Katie, however, pursed her lips in the first display of emotion I’d seen: contemplation. Then her feet touched the ground as Bones finished lowering her. Once she tested her weight and found that she was standing under her own power, her eyes lost their preternatural glow and began to darken. When they turned to gunmetal gray, I almost let out a sob.
She had my eyes. My nose, too, and here’s hoping that edge to her chin was dirt instead of signs of the trademark Crawfield stubbornness. Without realizing it, I sank down until we were eye level.
And then she spoke.
“You heal like them, but you’re not one of them because your heart still beats sometimes. Why?”
I let her voice flow over me, storing it in parts I hadn’t known existed until now. Her vocabulary was years above her age, much like the rest of her traits, but her voice held the high, youthful tenor of a child’s.
“Because once,” I said huskily, “I was like you: part human and part something else. Special.”
“Katie.”
Tate crouched next to me, smiling at her with a sheen in his eyes that he didn’t attempt to blink away.
“I know I look different since I shaved and cut my hair, but you remember me, don’t you? You crushed my neck five seconds after we met.”
“Six,” she corrected with a solemn little blink.
He grinned. “All right, six. The only other girl to kick my butt that fast is Cat. She trained me to fight, you know.”
Dark gray eyes met mine, causing me to draw in a breath. Would I ever get used to seeing my own eyes look back at me from that tiny face?
“I remember you from the base,” she stated. “You tried to make me come with you. You are very hard to neutralize.”
From her tone, that last part was a compliment, though I wasn’t sure how to respond. The person she remembered trying to “neutralize” back then had been Denise, shapeshifted to look like me. In actuality, Katie had only tried to kill me once, and she’d damn near succeeded.
“Thank you,” I settled on, adding, “you’re very tough, too, but you don’t have to be anymore. We’re going to take care of you.”
Then I couldn’t help it; I took her hand. She flinched, her fingers tightening on her knife. After a glance at Bones, her grip loosened.
I let her go. If her first instinct was still to stab me, it was obviously too soon for tactile displays of affection.
Tate’s gaze tracked what happened, too. He put his arm around my shoulders, giving me a firm squeeze.
“Cat is my friend,” he said cleanly. “I hug my friends sometimes to show I’m happy that they’re there. Or I take their hand like this.”
His fingers twined through mine, and he held our hands up. She stared as though he’d magically pulled a rabbit out of a hat.
I understood then, and couldn’t stop the tears. Katie had never been taught to touch anyone except in violence. No wonder she’d flinched when I took her hand. She thought I was about to hurt her.
“You poor little girl,” I whispered. “It’s okay now, I promise.”
“Isn’t this sickeningly sweet?”
The mocking purr didn’t come from Ian, though from his expression, he’d been thinking something similar. Tension rocketed through my emotions as Bones’s power erupted, firing toward that voice, only to have it dissipate like he’d funneled it into a vacuum.
“Ooh, do that again,” our unseen intruder urged.
I recognized him now, and everything in me stiffened. Trove.
Smiling, the demon walked into the boiler room, his red-tinged gaze flicking between me and Katie. He was dressed in a suit and tie, his steel-colored hair coiffed to perfection and trademark handsome features set in a pleasant mask. He could have been dropping in on another fund-raising event, he looked so pressed and polished, and since we hadn’t heard him approach, he must have used his teleporting trick to get here, damn his evil hide.
Bones lowered his hand. The demon would only grow stronger from another telekinetic blast.
“Cat,” Trove drew out in a satisfied purr. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your daughter?”
I leapt up, standing between Katie and Trove without the slightest care that she had two silver knives, and I’d turned my back on her. Tate growled, flanking me. Ian pulled out his weapons, his mouth curling into a nasty smile.
If we were the picture of hostility, Bones looked like a study in Zen. He practically strolled toward the demon, both hands in his pockets as if he couldn’t be bothered to hold their weight up himself.
“What brings you here, mate?” he asked with remarkable casualness.
Trove grinned. The sight of those fancy white teeth made me fantasize about knocking them down his throat until he choked on them.
“A desire for mayhem, of course.”
I didn’t want to take my eyes off our unwelcome visitor. Then a small, clear voice asked, “Are you really my mother? The old man said she was dead.”
I couldn’t help it; I glanced behind me.