If all he had to go on were her words, he would have pegged her as angry. But what he sensed instead was sharp disappointment. Not, he suspected, aimed at Garrett.
Before he could talk himself out of it, he said, “Can you feel my emotions?”
She whipped her head around to look at him. “What?”
“I discovered today that I can feel yours, if they’re powerful enough. I knew something was wrong before you knocked on my door. I just didn’t cotton on to the fact that it was your emotion until you showed up.”
She said nothing. The light turned green. He traveled three blocks and found he couldn’t take the suspense. “Miss Harper?—”
“I don’t know.” She sounded bone weary. “I don’t think so.”
The regret this prompted was so odd that he assumed it was her discontent with the situation slopping over to him. Then he examined it more closely and realized some part of him really was sorry the link didn’t go both ways, though he couldn’t begin to explain why.
“Wait ... Are you often”—she hesitated—“afraid?”
His breath caught in his throat. “Yes,” he admitted.
“Why?”
He felt a rushing desire for her to know.Thatwas surely her feeling. “I don’t?—”
“You don’t trust me,” she said—no anger there, just resignation. “I know.”
“I was going to say that I don’t think you want to add your own fear to what you’re getting from me secondhand.”
She was staring at him again. He made himself keep his eyes on the nearly empty road.
“I hear you setting off explosions overhead every day,” she said. “Whatever is going on can’t be worse than what I’ve been imagining.”
He held back a bitter laugh.
“Omnimancer …”
“No.”
She sighed. “All right. At least now I know I’m not as afraid of you as I thought. I’m also afraidbecauseof you.”
He doubted very much that she was afraid of anything, this woman who fought with him, demanded his help, charged invisibly into the lion’s den for evidence and then negotiated media coverage, all in one day. Perhaps it was exasperation, perhaps hurt, but his response shot out moresharply than he’d intended: “There’s no reason to be frightened of me.”
She did not hold inherbitter laugh.
“What happened to believing I mean you no harm?” he asked.
“Meaning no harm is not the same as doing none.”
He couldn’t refute that. It was, so far as he could tell, the reason his Vow hadn’t required him to help her—he had no ill intent. Not even uncharitable thoughts, unlike when the Vowhadforced his hand.
As if she’d read his mind, she said: “I am in your debt for your assistance tonight, I know that, but we have no privacy while we’re asleep and less than we ought while we’re awake. And you once summoned me without meaning to do it.”
He tried to think of something to say to that, but she wasn’t done.
“I live in a constant state of apprehension,” she said, a quiet statement of fact. “You could order me to do anything, consciously or not.”
He hesitated on the brink of a decision for miles, as the landscape around Route 40 turned from rowhomes to modest houses and finally to farmland. At the edge of Ellicott Mills, he leapt into the abyss.
“I’ll rewrite the contract.”
She gasped.
