Chapter Thirteen
After the Captain leftto ice his hand, Fin eased the knives from my grasp.
At my questioning stare, he shrugged. “If you need to channel, it won’t work to channel only through weapons. Or else everything will start looking like a target. You have your own mage weapon. Let’s see if we can find you a piece of fae magic that wasn’t created to destroy.”
He led me down the hall of the armory but stopped a door short of my version of heaven. When we arrived, Fin held out his hand to stop me. “Wait here for a moment.”
I was surprised but did as he requested, staying outside the room until he entered and flipped on the light. He barely fit inside the room, the size of a walk-in closet but lined with shelves. Books, pictures, random boxes.
It hit me before Fin explained. This was his legacy, his memories, his family heirlooms.
I feared touching anything, and at the same time I wanted to drag everything off the shelves and dissect it to learn more about the mysterious man who’d changed my life so completely.
He picked up a small white box off a shelf and offered it to me. It took me a minute to get the courage to take it, mostly because I didn’t want him to see the amazement on my face. Which was idiotic on its own, considering he could probably feel my every twitch down our bond.
With shaking hands, I opened the lid on the box to find a silver necklace with a white crystal hanging off it. The crystal came to a sharp point and reflected the soft overhead light of the room from its shiny polished surface.
I cleared my throat and pulled the necklace from the box. “What is it?”
Fin took the box, snapped it shut, and placed it back on the shelf, as if he needed a moment to shape the words. “It was my sister’s. She made it. When we were younger, she loved tinkering with tiny things like this. I thought she’d made it for herself, decades ago, but when I asked her about it, she shook her head and told me to keep it safe. That someone I cared about would need it one day. That it’s both a tool and a map.”
I held the crystal to the light, but I couldn’t see anything magical. Only its milky white surface. “Was your sister some kind of psychic?”
He shook his head. “Not that she ever told me, but fae women are unpredictable in their magic. As they age, it grows with them, changes. Something to think about for yourself.”
Why would he give me his sister’s necklace? Even if Sol had one day thought it might be for me. After he’d lost her, he’d kept her room like a shrine, and this place, a room full of memories and dust. It was obvious on so many levels he hadn’t gotten over her disappearance, or death, as he thought. Considering my own mental health after losing my family, I couldn’t judge anyone for how they did or didn’t display their grief.
“Are you sure you want me to take this?” I asked him, looking directly into his eyes as I did. “If it was Sol’s you should have it, keep it here so you can think about her.”
He took the necklace and opened the clasp, then swirled his finger in a motion for me to turn. I did so, holding my breath.
When the necklace touched the hollow of my throat, I gasped.
“It’s vibrating. No, it’s singing, like my knives do, only differently. Softer, less urgent... less bloodthirsty,” I joked.
I’d defaulted to that place. The jokes. The sarcasm. Anything to keep my true feelings out of the picture.
It didn’t work when someone could feel the truth, even through my lies.
I spun to face him, stepping back until I bumped the shelf, its ledge digging into my shoulder blades. “Um, so what do you think about the watch?”
He gave me an easy smile, leaning on the shelf. “I think we should examine it. See if we can figure out its secrets. If Esteban carried it with him, then it must mean something. Whether because of its power, or something else, we should find out so we can decide what to do with it.”
I nodded and stepped out into the hallway so he could exit and lock the door.
Then he said, “I’ll grab it. You go to the training room. If something happens, it might be best to have a soft surface to land on.”
Thankful for the moment alone, I headed toward the mats while he marched off in the other direction. I twirled the necklace between my fingers. I felt like I was missing something. But I also felt like for the first time, I didn’t need to worry about it. The missing piece would be there when I needed it.
I plopped onto the mat and stretched out onto the yielding surface. The scent of disinfectant wafted around me, but I’d always kind of liked the smell of clean workout mats. It reminded me of the chief’s basement where we did a lot of my training.
My childhood had been stolen from me with the death of my parents, but the chief had given me a home when I needed it.
I absentmindedly ran the crystal along the chain and then surged up, despite the twinge in my abs. No matter what the chief had taught me, one part of my training I excelled at, from day one, had been tracking. It was what made me such a great bounty hunter. I used personal belongings in the homes of my targets to hunt them down.
Fin and I had started the process of tracking Sol with the ribbon we’d found, and despite little evidence of his sister’s existence at Esteban’s last showdown, the scrap of silk seemed legit.
What we’d done to find her hadn’t been enough though; I hadn’t followed the path to the end, I’d been so mired in the middle, sifting through everything else that came up.
What if I threw out everything I knew about Sol, and her life, and started from the beginning? Started with something like this necklace. That would allow me a cleaner look at who the woman was, and what she valued.
Despite Fin’s love for her, he saw her through rose-colored lenses. He was her big brother. A man who mourned her loss and wanted to extol her virtues. But women were always far more than the pretty picture they painted for others. I needed to dig deeper into her life, look under her bed, bring out the shadows and see what turned up.
If I knew anything about a hunt, the shadows were the last place people wanted to look for their loved ones.
Before I could formulate a plan of attack, Fin jogged back into the room holding a familiar antique watch. I both enjoyed the sight of his tall, lean frame in motion and hated that we now had one more thing to worry about with the watch. One more problem I’d thrown into the mix by stealing it.
Damn, I was an asshole sometimes.
He wasn’t about to hear it from me, but he’d been right when he said I didn’t think things through enough.
He held out the watch toward me as I walked towards him.
I shook my head. “Nope, I’m good. I don’t want to hold that thing. What do you see when you look at it? One thing that bastard who tried to steal it taught me is that there is mage writing on the back. Well, he didn’t tell me that, I figured it out on my own.”
He flipped open the watch to peer down at it. “I can feel magic coming off it. Fae and mage power, but I can’t tell for what purpose.”
Again, he thrust it toward me. I sighed, taking it, and held it in my palm. From what I could tell, and what little experience I had with antique pocket watches, it weighed a normal amount.
“I’m not sure what I should be looking for,” I said.
He scratched the back of his head and studied me. “Try channeling your magic. Your mage magic first. It might give us a clue as to what power it favors. Few things, objects or people, can find a balance between the two.”
I opened the face of the watch and stared down at the tiny hands, focusing so I didn’t feel so antsy under Fin’s all-seeing gaze. Like they’d just taught me, I tried to match my magic to the power of the watch.
The world stopped. Not my world, but everything around me. A tiny hand at the bottom of the watch ticked slowly, like a secondhand almost winding around. I watched Fin, who stayed mid-motion in the act of bringing his arm down from his head. His eyes were clear and earnest, his stance relaxed, but he remained perfectly still.
My mouth dropped open. “Fin? Are you okay?”
I walked around behind him, bouncing my focus between the watch, and him, with every step. Then I wandered back to the hall, but I couldn’t tell how far the magic radiated.
By the time I got back to Fin, the second hand had almost returned to the bottom of the watch. When it did, Fin unfroze, and continued his motion as if nothing happened. But he didn’t miss the confusion, no doubt etched in my features.
“What is it? What happened?”
I held the watch out to him between my fingers and dropped it in his outstretched hand. “Not sure what the fuck just happened, but I think it only works for a minute at a time.”
He looked between me and the watch. “What does?”
“That thing just stopped time for about a minute. You were completely frozen.”
I appreciated we didn’t have to do the whole back and forth, ‘really, are you sure’ thing. He simply believed what I told him.
“Time magic is tricky. Temperamental. Unstable. Did you do it only once?”
I nodded.
With a smile, he turned my wrist upward and slapped the watch back in my hand. “Do it again and see if you can make it last longer this time. Or maybe change the length of time.”
“Do I have to? The Captain could do it right, with his own mage powers?”
His concern flashed through me, but I ignored it.
“What about it bothers you?” he asked.
I couldn’t explain why touching the watch made me feel like I had some sort of connection to Esteban.
“It’s... I don’t know.”
“Try it one more time for me,” he said. “Just once more to see if it gives you the same result.”
I didn’t know if it was the sweet way he said ‘for me’ or if was going soft, but I took the watch, focused my power, and again, the world stopped. Easier this time, as I knew what it had felt like to activate it.
I tried to alter the time on the clock, but nothing happened. After sixty seconds, he unfroze and stared at me expectantly.
I shook my head and closed the face of the watch. “It was the same. One minute.”
He stepped forward and wrapped his fingers around my chin, lifting it gently. “Take a break. Go get some coffee. We can go over it again in a bit.”
Needing to get the hell away from the claim imprinted on my skin from his fingers, I shoved the watch in my pocket and jogged up the stairs to the dining room. As usual, coffee greeted me like an old friend.
I leaned against the table while and ran the crystal along its silver chain. It was quiet, not even a whisper of sound, but with each pass I felt a thrum through me. A calling under the singing of the pendant.
When I’d touched the watch it remained static, except for that little second hand which spun all on its own. It didn’t make any noises, but it put off something else. A feeling that wasn’t fae, nor mage, but something I would call... a signature.
This crystal gave off that same signal but stronger, less effort, more... just more. I couldn’t describe how it felt in my mind. Not yet.
I used the same sort of signature when I tracked. Everyone had a signature to their lives, their existence. When a hunter found that thread underneath the chaos, it was easy to follow back to its source.
I’d hunted many people down with barely a whisper of this feeling. And here I stood with two items, both with a strong enough signature that I could likely track anywhere.
Fin believed every person had magic. What if this feeling I’d always followed wasn’t about a person’s life, but about this tiny thread of magic? Now, with my own powers tossed into the mix, like a fucked-up salad, I could feel it so much more strongly.
I sipped my coffee and closed my eyes, connecting with the crystal. My fae magic surged to the surface, waiting for my will to direct it. But I didn’t want it here. I needed to figure out how to dissipate the magic that the crystal stirred up in me enough to use it differently.
The last time we’d tried to track Sol, everything had failed. Spectacularly so. Esteban had used my ignorance of my magic, and Fin’s need to find his sister, against us. He’d played us both easily.
I couldn’t rush off and see what happened like last time. I needed to take the time to consider the angles, the ways the bad guys could use our weaknesses against me. Against Fin.
I downed the rest of the coffee and released the necklace to lie against my chest. Fin and the Captain would dance in circles right now if they knew I stood here considering my actions and how they affected others for once. Which was why they would never know, not about what I’d figured out, or what I might be able to do. Not until I knew if they would help or hinder me.
For now, Fin wouldn’t know I might be able to find Sol. He couldn’t read my mind, yet. I shuddered at the thought. Whatever was happening between us, I needed to keep it from going that next step further.
I had to keep him out of my head until I had more answers.