“Find her.”

His energy spent, his path now clear, the Grand Minister slumped against the operating table. Hans pocketed the phone, and just before the nurse he was soon going to kill lowered the oxygen mask to his face, he whispered hoarsely to Hans, “New directive. Divert all resources to finding the Aberrant Lumina Bohn. All resources!”

A hiss of pressurized air, a murmur of voices, the sensation of weightlessness, then sinking. Then Hans spoke, and the Grand Minister faded into unconsciousness with a savage, satisfied smile on his face.

Hans said, “Already on it, sir. We’re getting an intermittent signal from Ritter’s collar; he must have tagged her at the father’s house before she escaped. If the signal holds, we’ll have her in a matter of hours.”

SEVEN

“You’re saying she burned the house after she was collared? Is that possible?”

“It’s the only explanation. There’s no way the mog from Enforcement survived the fire long enough to tag her. The entire building was in flames in seconds. It was the same at the Hospice. He shot her, collared her, then she lit him up.”

“But that would mean . . .”

“Yes. Especially since she was able to scan me after the collar was already on. The technology doesn’t seem to have any effect on her at all. For that matter, neither do the flames. She came out of both buildings totally unscathed. Not even a singed hair. And the reports I’m getting indicate the only burn injuries at the Hospice were the GM and his men. The other injuries were all secondary, caused by shattered glass or other objects propelled in the initial explosion. It’s almost as if her Gift is . . . sentient.”

A pause. Then the first speaker, a woman, said to the second, “Well, look who we’re talking about here. If Honor’s any indication, anything’s possible.”

An even longer pause. Finally, reluctantly, the second speaker, a man, replied. “That’s exactly what I’m worried about.” The voices fell silent, and only the faraway music of water dancing over stone remained.

Lu opened her eyes.

She was in a dim, cool chamber with smooth, rounded stone walls, lit only by a few candles sputtering in niches that cast flickering shadows over everything. There was no furniture save the feather mattress beneath her and a small wood table nearby. The air smelled like damp rock, hot wax, and creatures who weren’t human, and the sound of running water was underscored by a constant, melancholy drip that seemed to be coming from . . . She looked up.

Hanging from the ceiling directly above loomed a forest of long, sharp teeth.

Lu bolted upright, rolled to one side, and became tangled in the mess of heavy blankets that were wrapped around her. She fought them off and got her feet beneath her, but failed at the effort to stand when she sank deep into the mattress, pillowy and insubstantial as clouds. Off-balance, she pitched forward. Just before she fell flat on her face, she was caught by a pair of strong, steadying hands.

Breathless, her palms erupting with heat, Lu looked up into the face of the man who’d caught her.

Eyes like dark chocolate, rimmed in a thicket of long black lashes. The beautiful bone structure, the full, luscious lips. The face of an angel, mauled by the devil’s claws.

“They’re just stalactites,” Magnus said gruffly, his fingers gripping her arms a little too hard. “Water drips through the limestone and leaves deposits that over time form a hanging cone. They’re not dangerous.”

Lu stared at him, her heart still pounding. Stalactites. Not dangerous. She couldn’t get her mind wrapped around the idea that the ceiling teeth weren’t going to chomp down on her; in all her reading and homeschooling she’d never encountered the word.

The candles all around the room flared bright, sputtering and popping in their niches, a tune that corresponded with the itch in her palms. His tone drier, Magnus added, “Please don’t light me on fire. I’d prefer not to look any worse than I already do.”

For a long, frozen moment they stared at one another, until Lu released a breath that felt as if it had been punched from her lungs. She threw her arms around his shoulders and buried her face in his neck. “Magnus!” she whispered, her voice choked.

God, it’s really you!

He reacted as if he’d been slapped.

He stiffened, dropped his hands to his sides and recoiled. “Don’t touch me!” he snarled. He leapt to his feet, eyes flashing with fury, and turned away, every movement jerky and awkward. He stalked out of an arched stone doorway a few meters away, leaving her staring after him in shock.

“Note to self: Magnus has personal space issues,” Lu muttered, oddly crushed by his reaction. They’d been intimate, in every way that two people could be! Well, without actually being intimate, that is. Physically.

Then a terrible thought arrested her; had her dreams been only one-sided? Had he not actually participated in them, the way she had, all the kissing and touching and . . . the rest? For some reason she’d always assumed the dreams were as real to him as they were to her, two minds touching across time and space, but maybe the encounters had all been in her own head?

But no, he’d come for her—he’d found her! He knew her, just as she knew him, she’d seen it in his eyes when she’d first said his name. That telling flare of emotion, quickly smothered, but definitely there.

Then what could it be?

She sucked in a breath, horrified by the thought that maybe he wasn’t joking when he asked her not to light him on fire. Could he think she would hurt him? Could he be . . . afraid of her?

Lu looked down at her ungloved hands in horror. Of course he was afraid of her. He’d seen exactly what she was capable of.

She suffered a moment of excruciating shame, so familiar from all the years of odd looks and whispers behind hands.

“Don’t take it personally. He’s had a few rough decades,” said a low, cultured voice from the doorway.

Lu looked up. There with crossed arms and a slight smile stood one of the most beautiful women she’d ever seen.

Tall and curvy with a mass of long, dark hair she wore in a loose ponytail over one shoulder, the woman was what her father would have called a “kiefer auftakt.” Jaw dropper. She wore tight leather pants, a belted, finely cut tunic of wool, and knee-high boots, all of it black. Though a slight softness of jaw, laugh lines at the corners of her electric-green eyes, and strands of silver threaded through her hair suggested she was somewhere in her early fifties, she was stunning. All easy grace and regal bearing, with a face a master artist would have loved to reproduce on canvas with oils or carve into marble.

She exuded that wild, nighttime scent like Magnus did, only hers was sweeter, more brown sugar than spice. But her eyes held the same sharpness, the coiled tension in her limbs, the same animal readiness. As beautiful as she was, everything about her screamed Danger!

Clearly, she wasn’t human.

In response to Lu’s gaping inspection of her, the woman raised her brows.

“Sorry,” said Lu, realizing how rude she was being. “You’re just . . . unexpected.”

The woman’s smile vanished. She smoothed a hand over her hair. “I know. I look a mess.” She looked down at herself, and her expression soured. “Twenty-six years and I’m still missing my wardrobe at Sommerley.” She sighed and once again looked at Lu. With a shrug, she said, “Well. One does what one must. Keep calm, carry on, and be grateful some other female learned how to weave and sew or I’d be wearing nothing but a fur pelt, because there’s no way in hell I’m doing anything so domesticated.”