Page 75

Nothing.

Great. My cat has a gag order.

Gage takes off his flannel, wraps his hand in it, and starts sweeping my belongings into a plastic bucket without touching one of them skin to skin. The hairbrush. The apron, folded into a square by hands that weren't mine. The photograph last, face down.

"That's my stuff."

But all I really care about is that he has no shirt on again. My breathing gets shallow and my pussy starts to throb.

"Not anymore." He carries the bucket out the back door but not before I see him take a deep breath and close his eyes.

Does he smell me every time I’m aroused? Now I’m mortified.

I follow him into a yard that smells like wet leaves and someone else's smoke. Good. Maybe he can’t smell my arousal over this.

I watch his naked back and all the muscles flexing as he moves because I can’t help myself. My body goes all hot and needy. What the fuck is wrong with me?

He dumps it all in the fire pit, pours a ring of salt around the stones, and drops a match.

The flame comes up blue.

Not blue like gas. Blue like a bruise, like something furious, and it makes a sound I feel in my back teeth before it goes ordinary orange and eats my grocery receipt.

"Blue means what?"

"It means they were reaching you through it."

"Through my hairbrush."

"Through anything that's yours." He watches the fire like it owes him money. "That's how it works. They take something small, and it gives them a thread. This wasn't them taking. This was them showing me how far in they can already reach."

"You."

"They laid it out on your table while I was sitting on your steps." His jaw shifts. "Yes. Me."

I make coffee, because if I stand still I'm going to start screaming and I don't know where I'd stop.

Gage sits on my kitchen floor with his back against the cabinet that sticks. He's too big for the room. He's been too big for every room he's ever been in, and I've spent six months finding that funny.

"Talk," I say.

So he talks.

There are two groups of witches that matter, and both of them have been standing over my life for weeks. Evelyn's people call themselves the Lantern Coven. They protect. That's the word he uses, and he uses it flat enough that I know how he feels about it.

The other one is the Veiled Hand.

"They're the hairbrush people."

"They're the everything people." He turns his coffee cup and doesn't drink from it. "The claw marks. The footprints. The whisper at your door. The thing that came out of your garden last night."

"And the mirror."

"And the mirror."

"Great. Cohesive brand." I sit down on the floor across from him because my legs want it. "What do they want with me?"

He takes a second too long.