“This isn’t helping,” she said, biting her lip.
Two hot, heavy hands landed on her shoulders, and he took a deep breath behind her. “Relax. You can do this.”
As his thumb brushed the skin of her neck, she gasped, and everything sharpened; she could feel a burst of magic within her.
They were making a fire. They barely had anything to burn. She watched fire bounce against rock.
She gasped and staggered away.
He looked equally gobsmacked as he shook out his fingers. “What the hell was that?”
“What was what?”
“It was like electricity. You didn’t feel that?”
Cat shook her head, unwilling to acknowledge what just happened. “They were indoors or under a rock. I don’t understand it.”
“They’re in a silver mine,” he said with a grin.
“How did you know that? You don’t know where you are. You’ve never been to the area, and you can’t even dress properly for winter!”
“They brought outdoor gear and mining equipment, and most importantly, they brought bleach, a strong magnet, and fertilizer and nitric acid, all of which can test for silver.”
She crossed her arms. “And the toothpaste?”
“Polishes it.”
“What are they thinking?” she asked, truly disturbed.
“And they headed out into what was supposed to be a serious but not insane snowstorm that would obscure any kind of surveillance cameras or alarms, and even if they went off, no one would come to look. So we’re looking for a modern site that isn’t currently being worked on. Somewhere behind a fence?”
“Argent Corp.,” she said with a start. Some corporation had bought land in the next valley over, intent on digging more silver out of the ground. There hadn’t been an active mine in the area since the 1920s, but they wanted to see if they could capitalize on the skyrocketing price of metals.
Except it was only a mile from the town center, and some things they were doing with the water had been affecting the aquifer, so they’d been tied up in legal challenges ever since, but they had cameras and fences protecting a hole in the ground.
“It has to be Argent Corp,” she said.
“The Latin word for silver.”
“How do youknowthis stuff?”
“I don’t know. It just sticks in my brain.”
“Come on, let’s go see.”
He froze at the threshold. “We don’t have to go searching. We found them.”
“I’m not calling in Search and Rescue based on a vision of mine plus your Jeopardy brain.”
“I’d be terrible at Jeopardy.”
“In the past five minutes, you’ve told me the Latin name for silver and how to detect it, and somehow deduced from a vision of a flickering flame on a rock and a stolen sleeping bag that Ihave local teenagers cosplaying as miners. I am not taking that to the local authorities. We are going to check ourselves. Besides, I have no way to contact them even if I did want to tell that story.”
“Right. Let’s go.”
9
The look of surprise and relief in her eyes made his heart hurt. How many people reacted poorly to her visions? He started taking off the layers. He had assumed they’d be heading for the snowplow, and he needed to be human, but he wasn’t going hunting in the back country without his nose.
