silent for several heartbeats. “I knew them both. Barry here was the one who gave me heroin.” Carl knew about that incident already. “And the other one, Evelyn Stark, was the drunk driver who killed my dad.”
“Ah,” he said, and in that one syllable was a paragraph’s worth of meaning.
“Plus, Eilahn and I encountered a graa early yesterday morning,” I added. Carl knew a great deal about the arcane and demons, but I didn’t know if that was because of his relationship with my aunt or if he had prior knowledge. I knew that wards didn’t seem to have any effect on him, and he’d once been attacked by an assailant with the ability to suck out a person’s essence, yet he’d been completely unaffected. But despite not knowing a damn thing about him, I trusted him.
But should I? I was suddenly suspicious of any sort of blind trust. Yet, Tessa cared deeply for him and clearly, she trusted him. And I’d never seen the barest whisper or hint that Carl had anything but fond adoration for my aunt in return. Maybe there were times when blind trust was necessary. I sure as hell needed to be better about trusting people.
His hazel brown eyes flicked to me. “Should I assume it was not a pleasant encounter?”
“You could say that,” I replied with a dry laugh, “though Eilahn’s convinced it wasn’t trying to kill me.” I lifted my shoulders in a shrug. “Obviously, I need even more weird shit in my life.”
A smile touched the corners of his mouth. “And yet you weather it well.”
“I’d hate to see what my life would be like if I weathered it badly!”
“And you don’t think your aunt summoned this demon?”
That hadn’t even occurred to me. Why the hell hadn’t it? She was a strong summoner. She was the one who had trained me. “I’m pretty confident that she wouldn’t send a demon to attack me,” I told him. Still, I should have asked her. What if the attack had been some sort of misunderstanding? “Did she summon it?”
His eyes held mine briefly before he looked back down at the instruments. “No.”
Carl was a hard man to read, but I could have sworn I’d seen relief, or something awfully close to it, in that brief look. I let out a breath and resisted the urge to ask him why the hell he’d implied that she had. Carl usually had good stuff to say, but he didn’t always come right out and say it—usually preferring for me to come around to it on my own. “I don’t know if it had anything to do with the deaths of these two people,” I said, “but it sure as hell got my attention.”