I squinted at him and suddenly felt very naked in only my towel. “Why don’t you start with what happened just now? I was being attacked by something I couldn’t see—but you did. You saw it. So have you been lying to me this whole time? When we first met, you said you’d never seen a ghost.”
“That’s true. I hadn’t until tonight, and I’d certainly never caught one. I wasn’t lying about that.” His jaw clenched. “But I did see something over you. It was dark. It didn’t have a human shape. It was sort of formless like water.”
“And what you did, with your hand?”
Roan’s fists tightened. “I don’t know what I did. I saw you in trouble and worked instinctively.” He raked his fingers through his hair, leaving it skewed in back. It was boyish and charming, giving a different impression from the sarcastic Roan I was used to.
“I wanted the thing to stop and it did.” Roan gazed at me, his eyes full of sincerity. “I swear I don’t know how I made it go away. The only thing I knew was that you were in danger. I could not have that. If I had to wrestle the spirit to hell, I would have.”
I smiled. “That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
His lips tightened to a smile, though his gaze was cold as stone. “It’s not meant to be sweet. I’m being honest. You were getting hurt. That had to end.”
“So what does all of this mean?”
He capped one hand over the one holding mine. “Let me start at the beginning. My grandfather, you’ve heard of him, right?”
“You mean the guy who trapped the spirit in the cellar but didn’t bother to tell anyone what to do about it?”
Roan grinned. “That’s the one. He was a demonologist. I know there are all sorts of rumors around town about him—he dabbled in spirits, he worked black magic, that sort of thing. But none of it’s true. He was a demonologist.”
I tipped my chin down. “Which means?”
“Which means he had some command over evil, like demons. He could banish them.”
“Like you just did?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe. But that wasn’t a demon. It was dark, but not a demon. That much I could feel.”
“So somehow your power works on dark entities but you don’t know how. That’s a problem.”
“I realize that,” he said through gritted teeth. “But he could. The talent skipped my father and I thought it had skipped me, but obviously it didn’t.”
I pulled my hand from his and tightened the towel around me.
Roan’s gaze flickered to my bare shoulders. “Let me get you a T-shirt.” He slid off the bed and rummaged in his drawers until he found one. “Here.”
I slipped the soft cotton over my torso and delicately peeled the towel from under my arms. I dried my hair as we spoke.
“So you don’t know what you did, but you banished the spirit. And you’d never seen a spirit before tonight.” I chewed on all this new information. “What could have triggered your gift?”
“More like curse.” Roan rubbed his face.
I grabbed his hand and rested it over my heart. “It’s not a curse. I lived the first half of my life believing clairvoyance was a curse. It isn’t. It’s a gift. Repeat after me.A gift.”
His eyes glittered with amusement. “Fine. It’s a gift. But the trigger? I don’t know. Something about when that spirit in the house talked about the master, there was something in that word that awoke a part of me.”
I cocked my head. “Why would one word do that?”
“Then I held theSpiritus.”
Maybe that was a bigger clue. “And?”
“I could feel the spirit coiling inside, growing angry, wanting freedom. I felt it as strongly as if they had been my own emotions.”
Something had stirred in Roan, and that something was breaking free. “Maybe feeling the spirit’s energy awoke your latent powers.”
He scoffed. “It would help if I knew how to use them. There’s nothing in the cellar that gives me any clue as to what to do. Do I summon spirits? How do I use this?” He gazed down at his hands. “I don’t have a teacher.”
