Sam blinked in the sudden darkness. “You’re a very handy woman to have around,” he said.
“You have no idea,” she replied, and proceeded to demonstrate that she wasn’t quite as tired as he’d thought.
* * *
THE EARLY MORNING sun streaming in the windows woke Sam up at his usual time. For a moment, he thought he’d dreamed the entire thing, but the languid contentment in his body convinced him otherwise. A glance around the tiny space showed that he was alone, and he tried to shrug away the disappointment that briefly lashed sharp claws into his otherwise good mood. It was a night of mutual comfort, nothing more. No point in reading something into it that wasn’t there. Couldn’t be there.
Then he looked out the window and saw Bella standing on the catwalk, looking out at the mountains, the mug between her hands steaming peacefully into the morning mistiness. She’d clearly made use of his solar shower; she was dressed in yesterday’s clothes, but her red hair gleamed like wet rubies in the brightening sun. An echoing brightness seemed to settle into his chest, somewhere around the place where his heart used to reside, before it cracked into shards of broken glass and debris.
Bella turned around when he came outside, shrugging a shirt into place as he walked, and she gave him a smile of such vivid cheerfulness, it put the sun to shame.
“Morning,” she said, tilting her head up to receive his kiss. “Sleep well?”
“Like a rock,” he said. “A very happy rock.” He bent down to sniff at the steam rising off of her cup. “What is that, mint?”
“Um-hmm,” she said, eyes twinkling.
“But I don’t have any mint tea,” Sam said, baffled. “At least, I was pretty sure I didn’t.”
“No, you didn’t,” Bella said. “I kind of grabbed it from the caravan. You didn’t have any bacon either. Shame on you.” She grinned at him, as if daring him to balk at her magical sleight of hand.
Sam just shook his head. “Wait until I tell my grandmother she was right about me meeting a witch. The woman is going to be unbearably smug.”
Bella rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe that I ended up with the one guy and the one teenager who still believe in witches. What the heck are the odds?”
“Teenager? You mean Jazz?” He clearly needed to make some coffee, because he wasn’t tracking well. “Of course she believes you’re a witch. She’s your niece.”
Bella gazed out at the sky, her face studiously blank. “The view from here is really amazing. I’ll bet you never get tired of looking at it.”
“She is your niece, right?” Sam refused to get sidetracked by a discussion of the scenery.
“Well, not technically,” Bella said, taking a sip of tea. “In fact, not at all. We met for the first time the day she got trapped up in that tree.”
“What?” Sam leaned his back against the railing and stared at her. “If she’s not your niece, who the hell is she and where is she from?”
“She’s Jazz,” Bella said, putting her tea mug on the ground by her feet. “And she’s from a series of lousy foster homes where she was systematically ignored and abused. She’s been living in the forest since spring, apparently. Now she’s staying with me for a while.”
“Are you serious?” He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You’re harboring a runaway? Do you have any idea what kind of trouble you could get in for that? What kind of trouble she could be running away from? Just because she says she came from a foster home doesn’t mean she did. Teenagers run away all the time. She might have parents looking for her. Hell, she might have the police looking for her, for all you know.”
It wasn’t that he didn’t like Jazz—he did, a lot. But that didn’t mean Bella could just take her in like a stray dog that showed up on her doorstep.
“How do you know that she doesn’t have anything to do with these fires?” he asked, fists clenching at his sides. “Teenagers are often at the root of suspicious fires, you know. For all you know she could be a pyromaniac. It wouldn’t be the first time that a fire setter got caught in his or her own fire.”
Bella glared at him, crossing her arms over her chest. “Now you’re just being ridiculous. Yes, she’s a runaway, but she had good reasons. No kid lives in the woods for months if they have something better to go home to. She’s not on the run from the law and she’s not setting the fires, I promise.”
“How can you be sure?” he said, fighting the impulse to step back from the glare of her green eyes. He wished they could turn the clock back to five minutes ago, when everything was so mellow. But he was right about this, and she knew it. “You can’t just take her word for it. She could be lying to you.”
“She’s not,” Bella said. “And if you don’t believe me, you can ask Koshka. He’s as good as a lie detector.”
Sam rubbed his face, feeling the stubble scratchy under his palm. “Koshka. You want me to ask the cat if your teenage runaway is telling the truth?”
“I told you, no one can lie to Koshka; it’s one of his gifts. And he’s not a cat. He’s a dragon disguised as a cat. Big, scaly beasts kind of stick out in this day and age, you know.”
“Right,” Sam said slowly. “Your cat is a dragon.”
“What? You can believe in witches and ghosts, but you draw the line at dragons?” Bella scowled at him.
“I draw the line at letting you shelter an underage runaway, no matter how good your intentions are. She’s still a child. The system is there for a reason.”
Bella gritted her teeth. “In Jazz’s case, the system didn’t work. It didn’t work for me when I was a kid either, which is how I ended up being taken in by the Baba Yaga who trained me. I’m not going to just throw her to the wolves because you think she might be lying. Not when I know she isn’t.”
Sam drew in a deep breath, feeling it stutter inside his smoke-damaged lungs. “I’m sorry about your past, Bella, but you can’t just make up the rules to suit yourself.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Oh no?” she said in a soft, dangerous voice. “Which part of powerful witch did you not understand?” She snapped her fingers, and a flame danced between them, no more than six inches away from his nose.
“Shit!” he said, taking an involuntary step backward, the railing the only thing stopping him from plummeting into the air. “Are you crazy?” He gripped the metal bars behind him with both hands. “You know how the chief said you should leave the area because it wasn’t safe? I’m starting to think maybe he was right. Only maybe it isn’t safe for the rest of us to have you here.”
Bella gazed at him for a minute with suspiciously bright eyes, then blinked a couple of times rapidly, the fire in her hand winking out of existence. “Maybe he was right,” she said in a rough voice. “But I’ll leave when I’m damned good and ready to and not before. And if I see one sign of either a cop or a social worker, someone is going to get turned into a toad.”
Then she turned on her heel and stomped down the stairs to the ground. After a minute, he heard the roar of the dirt bike’s engine, racing down the road in the direction of the caravan. Away from him.
Sam sank down onto the hard surface of the catwalk and put his head in his hands. He didn’t know why he felt so stunned and bereft. It wasn’t as though he thought one night of comfort and passion meant they were starting a relationship. He didn’t do relationships anymore; he couldn’t bear to lose one more person, and relationships just made you vulnerable.
But he thought they might at least be becoming friends, of a sort, and now it turned out that he didn’t know Bella at all. At least not in the ways that counted. And that last thing she did with the flames made him wonder all over again if she could have been involved with the two fires she was found near. He didn’t know which he hated more—thinking she might be a fire starter or thinking Jazz might be.
But most of all, he hated the glitter of tears he was sure he’d
seen in Bella’s eyes right before she left.
* * *
BELLA FELT EVERY rock and every bump as the dirt bike bounced too fast down the trail in the direction of home, each shock echoing in her bones and in her heart.
Idiot! She scolded herself as she rounded a curve and almost skidded on the still-wet ground. But she wasn’t talking about her driving ability. More like her common sense, or lack of it.
It wasn’t as though she didn’t know better than to get involved with Humans. Hadn’t she learned anything from the past? Not only was Sam frustrating and pigheaded (and just plain wrong, dammit, at least when it came to Jazz), but she’d almost lost her temper over it, and that could have been disastrous. The look on his face when she’d created a flame out of thin air right in front of him, that particular mix of fear and horror and disbelief—she’d seen that before. She’d hated it then and she hated it now. And the fact that she’d done it to Sam, knowing what he’d been through . . . It was going to be a long time before she could forgive herself for that.
A lot longer before Sam would forgive her, of that she was sure.
Then there was the little matter of the picture she’d seen on the windowsill when she’d gone to make tea earlier. A large group of firefighters, all in full gear with their helmets tucked under their arms and big grins on their faces as they looked toward the camera. Bella had gotten a jolt when she’d recognized a pre-fire Sam without his scars or the haunted look in his eyes. But that had been nothing compared to the shock of seeing the woman standing next to him, one arm linked through his. The lone female in a sea of men, the woman had a round, cheerful face, a slightly stocky but strong-looking physique . . . and red hair.
For a second, gazing at the picture, Bella had a moment of doubt; was Sam only attracted to her because her hair color reminded him of his lost fiancée? Then she’d told herself she was being ridiculous, and that their intense and inexplicable chemistry was clearly mutual. She’d dismissed the thought as foolish until things had blown up in her face. Now she was back to wondering who he actually saw when he looked at her.
She took one hand off the handlebar and swiped at her eyes, trying to blame the wind and the speed of the bike, but not really believing it. Her chest felt tight and crackly, like the air right before a lightning strike. Maybe she could say her tears were rain, although the sky seen through the tall trees was a determined crystalline blue. The only clouds in sight were the ones that she’d created herself, and she needed to waft them away so she could see where she was going.
In short, she needed to stay away from Sam and get her head back in the game; focus on finding the Riders and tracking down Brenna, if that’s who was behind last night’s storm. Sam could take care of himself, and he’d made it brutally, painfully clear that he didn’t want her around. Fine. Let the man deal with his tiny owl and his panic attacks and his completely misguided ideas by himself. It was none of her business anymore, and that was the way it should be.
She just hoped that he would keep her secret, and Jazz’s.
She wasn’t going to miss him at all.
TWENTY
JAZZ WAS SO happy to see Bella return safe and sound, she almost forgot to act cool, and barely stopped her bare feet from rushing down the steps and across the clearing and her arms from forming some kind of crazy hug. Instead, she strolled toward Bella and turned the motion into a victory air punch.
“Excellent job stopping the storm last night,” Jazz said. Then took a second look as Bella removed her helmet and swung her leg over the little red dirt bike. For a woman who’d saved the day, she didn’t seem very happy. There was a smudge of dirt over one cheekbone and a distinct reddish tinge to her eyes, which were shadowed and tired-looking. Witches didn’t cry, did they? Maybe using all that magic just wiped her out. That would explain why she’d had to stay at the tower.
Of course, there was another possible explanation, and Jazz was neither too young nor too naïve to figure out what it was. But if Sam and Bella had finally acted on all that simmering attraction that was so obvious to anyone other than the two of them, Jazz had to guess it hadn’t gone all that well. Leave it to grown-ups to mess up something simple.
“Um, is something wrong?” she asked Bella. Their relationship was still in the shaky and weird stage where neither one of them really knew the boundaries. It wasn’t as though they were really aunt and niece, after all. But Jazz kind of felt like that anyway. “I mean, was there a problem with the magic, or, you know, like, Sam, or something?”
Bella shook her head. “The magic went okay. It just took me a few tries to figure out what I was doing wrong. I’ll explain it later. I need to get back to the search soon. I’ll just make us some breakfast before I go.”
Uh-huh. Jazz noticed she didn’t answer the Sam part of the question at all. Which sort of was an answer, all by itself, she figured. She hadn’t had a lot of experience with boys, what with moving from foster home to foster home and from school to school. But from what she’d observed from the popular girls, if things went well with a guy, you told everybody about it. It was only when it wasn’t working out the way you wanted that suddenly every other subject on the planet was more interesting, even algebra.
A large gray and brown head appeared in the caravan’s doorway. “Nice of you to finally check in,” he said in a growly tone. “Some of us worry, you know. Also, didn’t we have bacon?”
“You knew perfectly well I was okay,” Bella responded, ruffling the fur on his head as she walked by. “And we’re going to have to live without bacon today. I sort of misplaced it. Have some cheese instead. You like cheese.”
“How do you misplace bacon?” Jazz asked, mostly not caring. She was just glad to eat something other than tuna. She liked it okay, but seriously, not for breakfast. Well, at least not now that she wasn’t so hungry all the time.
She followed Bella back into the caravan and slid into a seat at the table. Normally she would have offered to help, but Jazz had a feeling it wasn’t a good idea to get in the woman’s way right now.
“Never mind,” Bella said. “It happens. I’ll try and find some time to run into town for supplies today. In the meanwhile, we can all eat what’s in the refrigerator already. Just be glad that my fridge doesn’t have a mind of its own, like Barbara’s does. She once had to eat nothing but cherry pies for days.” A few minutes later she slapped a plate of melted cheese and toast down in front of Jazz, who wasn’t completely sure it hadn’t melted from the heat of Bella’s bad mood.
Koshka snagged a piece of cheese almost as big as his paw and made it disappear effortlessly. “Aren’t you eating?” he asked Bella pointedly. “All that magical work last night must have used up a lot of energy. You need to eat.”
“You’re my dragon, not my mother,” Bella said. “And I’m not hungry.” But Jazz noticed that she made herself some cheese and toast anyway, and sat down at the table opposite Jazz to nibble at it halfheartedly.
After a few moments of charged silence that seemed to send sparks out into the air within the caravan, Jazz and Bella spoke at the same time.
“Is Sam okay?” Jazz asked, as Bella said, “I’m not sure you’re safe here anymore. You might want to consider finding someplace else to hide out.”
“What?” Jazz lowered her toast slowly back down to her plate as if it had suddenly turned into a poisonous snake. “You want me to leave?”
She could feel the walls closing in around her as history repeated itself. Of course Bella didn’t want her to stay. No one ever did. Not for long. But Bella had been the one demanding she stick around. It wasn’t like Jazz had begged her or anything. Hell, she’d even tried to leave, and Bella said no. So what changed? Was it because Jazz asked about Sam when Bella obviously didn’t want to talk about whatever had happened between them?
Bella shook her head, long red curls framing a face that looked more sad than mad. “No, that’s
not it at all, Jazz. I swear, it isn’t that I want you to go. I’m just not feeling good about the situation, that’s all. I mean, there’s all these fires, and now it turns out there may be a crazy former Baba Yaga lurking somewhere in the forest who might have something to do with them . . .”
Jazz narrowed her eyes. She knew a partial truth when she heard one; she’d told enough of them in her time. “What aren’t you telling me?” she demanded. “I’m not a kid. If I’ve done something wrong, tell me what it was. Maybe I can fix it. Or, like, say I’m sorry, or something.”
Bella let out a sigh that sounded like the last balloon at the end of a party giving up the ghost. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Jazz. I did. I told Sam the truth, about my magic, and that you aren’t my niece, that you’re a runaway from the foster care system. He didn’t take it well.”
“What? Why would you do that?” Jazz could feel unwanted tears welling up in her eyes, and she brushed them away angrily. “I mean, I like Sam, and I guess I trust him, kind of, but he’s clearly a do-gooder. You can’t tell people like that that someone is breaking the rules; they freak out. Now Sam isn’t going to want to hang out with me anymore. What’s he going to do?”
“I’m sorry, Jazz,” Bella said, looking at the table. “I wasn’t thinking. It just kind of came out. I do that, sometimes. Speak without thinking. It’s that whole raised in the woods thing.” She picked her head up and met Jazz’s gaze with obvious reluctance. “He told me I should turn you over to the system, and of course I explained why that was a lousy idea. But I’m not sure he believed me. Hopefully he took me seriously when I told him I’d turn him into a toad if he called the cops on you, but I can’t be sure. That’s why I wanted to warn you that you might not be safe. I’m sorry. I screwed up.”
Jazz blinked. This might well have been the only time in her entire life an adult actually apologized to her for messing up her life. It didn’t make things better, exactly, but at least it meant that Bella hadn’t changed her mind about liking her. Probably.
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