Kisten jerked into motion. “Whoops,” he said, reaching. “He’s going down!”
“David!” I exclaimed, shocked when the small man’s knees buckled.
I stretched for him, but Kisten had already slipped an arm under his shoulders. While Ivy fiddled with the rivet on her boot with a nail in feigned unconcern, Kisten lowered him into a chair. I edged the vampire out of the way, kneeling. “David?” I said, patting his cheeks. “David!”
Immediately his eyes fluttered. “I’m okay,” he said, pushing me away before he was fully conscious. “I’m all right!” Taking a breath, he opened his eyes. His lips were pressed tightly together and he was clearly disgusted at himself. “Where…did you get it?” he said, his head down. “The stories say it’s cursed. If it wasn’t a gift, you’re cursed.”
“I don’t believe in curses…like that,” Ivy said.
Fear slid through me. I believed in curses; Nick had stolen it—Nick had fallen off the Mackinac Bridge. No, he had jumped. “Someone sent it to me,” I said. “Everyone who knew I had it thinks it went over the bridge. No one knows I’ve got it.”
At that, he pulled himself upright. “Just that loner out there,” he said, shifting his feet but staying seated. He glanced at Kisten, who was at the sink, washing the topping bowls as if this was all normal.
“He doesn’t know,” I said, wincing when Ivy went to set the timer on the stove. Crap, I’d forgotten to again. “I think Kisten’s right that he might be trying to get into our pack, seeing as I trounced him.” I frowned, not believing that he was digging for information and would go back to Walter after the insult of being given to the street pack.
Nodding, David’s gaze returned to the focus. “I got notification that you won another alpha contest,” he said, clearly distracted. “Are you okay?”
Jenks lifted off the table, making glittering sparkles around me and bringing Rex to my feet when he landed on my shoulder. “She did great!” he said, ignoring the small cat. “You should have seen her. Rachel used the Were charm. She came out the size of a real wolf but had hair like a red setter.” He flitted up, moving to Ivy. “Such a pretty puppy she was,” he crooned, safely on Ivy’s shoulder. “Soft fuzzy ears…little black paws.”
“Shut up, Jenks.”
“And the cutest little tail you’ve ever seen on a witch!”
“Put a cork in it!” I said, lunging for him. Fighting Pam hadn’t been a fair contest, and I wondered who had credited me with the win at the Were registery. Brett maybe?
Laughing, Jenks zipped up and out of my reach. Ivy smiled softly, never moving except for putting her feet on the floor where they belonged. She looked proud of me, I think.“Red wolf,” David murmured, as if it was curious but not important. He had scooted his chair to the table and was reaching to the statue. Breath held, he touched it, and the carved bone gave way under his pressure like a balloon. He pulled back, an odd sound slipping from him.
Nervous, I sat down kitty-corner to him, the statue between us. “When I moved the curse to it, it looked like a totem pole, but every day it looked more like it did when we first got it, until now it looks like this. Again.”
David licked his lips, dragging his attention from it for a brief second to meet my eyes, then back to the statue. Something had shifted in him. The fear was gone. It wasn’t avarice in his gaze, but wonder. His fingers curled under, a mere inch from touching it, and he shuddered.
That was enough for me. I glanced at Ivy, and when she nodded, I turned to Jenks. He stood beside Mr. Fish and his tank of sea monkeys on the windowsill, his ankles crossed and his arms over his chest, but I still saw him as six-foot-four. Feeling my gaze on him, he nodded.
“Will you hold it for me?” I asked.
David jerked his hand away and spun in his chair. “Me? Why me?”
Jenks lifted smoothly into the air in a clatter of wings and landed next to it. “Because if I don’t get that freaky thing out of my living room, Matalina is going to leave me.”
My eyebrows rose, and Ivy snickered. Matalina had almost pinned Jenks to the flour canister when we had walked in, crying and laughing to have him home again. It had been hard on her, so hard. I’d never ask him to leave again.
“You’re the only Were I trust to hold it,” I said. “For crying out loud, David, I’m your alpha. Who else am I going to give it to?”
He looked at it, then back to me. “Rachel, I can’t. This is too much.”
Flustered, I moved my chair beside him. “It’s not a gift. It’s a burden.” Steeling myself, I pulled the statue closer. “Something this powerful can’t go back into hiding once it’s in the open,” I said, looking at its ugly curves. I thought I saw a tear in its eye—I wasn’t sure. “Even if accepting it might cause everything I care about to go down the crapper. If we ignore it, it’s going to bite us on our asses, but if we meet it head on, maybe we can come out better than when we went in.”
Kisten laughed, and in front of her computer, Ivy froze. By her suddenly closed expression, I realized that what I had said could also be applied to her and myself. I tried to catch her gaze, but she wouldn’t look up, fiddling with the same rivet on her boot. From the corner of my sight Jenks’s wings drooped as he watched us.
Oblivious, David stared at the statue. “Okay,” he said, not reaching for it. “I’ll…I’ll take it, but it’s yours.” His brown eyes were wide and his shoulders were tense. “It’s not mine.”
“Deal.” Pleased to have gotten rid of it, I took a happy breath. Jenks, too, puffed out his air. Matalina hadn’t been happy with it being in their living room. It was sort of like bringing a marlin home from vacation. Or maybe a moose head.
The pizza had a bubble starting to rise, and Kisten opened the oven to stick a toothpick through the dough to release the hot air under it. The odor of tomato sauce and pepperoni billowed out, the scent of security and contentment. My tension eased, and David picked the focus up.
“I, ah, I think I’ll take this home before I finish my appointments,” he said, hefting it. “It feels…Damn, I could do anything with it.”
Ivy put her feet on the floor and stood. “Just don’t go starting a war,” she grumbled, heading out to the hall. “I’ve got a box you can put that in.”
David set it back on the table. “Thanks.” Face creasing in worry, he edged it closer in a show of possession—not greed, but of protection. A smile came over Kisten as he saw it too.
“You, ah, sure the vampires won’t be after it?” the small man said, and Kisten pulled out a chair and sat in it backward.
“No one knows you have it, and as long as you don’t start rallying the Weres to you, they won’t,” he said, draping his arms over the top of his chair. “The only one that might know about it would be Piscary.” He glanced at the empty hallway. “By way of Ivy,” he said softly. “But she’s very closed with her thoughts. He would have to dig for it.” Kisten’s look went worried. “He doesn’t have any reason to think it’s surfaced, but word gets around.”
David put his hands into his pockets. “Maybe I should hide it in my cat box.”
“You have a cat?” I asked. “I’d put you as a dog person.”
His gaze darted over the kitchen when Ivy came in and put a small cardboard box on the table. Jenks landed on it and started tugging at the tape holding it. “It belonged to an old girlfriend,” David said. “You want it?”
Ivy went to flick Jenks away to open the box herself, then changed her mind. “No,” she said as she sat and forced her hands into her lap. “Do you want ours?”
“Hey!” Jenks shouted as the tape gave way and he flew back from the momentum. “Rex is my cat. Stop trying to give her away.”
“Yours?” David said, surprised. “I thought she was Rachel’s.”
Embarrassed, I shrugged with one shoulder. “She doesn’t like me,” I said, pretending to check on the pizza.
Jenks landed on my shoulder in a soft show of support. “I think she’s waiting for you to turn back into a wolf, Rache,” he teased.
I went to brush him off, then stopped. A ribbon of memory pulled through me—of how he had treated me when he was big—and I made a soft “Mmmm” instead. “Have you seen her stare at me?” I turned, seeing her doing it now. “See?” I said, pointing at her in the middle of the threshold, her ears pricked and a curious, unafraid look on her sweet, kitten face.
David pulled the scarf from the collar of his duster and wrapped the focus up. “You should make her your familiar,” he said. “She’d like you then.”
“No fairy crap way!” Jenks shouted, wings a blur as he went to hold the box open for David. “Rachel isn’t going to draw any ever-after through Rex. She’ll fry her little kitty brain.”
Might be an improvement, I thought sourly. “It doesn’t work that way. She has to choose me. And he’s right. I’d probably fry her little kitty brain. I fried Nick’s.”A shudder rippled over David. The entire kitchen seemed to go still, and I looked worriedly at Ivy and Kisten. “You okay?” I said when they met my blank stare with my own.