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His brow climbs, curiosity written all over him. “What is it?”
I’m lost. “What’s yours?”
“This.” He twitches his head toward the others.
“I don’t understand.”
“We hunt things. Bad people. We track them and, well…” He grins.
“It took us a few months to track down the one your Hyde killed,” Huck adds. “He’d been busy all over the east coast before coming here. We only arrived in town a few hours before you took care of him.”
“I’ve never been to New Orleans before,” Zeb says conversationally. “Gods, am I glad that trader bastard chose this city.”
His eyes lock on mine, full of meaning, when he says that. I look away fast.
But then logic kicks in. “Wait, you’ve never been here? But what about your apartment?”
Zeb makes a dismissive noise. “Oh, that’s just some place we rented for our stay.”
Holy shit. “Hunting bad guys pays well, I take it?”
“Old family money pays well. Means we can come and go as we please. But we never stay anywhere long. Few days, few weeks tops. Then it’s time to chase the next bad guy to wherever they might be hiding.”
I can’t imagine that. Not the money part or the hunting—well, maybe the money part a bit. But how can they not have any place they call home?
It seems vaguely awful. Like being uprooted forever, living like a dandelion seed with nowhere to land. My house has history. My block and my neighborhood do too. Years and decades and centuries of it, and it always leaves me feeling grounded and stable in a world where who I am is only half the story anyone can ever be allowed to see.
And more than that…
Reality sinks over me, turning my stomach to lead. No matter what attraction I feel for these guys, it can’t ever grow into anything more. Not when our lives are this wildly different. I never want to leave New Orleans. And soon—maybe very soon—they’ll do exactly that, and I’ll return to being the only Jekyll for who knows how many miles around.
“So what do you do?” Zeb prompts again.
I blink, pulling myself away from the thought. “I… I run a magical apothecary. It’s been in my family for four generations.”
Phineas glances up at me in the rearview mirror.
“What?” I ask.
He returns his eyes to the road. “Nothing.”
Yeah, that’s a lie. “What?”
Zeb looks between us. “Pretty sure he thinks it’s interesting, is all. Phineas’s parents ran a shop like that in New York when he was a kid.”
He makes the information sound like it’s barely noteworthy, but now I’m the one staring at Phineas. Or at least the back of his head, considering he doesn’t glance away from the road again.
“So if your family was in New York,” I start, “and you all met in college… how many of our kind are out there?”
Silence follows, and my stomach sinks at the awkward tension in it.
“Not many,” Zeb says finally. “We’ve only come across a handful over the years.”
“It’s part of why we stick together,” Huck adds. “So we’re not alone and all that.”
And gods, if that doesn’t cut me right to the bone.
Huck’s hand twitches toward me like maybe he wants to reach out and take mine, and the ache inside me gets worse. Creepy presses at my skin, reinforcing that pain with the desire to touch him and to tell them all how much she hates being alone too.
