“I have no idea.”
“You don’t know? You were just spouting off random numbers, and you don’t know what they mean?”
“No.” She braced for his censure. She’d seen a glimpse of the way his mind worked with brilliant intuitive leaps backed by solid fact. That he could look at a book and intuit what that spell was, when it was written, and why, took her breath away. She certainly hadn’t connected the dots as fast.
He folded her into his arms and groaned. “That must be so terrible, to get a glimpse of what’s coming, but not enough information to act on it or understand.”
“It mostly sucks.” Her shoulders dropped away from her ears, even though the hug was awkward with two books digging into her sides. “There’s a reason the prophet is never the hero of a story or gets a happy ending.”
“Joseph,” he said.
“What?”
He pulled back so he could meet her eyes. “From the Bible? The guy with the multicolored coat. He was a prophet. He saw dreams, and he ended up ruling Egypt, or not ruling, but doing something. I forget. Sunday school was a long time ago.”
“If you believe in any kind of god, I will eat my hat.”
“There’s not enough data, and there never will be, so I find the question unanswerable.”
She laughed. “Of course it is.”
“You said there was no prophet with a happy ending. He had a happy ending.”
She crossed her arms. Ruling Egypt was fun and all, but… “Did he find the love of his life and have a family?”
Mateo burst out laughing.
“What?”
“His two sons are the fathers of two of the tribes of Israel, so yes, canonically speaking, fatherhood was a key part of the story.”
“Take me to bed,” she said.
He looked around at the violence and death. “How about you take me to your bed?”
There was still every reason under the sun why this was a terrible idea, not least because her family was at this moment chasing a wolf around Silver Spring and preparing for a massive fight, but she wanted him.
14
She pulled him up a flight of stairs, and he couldn’t help gaping at the photos along the wall. There had to be at least thirty different girls smiling with varying degrees of enthusiasm from homemade frames.
“Who are they?”
Cat hesitated for just a step and then pulled him up three more stairs to point at a young girl with a shock of black hair and skin so pale it seemed to glow in the flash of a camera. She had to be somewhere in elementary school, and her eyes were closed. She was grinning so wide he could see almost all of her teeth.
“That’s me.”
He looked at the rest of the kids on that wall, but she didn’t introduce anyone else or explain; she just pulled him up the stairs to the second floor, down the hall to the front of the house. When she opened a door on the right, he mapped the house mentally and realized they were standing right over the sitting room they had just been in.
The room was a decent size with a bed in the corner across from a desk and an armchair below two huge windows. The wooden floorboards were covered with a thick, fluffy rug of paleblue, and the walls were decked with more hangings, all in dark blues and greens with subtle patterns. The desk was cluttered with books and broken pieces of crystal.
He stepped further into the room and spun in a circle. At the end of the bed, there was a large bookshelf. It was half full of books and half full of glasses, crystal balls, and mirrors. He stepped closer to the desk to examine the pieces of what used to be a crystal ball, sliced cleanly into quarters.
“Sometimes when I need a 360 view, I have to go for crystal. But then that happens.”
It wasn’t that he didn’t believe she could see the future. He just hadn’t connected that to real power, like the power to shatter rock with her brain. Something real was happening to her, even if it was just receiving information.
He ran a finger along a broken crystal edge, and it sliced cleanly through the pad. He sucked the blood into his mouth before it woke the wolf. The wound closed in seconds.
