Sophie glanced over and blinked at him. “You know a guy who can create a forgery of this artifact that’s good enough to risk Liza’s life on?”
“If anybody can do it, Olaf can.”
‘You trust him?”
“With my life. If he didn’t evacuate, he’ll do what he can.”
She blew out a long breath. “Well, it’s not necessarily a great plan, but it’s a plan. Where are we going?”
He directed her back to the interstate until they were headed toward Slidell. As they hit I-10, he
fell quiet.
In the silence, Sophie’s mind turned over the events of the night, settling on Mick’s rescue from the catacombs.
“What did you mean back at the pond?” she asked.
“What?”
“When you said you weren’t going to lose another one.” When she looked over at him, his face was hard. “Did you lose one of your Pack?”
“Not exactly.”
He stopped and stayed silent for so long, she didn’t think he would explain.
“When I was seventeen, I was sent to pick up an order of herbs and other supplies for our pack healer. Usually she’d go herself, but one of the women was due to give birth any day and she didn’t want to leave, just in case. When I got to the guild, the herbalist didn’t have our order ready yet. There was a girl, a child really. Five, maybe six. She wanted to play. Was bugging everybody there to play Hide and Seek—really insistent. Nobody else would pay any attention to her, so I followed her out into the swamp. She didn’t stand a chance. I could smell her easy, but I played along, pretending I couldn’t find her.
“We were more than a mile away from town when the attack came. Her entire clan was slaughtered while we hid in the swamp playing a child’s game. Then she stepped out from behind a tree and looked at me with these grave brown eyes and said, “It’s over,” and started crying. I didn’t realize what she meant until I scented their blood. She knew it was going to happen.”
“She was a Seer?” asked Sophie.
“Yeah. I don’t think they’d realized it yet. She was young to manifest that kind of gift. So nobody listened to her.”
“That’s horrible. What did you do?”
“The only thing I could think of. I took her back home to the Pack. She was just a child. I promised we would keep her safe until my Alpha could decide what to do with her. He wasn’t thrilled with me, but when I explained the circumstances, he agreed that she could stay. Then he sent me off to another witch clan he knew, to see if they would take her in.”
He stopped again, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. “While I was gone the same people who attacked her home came after my Pack. They were after the girl. It wasn’t that they just handed her over, but . . . to them she wasn’t Pack, so nobody even thought about protecting her. They were too busy protecting their own.”
“Was she killed?” asked Sophie quietly.
“Or worse. Her body wasn’t found in the clan compound during the aftermath.” Mick paused again.
“When I got back, the Alpha confronted me. He said I’d brought death straight to our Pack’s door because I’d brought in an outsider. So I was banished.”
“So you’ve made your own Pack. Your own rules about who counts, who deserves protection,” she said. He had protected what he deemed his.
Mick shrugged.
“What was her name?” asked Sophie.
“Isla. Her name was Isla.”
They lapsed into silence.
“I was like you once,” said the demon.
Startled, they both glanced back at it.