This, she thought, taking a wary step backward, this is what death looks like.
* * *
Chapter 30
The night after Dorothy freed him, Gideon stood in the midnight shadows outside the Rinaldi compound. Earlier, he had tried to get inside the fence, but to no avail. It was obvious that Alissano had alerted Victor to the fact that Gideon was no longer a prisoner. And just as obvious that Diego and his family had been warned to take the necessary precautions to keep Gideon out of the compound and out of the house.
He ignored the temptation to contact Kay. Until he could come up with a plan to get her safely away from Victor, it seemed best to keep silent. No point in getting her hopes up.
Dammit! Unless he could find someone to invite him into the house—and the chances of that seemed pretty slim now that the werewolves knew he was on the loose—he would never get her out of there.
It seemed hopeless. Or was it?
A thought took him to Apache Junction and a small white house located on a quiet street.
Clad in a long white nightgown, Kusuma Ila opened the door, a rifle held rock steady in her hands, a black cat on either side of her.
Gideon blinked at her. “Who were you expecting?”
With a shrug, she took a step back, allowing him entrance. “It is late.” She closed the door behind him, then propped the rifle in the corner. “What brings you here at this hour?” she asked, and then chuckled softly. “I guess it is not late, for nightwalkers.”
She cleared a space on the sofa for him, then sat down in her rocker. “Why have you come?”
Gideon shook his head. “I didn’t have anywhere else to turn.”
“Are you still running from Verah?”
“You know about that?” He leaned back on the couch, his legs stretched out in front of him.
Kusuma Ila made a vague gesture with one hand. “I hear things.” Leaning down, she stroked the cats.
Gideon cocked his head to one side. “What things?”
“Verah is no longer a prisoner in the Rinaldi house.”
“Who told you that?”
Kusuma Ila picked up one of the cats and scratched its ears. “Does it matter?”
Gideon glanced from the cat to the witch. “The cat told you?”
“In a way.”
“What else do you know?”
“Before Verah made her escape from the werewolf ’s compound, the boy gave her a vial of your blood.”
Damn! That swine, Victor, must have helped himself to a few cc’s of his blood while Gideon was at rest.
“Why would that old crone want your blood?” Kusuma Ila asked.
“Don’t you know? You seem to know everything else.”
“I have heard rumors,” the witch replied. “Macabre rumors.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Are they true, those rumors?”
“I don’t know. It depends on what you’ve heard.” He blew out a sigh of exasperation. All he needed was another witch who wanted to bleed him dry.
Kusuma Ila snorted. “You think I am like her?” she asked indignantly.
“I sure as hell hope not,” Gideon muttered dryly. “Do you know where she is?”
Kusuma Ila put the first cat down and picked up the other one. Humming tunelessly, the witch gazed into the cat’s eyes for several minutes.
Gideon felt the old woman’s power rise, felt it coalesce around the witch and the cat. It skittered over his skin like tiny electrical sparks.
And then, abruptly, it was gone.
Kusuma Ila shook her head as if to clear it.
The cat curled up in Kusuma Ila’s lap, purring loudly.
Gideon stared at the cat.
It stared back at him, slanted yellow eyes unblinking.
Gideon leaned forward. What the hell? He raked a hand through his hair. For a moment there, while staring into the cat’s eyes, he could have sworn he saw Verah standing in a dark room, chanting softly while gazing into a bowl of dark water.
“She’s gone home, hasn’t she?” he asked.
Kusuma Ila nodded.
“And she’s still hunting me?”
The witch’s silence was all the affirmation he needed.
“She can’t track me,” Gideon muttered, thinking aloud. “So she’ll go after Kiya again.” But hell, he had known that all along, just as he knew there was only one way to protect the woman he loved, and that was to give the wicked witch of the west what she wanted.
“There is another way,” Kusuma Ila said matter-of-factly. “Kill her.”
Gideon glanced at Kusuma Ila. Sitting there, her long white hair in braids, one cat asleep in her lap and the other curled at her feet, she looked like someone’s kindly grandmother, not someone who had just suggested cold-blooded murder.
“I’d love to kill her,” he said, “but don’t you think she knows that? She’s not going to let me get close to her unless she knows I’m not a threat.”