“When you said ‘I’ll do it. Just stop whatever you’re doing,’” the sorcerer said.
I grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him close, letting my fangs slide out. “Are you reading my mind?”
He scowled at me and gently touched the tattoo. The skin caught fire and I screamed, shoving the sorcerer away from me.
“Of course not. Your face said everything I needed to know. You should really learn to hide your thoughts. Being so transparent is only going to get you in trouble.”
I cradled my arm to my chest, hissing at the brush of cloth against the sensitive skin. That hurt.
“How can something that simple be an agreement?” I asked through gritted teeth. “We didn’t even discuss terms.”
“Any verbal agreement is enough to bind you into a contract. You said you’d do it, hence the mark. It’s not my fault you failed to clarify things before you agreed. This is magic 101. Do the vampires teach their young anything anymore?”
They probably did, but since I was never trained, I’d missed out on all the basic knowledge. Wish Jerry had taken the time to explain that little tidbit before sending me off on this job.
Not that it mattered. It didn’t change the fact I wasn’t going after the murderer. He’d gone through some of the highest members of the supernatural community like they were tissue paper. It’s why hysteria was building in the city after every attack. If some of the most powerful beings in the city couldn’t do anything about him, there was zero chance I’d be able to apprehend or kill him. I’d take the forfeit over certain death, thank you.
“I’m still not going after him,” I told the sorcerer.
“I hope you’ll reconsider,” he said. “The tattoo will kill you otherwise.”
“I thought you said it was fifty years of servitude?”
“It’s double or nothing now. You do this, and you’re free to go on your merry way. Fail and you owe me a hundred years. If you don’t even try, you’ll die.”
He hadn’t said anything about a hundred years or death in any of our dealings. I cursed my lack of knowledge. If I’d known that a simple slip of the tongue could get me committed to something, I would have guarded my words much more carefully.
He watched me with a nasty smile on his young face. “Guess you know now why everyone gives sorcerers such a wide berth. I’m not used to being able to bend someone to my needs so easily. I could get used to this.”
After this, I would be joining the masses in keeping away from sorcerers.
“Guess I’ll be working with you after all,” I said, with a grin that was closer to a baring of teeth.
There was no real choice. I just had to hope I could figure some way to take out the murderer. My entire life had been a series of triumphing against stacked odds. Why should this be any different?
“Somehow, I knew you’d come around to my way of thinking.”
Yeah, yeah. He was smarter than me.
“Let’s get on with it. If you know who the murderer is, oh smart one, point me in the right direction.”
“I didn’t say I knew who it was. The package you were to deliver was supposed to help the werewolf put the last of the pieces together.”
“Okay, so if it had everything he needed, you should be able to put the clues together to come up with a name.”
He folded his arms over his chest and scuffed one shoe against the cement. “If I knew what that information said, you would be right. As it stands, I don’t.”
I didn’t get it. He’d put the information together. Shouldn’t he be able to remember what it said?
“How can you not know?” I asked. “You said you were the one who recovered the clues.”
“That may have been a bit of an overstatement.”
“How big of an overstatement?”
“I wasn’t actually the one who assembled the information. Someone else did that.”
Unbelievable.
