“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.”
CHAPTER 31
“The plot thickens,” I said.
“You remember being sent to Ruthie’s?”
“Of course. I was twelve. I remember pretty much everything,” in excruciating detail, “from about three on.”
“You didn’t pop up on the radar until then or the federation would have snatched you long before they did.”
“Bummer for me.”
I had not had a good experience in foster care—until Ruthie. Being strange, knowing things you shouldn’t, getting yourself noticed—the-three-strikes-and-you’re-out-on-the-street plan for foster kids.
“There was nothing in the files about what you could do,” Sawyer continued.
“No?” I wasn’t surprised. Most people didn’t understand why I made them uncomfortable, just that I did.
Oh, sure, when I was little I didn’t at first realize that touching someone, then seeing things in their head was something few others could do, and I talked about it, which got me sent to another home, and then another. But no one with half a brain would say, Take this kid back; she reads minds. So I was labeled a smartmouth, even before I was; add to that disrespectful, ungrateful, crazy with a side order of thief, slut and addict as I got older, and you had the recipe for what I soon became.
A runaway.
I did better on the streets. Being able to “read” people told me what kind of people they were, and that kept me out of harm’s way more than most street kids. Worse things happened to me in places where I should have been safe.
“So what tipped off the federation when I was twelve?”
“You know there are members everywhere?”
“Cops, nurses, government workers. I’ll assume that we’ve got a few plants in Social Services too.”