“Exactly. All the while she was pretending to deal only with dabblers and dilettantes, I got the feeling she was hiding something.”
“But you used the Voice on her. It worked. I saw it work. She said she didn’t know anything.”
“The Voice worked on her. But something else was working on her, too. I could feel it.”
Caro chewed that over. “It’s possible,” she admitted. “She struck me as so out of place in that store.”
“There’s a reason you felt that way. Work on it. All I know is that she responded to my questions in a way that she was allowed to respond.”
“How can you tell the difference?”
“Centuries of practice. Take my word for it. I didn’t get the whole truth. What’s more, this ordinary modern businesswoman picked up on the fact that I’m not exactly human. She may not have identified what I am, but she definitely sensed it.”
“Alika identified you as a mage.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t make me happy to be identified as something other by someone who is pretending absolutely nothing out of the ordinary goes on in her store, her circle or her life.”
“You’ve got a point.”
Caro still hadn’t shucked her jacket, but as she did so now, she felt the pouch of gris-gris Alika had given her. She pulled it out and held it palm up. “I wonder if I should trust this. How do I know it’s for protection?”
“Close your eyes and concentrate on it. Remember what your grandmother said. You have the power, and the key is belief. Believe you can tell whether it’s for good or ill.”
“Can’t you?”
“It wasn’t given to me. I might not sense it in the same way. Besides, for days now I’ve been so aware of that force hovering in your vicinity that I’m not sure my senses aren’t dulled when it comes to you.”
She hoped all his senses about her weren’t dulled, but she pushed the thought away to try to do what he asked. Closing her eyes, she told herself that she absolutely could tell if that pouch protected her or did something else. That shouldn’t be hard.
“Just let your mind wander if it wishes,” Damien murmured. “Follow where it leads and don’t fight it. The same power that allowed you to see my aura and sense other things is there. When it is ready, it will answer your question.”
Sounds of a lullaby her grandmother had often hummed to her wafted up from the deep recesses of memory. Thoughts of the mother and father she had never known rose up along with it, reminding her of loss and, worse, a long-buried feeling of abandonment.
But she hadn’t been abandoned. She had figured that out a long time ago. Her parents hadn’t chosen to be killed by a drunk driver.
Ah, but if they’d had those powers her grandmother kept talking about, they could have saved themselves.
She gasped, dragging in air as if she were drowning. Where had that come from?
“Caro? Caro?”
Damien knelt before her but didn’t touch her. As she opened her eyes, still gasping, she realized that hot tears were running down her cheeks.
“Caro? What happened?”
She hurt so much she couldn’t prevent herself from blurting the source of her pain. Brokenly, still breathless from the way her diaphragm had cramped with agony, she told him. “My parents died in a car crash before I was a year old. If my grandmother was so damn powerful, Damien, why couldn’t she save them?”
Then he did touch her. He sat close to her on the floor and lifted her onto his lap as if she weighed nothing at all. She still clutched the pouch, but he pried it gently from her hand, then began rocking her slowly.
“Mein Schatz,” he said quietly, “some things are ordained. No power can prevent them.”
She hiccuped. “Are you going to tell me the murder of the Pritchett family was ordained?”
He sighed quietly, his breath cool as it trickled over her cheek. “There are mysteries. There will always be mysteries. Among them is a greater power than any can imagine, the power that set the universe in motion and gave birth to all things. There are plans and fates and probabilities that we can’t control. The overall arc of our lives is beyond that. We have lessons to learn and journeys to take.”
“But what about the Pritchetts?”
“They were murdered,” he said. “We know that. The murder was wrong. There are times and ways we can twist fate, but somehow it always snaps back to where it will go, with us or without us.”
“I don’t like that.”
“I doubt many do. But I am not dismissing the murders. I’m not saying they weren’t a crime. Of course they were. But in some way, the greater power will balance out and adjust for it. In your life, perhaps part of your arc was to lose your parents. Regardless, there are some strands in the universe we simply cannot bend to personal will.”
“If my grandmother had the power, if my mother had the power Grandma said she had, she should have been able to save them!”
“Perhaps she didn’t have time. Perhaps it all happened too fast.” He cradled her closer and dropped a kiss on her forehead. “And perhaps it was meant to be. But now I understand why you resisted your grandmother’s teachings so much.”
She couldn’t deny it. How could she believe what her grandmother said when her mother, who had supposedly possessed the power, too, hadn’t been able to avoid one drunk driver?
As the question settled into a hidden, hollow place inside her, another understanding hit her like a gut punch. “I blamed my mother for not saving them.”
“Of course you did.” He shifted a little, then turned her face up so that he was gazing into her eyes. “That was a natural response to your grandmother talking to you about a mage’s power. So first you blamed your mother, and then you decided such power couldn’t exist or your parents would have still been alive.”
He lifted his finger from her chin and gently wiped away her tears. “Whatever happened, for some reason it was beyond your mother’s power to control. No mage is omnipotent, Caro.”
She closed her eyes, letting the emotional earthquake roll through her. Fault lines, covered over by years of denial, ruptured and settled into a different geography.
And with that shift, she saw her entire life in a new light. Why she had become a cop. Why she had resisted senses and skills that might rightfully be her own. Why she had fought so hard to maintain a life of ordinary reality and battled the suggestion there were things she could not detect with her five senses. Things that were as real as the vampire who held her now.
Then, startling her, Damien said, “I can’t do this.”
An instant later, she was sitting all alone and he had backed to the farthest edge of the circle.
“Can’t do what?” she asked, totally at sea.
“I can’t act normal. I’m not normal. I’m a damned vampire and there’s just so much ordinary I can give you.”
Damien’s eyes burned in a way he couldn’t remember feeling since his change. His entire body was overloaded with the hungers she woke in him. His blood pounded in his ears. His Hunger had pushed him to a brink where he felt he might snap. The ache to taste her blood, to lose himself in the ecstasy that sex with her would be, had reached phenomenal proportions, agonizing in their intensity, all the more dangerous now because he was aching for her pain. An emotional connection threatened him far more than a physical one.
And she sat there, uninitiated human, looking so shocked and, damn it, wounded by the way he had withdrawn so suddenly.