Mind Games (8 page)

I gaped at Madison. “You should talk!”

Madison’s face turned as red as the tomato sauce she was busily adding to the pot. “You can’t rescue me, either.”

“I could try. It might help if you told me what you need rescuing from. Was it something your dad said? Or is it Nicolas? If it’s Nicolas–”

“Nicolas is great. We have a lot of fun together.”

“Really? I’m surprised you have anything in common.”

“Because he’s three-and-a-half years younger than me?”

“Younger than that, maturity-wise. You’ve always been mature for your age, and, well, let’s face it. Nicolas is a bit immature for his.”

“So? Maybe I’ve always been too mature for my age. Do you know what we did last night?”

I shook my head.

“Had a water gun fight. Actually, he would light himself on fire and I would put it out, which was a little different from the fights I used to have with my brother when I was eight. But it’s been about that long since I let go like that. I was… I was silly.”

I had trouble imagining Madison playing like that. Which, I supposed, was precisely the point.

“So,” Madison said, “how was your day?”

“Got a new partner and a new lead on the McClellan case.” I added fresh herbs to the sauce and gave it a quick stir.

“The McClellan case?” She flinched. “Do you even want to solve that one?”

“Why? He ever do anything to you?”

“What was the lead?”

I studied Madison’s profile before answering, wondering at our string of answering questions with questions. She got uncomfortable whenever I mentioned the McClellan case, but it didn’t make any sense. She had never even met the guy, though I had told enough stories to gain her empathic hatred on my behalf.

“His brother found a pamphlet from the Gateway Christian Church with a warning on it. Thinks maybe the preacher stirred some of his parishioners into doing it. Like a hate crime.”

Madison shuddered. “Do you think they could have done it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Sorcerers aren’t invincible. And if they did, it means David wasn’t killed because of who he was, but because of what he was.”

“Yeah.”

“Not all sorcerers are bad.” I didn’t know why I felt the need to defend them to Madison, who wasn’t exactly arguing, but I did. “Some are real heroes.”

“Can they really be a hero if you owe them for it afterward?” Madison asked.

“Some choose not to accept debt, like vampire hunters.” I still felt I owed Evan a debt, though the magic no longer bound me to him because he disagreed. “Wait. Why? Do you owe someone a debt? My brother?”

“I don’t owe your brother a debt.”

“Someone else?” I asked.

“I saw some of those pamphlets at school today,” Madison said in a pitifully see-through attempt to change the subject. “I wondered if they were what made Elena cry.”

“At an elementary school?” I didn’t want to believe it. “Do they even know what it means?”

“They know the gist of it. Isn’t that enough?”

“I suppose. So, who do you owe?”

Madison blanched, but before she had a chance to answer or flee, someone rang the doorbell.

“I’ll get it,” she said.

“Don’t think this means you’re off the hook. And don’t forget to ask who it is before you open the door.” Opening the door could weaken the threshold, so it was always best to know who waited on the other side.

“Who is it?” Madison asked.

“It’s me,” came an achingly familiar voice. “Evan.”

Madison looked helplessly at me while I shook my head, feeling strangely dizzy. This couldn’t be happening. Not now. Not when I had just made my first step forward with my life. I couldn’t see him now. I wouldn’t.

“Go away!” I called when Madison didn’t look willing to challenge him. I strode toward the door while she retreated to the kitchen.

“Cassie, please, we need to talk. It’s important.”

The last thing he had said to me was a nonverbal door in my face, and I had every intention of reciprocating. If that’s as much as he cared about me, then that’s as much as I cared about him. Which was not at all. He could disappear from the face of the earth for all I cared. An expanding pressure in my chest tried to disagree, but I held firm.

“We have nothing to say to one another.” I retreated to the kitchen so it would be more difficult to hear him, and easier to steel my resolve. Madison stared at me with wide, frightened eyes, and kept shooting meaningful looks at the front door.

“He has no power over me,” I said, wishing it were true.

“Will those plants you put on the porch keep him out?”

A picture of Evan on the front porch of Belinda Hewitt’s home, turning her plants to dust, flashed through my mind. No, they wouldn’t hold him, but they weren’t our only form of protection. Nicolas stopped by weekly to recharge several powerful runes. That brought forth an image of Nicolas trying to heal Kaitlin, inadvertently hurting her, and Evan stepping in to tell the younger sorcerer to get an apprenticeship. Actually, Nicolas had finally taken the advice, and now spent his days with Clark Eagle, but he was just beginning.

I peered out the front window, and sure enough, Evan had set up a casting circle. He was, at that very moment, deep in concentration, his lips moving slightly in a chant.

Damn him, he was breaking into my house! I didn’t care who he thought he was, or how much he thought he could get away with, he had no right! The nerve of that arrogant, self-centered…

I flung open the front door and, ignoring every lesson I had ever learned about the consequences of disturbing a sorcerer in the middle of casting, I slapped him. Hard. Across the face. It left a satisfying sting in my palm as a red mark appeared on his cheek.

The satisfaction didn’t last long. The next thing I knew, the house jumped. Everything in it, and by everything I am including myself, leaped into the air and froze there for a minute or two, suspended. I might have been watching a freeze-frame from a cheesy fantasy show if it weren’t for the undeniable fact that I, too, hung in midair. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t scream. Only my brain remained active, and it chugged along at a million miles a second, largely wondering if I would survive my ill-considered fit of temper. I didn’t think I would hang in the air forever, it was the coming down part I dreaded. And what might come down on top of me.

The moment came with a heart-stopping jolt, followed by a graceless landing that bruised my tail bone. I closed my eyes, waiting for the roof to come down on me, but it remained miraculously in place.

Then came a high-pierced shriek from the kitchen. Remembering the large pot of boiling spaghetti sauce, I scrambled to my feet and raced to the kitchen to see my fears realized: The stock pot lay on the floor, its molten contents strewn across ceiling, cabinets, and floors.

“Madison!” I raced to her side, almost losing my footing in a patch of slick sauce. “How bad is it? Are you burned? Should I call Nicolas?”

She shook her head, groaned, and clutched at her back, which had apparently landed hard against the refrigerator. “I’m okay. Just freaked out.”

As my racing heart began to slow, I took in more elements of the confusing scene before me. Madison actually sat, surrounded by a pool of sauce, but none of it had touched her. I actually patted her dark brown hair, expecting the color to have hidden the sauce and my hand to come away sticky. It didn’t. Her pale blue shirt couldn’t have hidden any sauce if it tried. The stuff had quite simply missed her.

“How-? What-?” Oh yeah, she was hiding things. I took a step backward, nearly slipping in the sauce again, but this time Evan caught me before I could fall.

He could have used his magic – a cold, impersonal assist – but he didn’t. He caught me with arms around my waist and hands braced on my elbows. He caught me with his whole body, pulling me against him, holding me as closely as if he had never pushed me away.

My body betrayed me. It leaned into him for a moment, finding comfort in his warmth and his scent. It longed to kiss him, to feel the unmatched eroticism in the touch of his lips. It longed to forget the last two months, to pretend they had never happened, and to allow him access to my tortured heart once again.

The responding ache of pain finally snapped me back to reality. I jabbed backwards with my elbows to push him away, then flew into the living room to put space between us. The movement left a trail of red footprints across the beige carpet.

“Are you okay?” Evan asked Madison.

“Fine.” She stood and gave him a shy smile.

“Let me help clean this mess.” Before either Madison or I had a chance to respond, let alone stop him, Evan began levitating bits of pasta sauce back into the stock pot. He seemed to have trouble separating the sauce from the carpeting where I had trampled it in, but the tile floor in the kitchen turned out spotless.

“So much for dinner,” Madison said. “I’m going to run out and get something. What do you want? Pizza? Chinese? Or, you know what? I’ll just surprise you.”

Madison grabbed her purse and flip flops before racing out the front door as if the hounds of hell were on her heels. Since she had been afraid of Evan for years, maybe she thought they were. She had softened to him when he had saved my life, at least until she’d learned about the debt. Now I had no idea what she thought of him.

“I can’t believe you did that to her,” I said when we were alone.

“Did what?”

“Scared her like that.”

“Me? I can’t believe you slapped me while I was casting a spell. Have you lost your mind?” He gestured at the toppled tables and lamps, as well as the sofa and recliners that had come to rest in a new configuration.

To cover the growing tension in the house, I began pushing things back into place. “You were trying to break into my house. You
did
break into my house! Get out!”

“We need to talk.”

“I don’t have anything to say to you.” I shoved at the sofa with my hip until I felt it settle into its comfortable carpet grooves.

“You don’t need to talk, just listen.” Evan levitated the recliners back into place before I had a chance to take out my frustration on them. He then proceeded to put the rest of the living room back in order while increasingly irrational torrents of anger washed over me. I wasn’t so helpless that I needed magic to reposition the furniture. I wanted to manhandle the furniture; I needed to take my frustration out on something before I lost it and did the unthinkable – cry in front of
him
.

I didn’t think for a minute that he was being gallant. No, he was showing off.
Look at me, and look what I can do!
You can’t keep me out of your house, or your life.

“You know what?” I said. “I
do
have some things to say to you, Mr. I-can-do-whatever-I-want-and-you-can’t-stop-me! You slammed the door in my face. Do you remember doing that? I was on your porch, naively thinking everything between us was great. And what might have given me that impression?”

“Cassie–”

“Let me see,” I said. Then I forced my voice into a falsetto whine. “Oh Cassie, I’ve been in love with you since the first grade!”

Evan took a step backwards as if I’d struck him. Which I had done, I thought as I reveled in the pink slap mark still smarting his cheek. “Cassie, there are things you don’t understand.”

“You think so, do you? Well, maybe there are things you don’t understand, like the definition of love. And I don’t mean to get all philosophical on you, I’m just talking basics here.”

“Cassie, I came here to tell you the truth.” He did not look me in the eyes.

“Oh yeah? Well, maybe I don’t want to hear it anymore. Maybe I don’t care.” It wasn’t true, the part of me that was more hurt than angry tried to say. I did want to know. Isn’t that what I needed for closure?

Maybe, said the part of me that was more angry than hurt, but I couldn’t let him know I still cared. That would give him way too much power over me. He already had too much.

“You care,” Evan said, gently. “I know you better than that.”

I thought I’d known him, too. “I’m going out with Matthew Blair.”

“You’re…
what
?” Evan crossed the room to me. Though I scurried backwards, he easily caught me between himself and the sofa.

“Not that it’s any of your business,” I said. “But I just wanted you to know I’ve moved on.”

“He’s a mind mage.”

“I know what he is.”

Evan pulled himself back just far enough to stare into my face, as if looking for signs of warping. I stared back, mutinously.

“See any pink?” I asked. A pink tinge to the whites of the eyes indicated someone was under the influence of a love potion.

“Matthew’s too good for that,” Evan said. “He’d be more subtle. More sinister. Are you in love with him?”

“If I were, I wouldn’t tell you.” I wasn’t, either. I mean, I liked the guy, but we hardly knew one another. I found him fascinating and charming and maybe, just maybe, the thing I needed right now.