"It'll help with the vision aftershocks," he said, keeping his voice level despite the storm of emotions inside him.
Mac lingered by the door, checking his phone with suspicious frequency. "I should coordinate with the other perimeter teams."
Sam caught his friend's too-casual tone. Mac was giving them space, an uncharacteristically subtle move for the shifter king.
Delilah sank into Sam's leather armchair, curling her legs beneath her. The firelight caught the tear tracks on her cheeks, turning them to gold. She stared into the whiskey without drinking it.
"You believe me," she said. Not a question.
Sam lowered himself onto the hearth, wincing as his still-healing injuries protested. "I've seen enough impossible things to know when someone's telling the truth."
The fire popped and hissed, throwing shadows across the cabin walls. Outside, thunder rumbled like a distant warning.
"What Eleanor said about The Collector," Sam continued, "it explains the pattern of thefts. The paired artifacts, the ley line convergences?—"
"The paired people," Delilah finished, finally meeting his eyes. "Ivy and Rafe. And now..."
She didn't complete the thought. She didn't need to.
Mac cleared his throat. "I'll just step outside to make those calls." He slipped through the door with remarkable stealth for a man his size.
Sam watched Delilah's hands cradle the whiskey glass, remembering how those same hands had cradled his head after the witch's attack. How they'd trembled then, too.
"There's something I haven't told you," she said, her voice barely audible over the rain. "About my clairvoyance."
Sam waited, recognizing the weight of confession in her tone.
"I can see fragments of everyone's future. Sometimes clear paths, sometimes just... possibilities." She took a shaky breath. "It's why I don't date. Why I keep people at a distance. I accidentally told my high school boyfriend he'd marry someone else on our third date."
Despite the tension, Sam's mouth twitched. "That would kill the mood."
"You have no idea." A ghost of a smile crossed her face before fading. "But with you... since the witch attacked... I see nothing."
The whiskey glass trembled in her grip.
"No future. No possibilities. Just... emptiness." Her voice broke. "I've spent my life seeing paths for everyone else while keeping them at arm's length. But with you...I see nothing. No future. It terrifies me more than any vision I've ever had."
Sam moved without thinking, taking the untouched whiskey and setting it aside. He knelt before her, ignoring the pain shooting through his ribs.
"Maybe it's not emptiness," he said quietly. "Maybe it's just unknown."
"I don't do well with unknown." Her smile was fragile but real. "Control freak, remember?"
"Says the woman whose cat regularly destroys her entire shop."
"Jinxie is the exception that proves the rule."
Sam reached for her hand, his calloused fingers brushing her palm. "What if?—"
The fire suddenly roared emerald green, expanding outward in a shower of purple sparks and glittering smoke. Sam instinctively moved to shield Delilah as a figure stepped through the flames, dramatically dusting ash from a neon leopard-print jumpsuit.
"Dark forces circling Assjacket again," Baba Yaga announced, adjusting her enormous hoop earrings. "First the cursed warlock, now you two. Someone's collecting magical pairs. It's not an accident you found each other."
She snapped her fingers, and the dying fire leapt back to full strength. "I have a solution—with minor side effects."
Sam straightened, positioning himself between Delilah and the ancient witch. "How did you get through my wards?"
Baba Yaga rolled her eyes. "Please. Your magical protection is like tissue paper to me. Very nice tissue paper, expensive kind with lotion, but still tissue."
