Jonah breathed out raggedly. What was it he’d told Levi? He’d been raised on crazy and curses. No spell was one-sided; they just weren’t fair.
He leaned across the table and sealed it with a kiss, the spell static on his lips as he spat it back to Shiloh.
If he lingered a little longer than he absolutely had to, if he let himself taste the curve of Shiloh’s mouth under his, nobody could prove it.
The spell clicked into place and locked.
Shiloh grabbed his shoulder and shoved him away. His usually guarded expression had faltered, and he looked surprised and a little bit uncertain. He covered it quickly as he set his jaw and pressed his lips into a thin line.
“Fuck us over, and you’ll pay for it,” he said, his voice a little ragged, as if he was out of breath. “I’m the Crossroad’s dog, and you can’t run far enough or fast enough to get away from me. Got it?”
Jonah glanced at his hand, glass still embedded in the skin, and grimaced.
“Where I go, there you are,” he said. “Good thing I’m not going anywhere.”
Witch balled the linen up in her hand and stuffed it into her pocket. She patted her vest down to find a pen and scrawled something in thick black Sharpie on the back of a coaster.
Here,” she said as she pushed the coaster over. “This is where you’ll find the farm, in Miriam just over the town boundary line. If Slater agrees to talk to you, tell her if it was a mistake we can work something out. This doesn’t have to end with blood.”
Jonah picked glass out of his hand and chucked it on the table. The idea of leaving his blood there made his skin crawl, but it had already been sapped for Shiloh’s spell. It wouldn’t do anyone else any good.
“It starts in blood, and it ends in blood,” Jonah said as he picked up the coaster and turned it over between his fingers. The address was on one side, the blood-splattered gibbet on the other. “That’s the way of the world.”
