“Bread. I brought it for you.”
I wasn’t sure I could have been more surprised. I wouldn’t have figured a bachelor bounty hunter for a baker. “You bake?”
He grinned. “Do I look like I have the patience for that? Eleanor made it. She trained in France.”
I opened the bag, looked inside. A crusty round loaf of bread sat inside, just like the kind my dad had sometimes brought home from a patisserie on Ursulines. It smelled like flour and yeast. If there were gifts involved, maybe this Sensitive-training gig wouldn’t be so bad.
I looked up at him. “It looks amazing. Seriously, thank you, and thanks to Eleanor, too. I really appreciate it.” Maybe Eleanor should be the recipient of the Glorious Final Stick of Butter.
“Where should we work?” Nix asked.
“Why don’t we go discuss that upstairs?” Liam suggested. “Fewer eyes curious about an after-hours meeting with a bounty hunter.”
“Containment does think I’m your trainee.”
“That’s a point.”
I held up the bag. “Let me just put this in the kitchen.”
I left the bread on the counter, closed the curtain behind me, and led them upstairs to the second floor. There wasn’t as much room here as on the third, but I wasn’t ready to invite either of them into my personal abode. Besides, people usually got a kick out of seeing the inventory.
We reached the second floor, and I opened the door, gestured them in. “The storage room.”
Liam looked over the furniture and antiques with wistfulness in his eyes, but it was shielded by his masculine brow and pursed lips. Nix didn’t worry about hiding her emotions. She walked right in, began moving from item to item, trailing small, slender fingers over everything.
“No Gavin?” I asked quietly as Nix pulled open a drawer in a tall chest, checked the contents, closed it again.
“He has a previous engagement.”
She flipped through a shoe box of postcards.
“What does he do?” I asked.
“Most of the time, whatever he wants.”
That was all Liam said, but his tone made it clear that he wasn’t thrilled about it. Not that he told me what “it” was. If I ever needed a man to keep a secret, Liam Quinn was the obvious choice. I could fill a book with what I didn’t know about him.
“And more specifically?” I asked.
“He’s a tracker. He travels mostly in the Zone, finds things, people who don’t want to be found.”
“For PCC?”
“Sometimes. Not always. He’s got good skills, but he’s . . . unsettled.”
“Yeah. I got that from your talk with him. Bad blood between him and Eleanor?”
Liam shook his head, eyes tracking Nix as she made her way through the room. “No. Just a little war guilt. Feels like Eleanor was hurt because of him. Puts off visiting her because that’s how he copes. Tête dure.”
“What’s that mean?”
Liam chuckled, glanced down at me. “It means he’s got a head as hard as yours.”
“And yet you’re intrigued by me.”
“That’s one of the possible ways to describe it.”
“There you go with the flattery again.”
Nix walked back to us before Liam could reply. “I like your inventory.”
“Thank you. I do, too.”
“You can move things?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“How long ago did the magic appear?”
“Eight months.”
“Sudden or buildup?”
“Um, sudden. I stopped something that was falling on me.”
“And since then?” Her questions were quick, businesslike. It took me a moment to realize I was being interrogated. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who needed assurance about this partnership. She was putting herself in a really dangerous position, too.
“It happened once when I wasn’t thinking about it. Other than that, I haven’t really tried much.”
“And how do you feel afterward?”
“Dizzy. Hungry.”
She nodded. “Humans weren’t built for magic. It takes a toll on your body, which grows exponentially the more you absorb.”
“Your body is a sponge,” Liam said. “That’s your little biological gift.”
“And I’m so grateful for it.”
Nix ignored the jokes. “You have to learn to get rid of the magic, but in a way that won’t make the situation worse, or expose you publically. You have to learn to cast and bind it.”
“Wait. So if the thing that saves me is getting rid of the magic, and actually using it gets rid of it, why can’t I just do that? Why do I have to do something else?”
“Both methods discharge a certain amount of magic, yes. But not in the same way. It’s the difference between opening a dam on the Mississippi River and blowing up a levee. Water moves both ways, but one is much safer than the other.