Christian stood up and bowed. “We appreciate your assistance.”
One Eye turned around with a bottle of liquid fire. “It’s on the house.”
Christian searched the room for a mirror, but there was none. “I’ll wear it for a while and see.”
“You do that.”
* * *
When we leftthe tattoo parlor, Christian still hadn’t seen the tat on his neck. The one that looked like a gift tag with DRINK ME written on it, the strings disappearing into his skin as if they were wrapped around his vein.
“You’re telling me you don’t have a mirror in that bag of yours?” He glared at me in the backseat of the cab.
The driver was taking the scenic route, so I knocked on the plastic divider once more to get him to speed up.
“What’s taking Wyatt so long to call back?”
Christian widened his legs. “He’s probably downstairs heating up fries. It’ll take him an hour before he’s back upstairs.”
Wyatt was supposed to research Penny’s name and find out what her Breed was, now that we had confirmation she wasn’t human. Niko had implied she was a Mage, but we couldn’t jump to conclusions without more evidence. I wasn’t convinced. I’d drained many a Mage, and not one of them had ever died from blood loss. Pulling their core light and rendering them mortal was the only way I’d been able to finish the job. Maybe a young or weak Mage could succumb to blood loss, but with so many victims, it seemed unlikely that they all fit that pattern.
“What’s going on in that noggin of yours?” Christian asked. “You’ve been gazing out the window like a lost child.”
“Why was One Eye staring at me like that?”
“Is that all?”
I adjusted my hat so my hair was out of my eyes. “Maybe I’m kind of familiar with that look. It’s the one people give you when they want you dead.”
He stretched his arm across the seat and grinned. “You should be used to it.”
“Yeah, but I’m usually asking for it. He didn’t have a reason to be giving me that look when I was handing him two hundred dollars. Which, by the way, you owe me a hundred.”
“Afraid not, lass. I’mwearingmy half.”
“Your ink will fade; my money won’t replenish.”
He tugged on his ear. “There are a lot of superstitious men out there. Most of whom are one of the ancients. I knew a man who refused to have a pregnant woman in his home, and another who never trusted men with birthmarks. I suspect your eyes stirred him up, but so what?”
“Maybe I just don’t like getting the evil eye.”
“Well, at least he only had one,” Christian said with an amused snort.
My jet-black hair and black lashes had a way of making my blue eye stand out as if it were glowing with light. It wasn’t a warm sapphire like Blue’s, but clear and bright like a husky’s. Mostly I didn’t care what people thought of my mismatched eyes, but the look One Eye had given me left me rattled.
The car slammed to a stop.
I flew forward. “Hey, watch it!”
He was an independent cabbie who only shuttled around Breed, so it wasn’t uncommon for them to have security dividers and not give a rat’s ass about traffic violations.
We stopped in front of an old brown house with a wooden swing on the front porch. The property looked fifty years old, but by no means was it unloved. The garden beneath the window was blooming with fall flowers, the trim had a fresh coat of sage-green paint, and the concrete showed signs of recent repairs. While Christian paid the driver, I got our bags out of the trunk. Since we had no idea how long this search would last or what we would find, we decided to worry about transportation later.
I looked around as the cab sped away. “What if the neighbors call the police?”
Christian lifted both bags in his left hand and put his arm around me. “For what? Penny’s just having a few of her oldest friends over,” he said, tugging me close against him. “Should the neighbors be peering out the windows, they won’t suspect a thing.”
“Until you kick down the door.”
