“I need your shirt.”
I lifted my head as Bobby shrugged out of his. I wanted to enjoy the view, but the bruises on his torso and my still swimming head prevented it.
“Lie down before you fall,” Cassandra ordered, and because she was right, I did. She tore Bobby’s shirt into strips, made a pad out of the largest one and pressed it to my wound. The pain that had been numbed by adrenaline came screaming back.
“Sorry.” She set her hand on my forehead, chanted a few words in that pretty language, and when she lifted her hand, the pain withdrew. “Better?”
“Mmm.” The pain was still there, but removed, as if I’d been stabbed weeks, not minutes, ago. “What are you speaking?”
“Haitian.”
The idea of this itty-bitty white woman speaking Haitian made me smile.
“I know,” she said. “I feel the same way every time.”
I wondered momentarily if she could read minds, but the idea made my mind hurt, so I let it go. There was enough for me to think about right now to make me need extra strength Tylenol for the next several years. I wasn’t going to worry about a voodoo priestess too.
“Just lie still and stay calm,” Cassandra said. “Help’s on the way.”
Almost immediately sirens shrilled, and they sounded close, but out here in the middle of a great big nothing, everything did.
Cassandra moved off to speak quietly at the edge of the clearing with the suited guy. Bobby sat next to me and took my hand. “You’re cold.”
“I’ll live.”
“No thanks to me.”
“You saved my life.”
“After I put it at risk by leaving you.”
“You couldn’t have known Brad was a lying, witch-hunting bastard.” I hadn’t and I’d known him all my life.
“True.” Bobby took a breath, then continued very softly. “But it would have been nice to know that you were a witch.”
My gaze met his. I should have told him, except—
“You didn’t believe me about the ghosts. I certainly wasn’t going to tell you about…” I waved at the clearing. “This.”
“I’m sorry I behaved the way I did.”
I tilted my head. “You believe me now?”
“You tossed a dozen people while your hands were tied. Either I’m seeing things or you’re special.”
“Everyone’s special in their own way,” I said in my best Miss Larsen voice.
“Got that right.” He rubbed his thumb along mine. “How did you manage to hide what you were for so long?”
“I didn’t do a very good job.” I lifted my chin to indicate the still dopey Venatores Mali. “They knew.”
“But no one in New Bergin did.”
“That’s not true.” I kept my gaze on Brad. Perhaps knowing him all my life meant that he, in turn, had known me. He’d seen something, told someone.
“I always saw ghosts,” I continued. “But I learned not to talk about it. Freaked out my parents.”
“Can’t imagine why,” he said, and I tightened my fingers around his. We’d need to talk about Genevieve, but not yet.
“That I’m a witch too is new information.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I was adopted.”
“I thought you were abandoned and had no idea who your natural parents were.”
“I was, or I thought I was but—” My mind whirled at all I needed to tell him. By the time I was done, those sirens were closer. At this point, they had to be.
“Your dad’s a ghost and your mom’s a wolf,” he repeated. “From seventeenth-century Scotland.”
“Yes.”
“And as they died at the stake, they cast a time-traveling spell to send you and your sisters, whom you’ve never met, forward.”
“Technically, they sent us to a place where no one believes in witches anymore.”
He grunted and his gaze wandered around the clearing. “I’m not so sure they sent you to the right place.”
“Who would have thought an ancient witch-hunting society would be revived in this day and age?”
“Not me.”
“Franklin,” Cassandra said. “You got silver in that gun?”
Something in her voice, if not her odd question, made my skin prickle. I lifted my head as Pru stepped into the clearing.
“Always,” Franklin answered and pointed his weapon at my mother.
I tried to toss his gun, but the man had already seen my show and held on tight. I leaped up, nearly fell back down.
“No!” I cried. I couldn’t lose her when I’d only just found her. She wasn’t the usual mother, but she was the only mother I had.
Cassandra glanced in my direction. “You know this wolf?”
“It’s—uh—” My gaze met Bobby’s, and he shrugged. “My mother.”
Chapter 26
“When was she bitten?” Franklin asked.
“Could be cursed,” Cassandra put in.
“Bitten?” Bobby repeated. “By what? Cursed? By whom?”
Cassandra spread her hands.
“Look at her eyes,” the FBI agent said. “Human eyes in the face of a wolf.”
Now that he mentioned it, the wolf’s eyes were strange. “What does that mean?”
“He thinks she’s a werewolf,” Raye said.