two murdered human women.
Rick was going to come for him, and it didn’t matter if the women had abused their sons. He wouldn’t give Sam a pass.
I’d talk to Sam about it, but not now. Not yet.
Shapeshifters were rare, and Sam had been overcome with joy like he’d never felt when my own shapeshifter had made itself known. He was going to be devastated when I told him my shapeshifter had been killed by a siphoner. Once again, he would feel alone.
And I really, really didn’t want to do that to him—murderous bastard though he was.
I stood. “I have some housecleaning to do. We can talk about it on the way.”
He saw in my face that he wasn’t going to like what was coming. He hesitated before he got up and walked with me to the door.
Joe followed, quiet.
“How has Lucy been?” Sam asked, finally, as I opened the door.
“Lucy’s fine,” I told him, “though she’s going to be pissed that you came here first.”
“I called her,” he said. “She said I should find you.”
I only nodded.
“What’s going on, Kait?” he asked, and I could hear the worry creeping into his voice.
“I’ve sent the addresses to your phone,” Max called, as we crossed the empty waiting room. “Joe, make sure you’re somewhere safe before it gets close to dawn.”
Max worried about Joe more now than he ever had, as though becoming a vampire had made him more vulnerable than he’d been as an easy-to-kill human.
When I pulled out onto the street, Sam was beside me in the front seat. Joe was behind me, because no matter who was in the car with me, Joe wanted to have my back.
“Sam,” I said finally, as I drove. “Some things have happened.”
“Tell me the worst thing first,” he said, clenching his fists. “Let’s get that done.”
There was a lot of bad shit to tell him, but I knew what would hurt him the most. So I started with that.
And maybe that was when it really sank in for me.
I’d never wanted to be a shapeshifter in the first place. I’d gotten that from my birth mother. I’d never wanted it.
But even if I hadn’t wanted to admit it, it hurt me to lose it. Because a gift from my monster of a birth mother or not, it had been part of me. And the siphoner had carved it out like it was her right to do so.
It would break Sam’s heart.
“I lost my shapeshifter,” I whispered, and then, my voice stronger, I said it again. “I lost my shapeshifter.”
He looked like I’d said I was dying. “How?” he asked, like he couldn’t quite believe it but absolutely knew I wouldn’t lie about it. “I mean…how?”
So I told him about Anika Draper and how she’d siphoned out my magic because she believed it was her duty to do so. “I have my wolf and my blade,” I finished. “That’s all she left me.”
He sat back in his seat and stared through the windshield, silent.
Finally, when we were a block away from the first haunted house of the night, I reached over to pat his knee. “Sam?”
“I’ll find her,” he murmured. “And if she can’t give it back to you, I’ll kill her. Maybe that will release your power back to you.”
I felt worse for him, somehow, than I did for myself. “That’s not how it works,” I told him, my voice thick. “I’m still me. I’m still exactly what I was to you.”
He looked at me. “What are you to me, Kait?”
“Your friend,” I said immediately. “You’re part of my pack.” I hesitated, but only for a second. “I love you, Sammy.”
At first, it was like he didn’t quite understand what I’d said to him. He frowned and opened his mouth to ask me, maybe, to repeat my words. Then he simply stared at me, and when I glanced at him, I saw things in his eyes that only a person who’d been born into horrific abuse would understand.
“Sam,” I said again, quietly. “I love you, shapeshifter.”
He sniffed, then rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. He said nothing, and his gaze grew distant, as though he were lost for a moment in his thoughts. He’d had a shit life and a shit family. It was unlikely anyone had ever told him they loved him.
I knew Lucy loved him, but Lucy would take her time saying so.
Finally, he smiled, and it lit up his whole face. “Thank you for that,” he said, his voice low. “Not just for the words, but for the truth of them.” He nodded, almost to himself. “I believe you.”
My chest ached for him.
Joe leaned up. “You’re family, Bub. And you’ll protect Kait with your shapeshifter. She needs us.”
I wanted to deny his words. I wanted to say something sharp and tell him I was still just as strong and that I didn’t need anybody to protect me.
But I didn’t.
Sam pulled out his phone, more cheerful than he’d been five minutes earlier. “I’m going to look into this magic-killing bitch.” He glanced away from his screen, something close to hope in his stare. “She’s not blonde, by any chance?”
From the back seat, Joe snorted.
When I parked on the street in front of the first house I was to clean, none of us said anything as we got out of the car. My heart was heavy. Instead of getting more used to and accepting of my loss, it just kept hitting me harder.
Sam and I didn’t usually hug each other, but I didn’t think anything of it when he hurried around the front of the car and pulled me into his arms.
But then he lowered his nose to the side of my neck, held me in a crushing grip, and inhaled. Then he licked my skin, and as I was in the process of shoving him away, I felt his teeth as he nipped me.
“Sam,” I cried, my fingers to my throat. “I know you’re upset, but that’s a step too far, buddy.”
Joe wedged himself between us, looking as confused as I felt. “What’d he do?”
“He licked me,” I said. “And he…I think he bit me.”
Joe growled and turned on the shapeshifter, who backed up a couple of steps, his hands up, smiling.
“Hang on, hang on,” he said. Then he sobered, but there was a sparkle in his eyes.
“Kait, I can’t tell you how sorry I am that some asshole sucked out your magic.
But you’re still a shapeshifter. There’s no way she could steal that part of you.
It’s you, just as your wolf is you. I tasted it. I got its scent.”
I shook my head. “You’re wrong. It’s gone.”
He sighed. “It’s not some bit of magic floating around inside you, waiting to slip out through a cut or come to a siphoner’s call.”
I wasn’t convinced. Not even a little bit.
He was in denial. The only shapeshifter he’d ever known, and one he could trust—and Sam had never trusted anyone in his entire life—was dead. That wasn’t something he could just accept.
He nudged Joe out of the way, and Joe moved, though he didn’t move far. Sam took my shoulders, but gently, and his stare was earnest, open, and completely sure. “You couldn’t feel it your whole life,” he reminded me, “and it’s pretty new to you. It’s understandable that you might think—”
“I tried to shift into her,” I told him. “I tried. I couldn’t do it.” I shook my head, my heart fluttering, wanting to believe him but nearly certain he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. “It’s what siphoners do, Sam.”
“Siphoners steal magic to regulate your power. That’s all they do. If you couldn’t shift into her, it’s because siphoners can’t be shifted into.”
If he was right…
“Try,” he urged. “Right now. Just try.”
“On the street in under about a million lights and cameras?” Joe moved to shield me, as though I was shifting right then and there and the humans might see. Joe was becoming a tad overprotective, and he and I were going to have to have a talk about that.
But I wasn’t going to try shifting in the street. “I’ll try when I get home,” I said, and I was a little breathless, a little hopeful.
I was a lot doubtful.
If I still had my ability to shapeshift, that made the siphoner’s invasion just a little less horrifying. It made her seem less powerful.
And it would take away my deep, secret fear that she might somehow kill my wolf. A person didn’t spend the biggest part of her life as a hobbled wolf without some intense mental issues.
I needed to know without a doubt that my wolf could never again be taken from me, and I needed to not be afraid of Anika Draper.
Because I did not doubt for one second that the siphoner and I would fight again.