CHAPTER 30

“You loved her,” I whispered, my voice full of both awe and horror.

Sawyer continued to press his forehead, his body, against mine, though he did stop crunching our hands together. “So it would appear.”

“You didn’t know.”

“No?” He rolled off me and sat on the side of the bed, scrubbing at his hair as if he’d just woken up.

“Sawyer.” I put my hand on his shoulder, felt the shimmer of the shark and yanked it back.

“Perhaps I did know. Perhaps I wanted the power that killing love would bring me. My mother had it. Why shouldn’t I?”

“You’re not her. You’re nothing like her.”

He stood and walked to the window, staring out at the night. “Soon, Elizabeth, you’ll think differently.”

I sat up then, his tone, his words, making my skin prickle. “What are you talking about?”

He produced a cigarette from nowhere, literally since he was naked, and then a match the same way. “You’ll see.” He took a drag, let the smoke trail out his nose in a slow, curling stream. “We’re all going to have to choose.”

“I have.”

“No.” Another drag. “But you will. Make sure it’s the right choice.”

“Gibberish,” I muttered. “I need help, answers, something, and he gives me gibberish.”

Sawyer glanced over his shoulder. “You can’t trust me. Sanducci is right about that.”

“You came here tonight to—” I stopped, confused. “Why did you come here?”

He let his gaze wander over me from the top of my short, dark hair down to my rapidly cooling toes, then lifted a brow.

“Ew. You just did my mother.”

He shrugged.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

Sawyer turned calmly back to the window and didn’t answer.

I clenched and unclenched my fingers, dazzled by the thought of beating it out of him. As if I could, but right now it was so appealing to try.

“Certain things you have to figure out for yourself,” he continued. “Certain choices must be made from . . .”—he took a final drag of the cigarette and tossed it out the window—“the heart.”

“Gibberish,” I muttered again.

“Take it or leave it.”

He was trying to tell me something. So why didn’t he just tell me? Maybe he couldn’t.

I crossed the floor. “What happened after she died?”

He didn’t answer, so I laid my hand on his back, careful to avoid any legs, heads or tails, and wonder of wonders, he continued to let me see.

Lightning rains all around them, slamming into the ground, leaving behind scorched earth and the scent of ozone. The rain pounds down, drenching them, though they are already drenched. Sawyer lifts his hands to the sky, in anguish, in fury, and the lightning . . .

Strikes him.

His outline sizzles, neon white and blue. He shape-shifts; a man reaching upward hunches into a great tarantula. When the light fades, a new tattoo traces one forearm. Again he reaches; again the lightning answers. Man to shark, leaving behind the likeness on his shoulder. Several more times the lightning flashes and when it fades a new tattoo is in place.

When at last he drops his hands, then sinks to his knees in what is now mud, every tattoo he had when I first met him is stenciled into his skin, and he’s become the sorcerer he never wanted to be.

The storm wanes as he loses consciousness, the thunder dies, the rain slows to a drizzle, then stops completely, burned away by the return of the sun, leaving two bodies on the muddy banks of the mountain lake—one breathing, one not.

When Sawyer awakens, he rolls away, unable to bear looking at her. He’s dreamed of her death, of holding her beneath the water until her life drains away, even as more power than he’s ever imagined flows into him. He is haunted by the glittering dazzle of the magic, tempted by all the possibilities that are now his. He doesn’t want this power, but there’s no giving it back.

He shifts into a wolf and runs. Then he runs and runs and runs. He hunts; he kills; he doesn’t come back for months. By then her body is gone. He tries not to think of her ever again, but he does. Every time he sees—

Sawyer turned, grabbing my wrist and holding my hand away from his skin. “Enough,” he said.

I stared into his face. Had he thought of her every time he’d seen me? Had he felt her skin every time he’d touched mine?

Sawyer had loved Maria Phoenix. Did he still, even though the woman who’d risen from the grave was a far cry from the woman who’d gone into it? Which side was he truly trying to infiltrate? Hers or ours? I might never know. He certainly wasn’t going to tell me.

“You didn’t need me to bring the storm, did you?” I tugged on my wrist; he didn’t let me go. “You could always do it by yourself.”

“Not always,” he murmured, and released me.

“How did she end up buried in Cairo?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.” Sawyer crossed to the bed and found his trousers.

“You were good; she went bad,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

He stood there, holding his pants in one hand as if he weren’t sure what to do with them.

“Jimmy thinks you hung around, doing just enough to be considered one of us so you’d be ready to join her when she rose.”

“Sanducci thinks a lot of things.” Sawyer shrugged one shoulder, the muscles rippling like water beneath. “He’s often right.”

“You had to do it,” I said. “She tried to kill Ruthie.”

“Did she?”

“What?” The word erupted, too loud, too high.

“Perhaps Ruthie merely needed a sorcerer, and she needed one fast.”

“You think she played you?”

“She isn’t above it. Ruthie’s played us all; she’s played you.”

“It’s a far cry from making me think Sanducci didn’t love me to having you kill someone.”

“Not that far.”

“Your morals are skewed.”

“Pot. Kettle,” he murmured.

I let that slide. “Ruthie had the feather.”

“So?”

“And a wound.”

He snorted.

“You seriously think she stuck herself with a knife and bled, then lied about it as she ordered you to kill the woman you loved just so you would become the great and powerful Sawyer?”

He let out a long, low, sad breath. “Maybe.”

“You’ve been listening to the evil voices in your head.”

His gaze narrowed. “What evil voices?”

Whoops. That was me.

“I’m just saying—where in hell do you get this stuff?”

He glanced at the door, then back.

“Her?” I asked. “She’s insane, or haven’t you noticed?”

“Waking up in a grave and having to dig your way out will do that.”

I was pretty sure the Phoenix had been crazy long before she’d clawed her way out from under, but that was beside the point at the moment. At the moment I had a bigger, better point that needed clarifying.

“Did you raise her?”

“I told you I couldn’t raise the dead.”

“And then you raised Xander.”

“Ghosts are different.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed him, so I reached for his arm, and he growled at me.

“All right.” I lowered my hand. “Let’s move on to another question. If you didn’t raise her, who did?”

“Whoever buried her?”

“Hmm.” Hadn’t thought of that. Typically one question just led to another. “How did I get here?”

“You just appeared in town, or so they say.”

“Not here.” I resisted the urge to stomp my foot. “I mean on earth. When she died I rose, or that’s what—”

“She said.”

“It isn’t true?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were there when she died. You didn’t hear a baby crying.”

“No.” His lips tightened. “But I ran and then—”

“Then what?”

“She was gone.”

“Which doesn’t explain how I was born, and how you can be so damn sure you’re not my father.”

“I’m not.”

“Because incest is on your very short, nearly nonexistent list of no-nos.”

He flicked his hand, a careless movement that belied the fury behind it, and I slammed into the wall just hard enough to knock the wind out of me but not hard enough to really hurt.

“I know I’m not your father, Elizabeth, because I did not choose to be.”

“You may have rattled my brains that time. I thought you said you didn’t choose to be my father and so you weren’t.”

“That’s right.”

“Are you aware how procreation works?”

“I’m not like other men.”

“You’re not even a man at all.”

His hand twitched; I tensed in expectation of being thrown out the window. Why I had the sudden and undeniable urge to poke Sawyer with the proverbial stick I couldn’t quite say.

“I’m a skinwalker.” He relaxed his fingers until they hung limply at his sides. “Both witch and shape-shifter, by definition a man with magic. Because of what I am, I have certain abilities.”

“Which I now have too.”

He cast me a sharp glance. “Not all of them. Not yet.”

“Right.” Hadn’t murdered someone I loved. Yet.

“One of my abilities is to choose when I make a child.”

“And you haven’t chosen.”

“I did not choose to make you,” he said.

“Technically, you did choose to make me.” I lifted my hand when he would have argued. “You chose to kill the Phoenix, which in turn caused me to be born.”

“But you’re not my child.”

“Thank God.”

He frowned. “I’d be a good father.”

“Now you’re just freaking me out.” I retrieved my clothes and put them on. “Do I even have a father?”

“Everyone has a father.”

“Every human,” I muttered. “Maybe the Phoenix just dropped me like an egg. She is a bird after all.”

“You have a point.”

“Fabulous. I was hatched.”

His lips curved. “I doubt that.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“No,” he admitted. “But I do know where you were found.”

I’d been putting my shoes back on—the better to kick someone with—and my head snapped up. “Where?”

“Cairo.”