Page 86 of The Spell Caster

“Not like that.” I picked at a loose thread on my skirt. “He’s really different.”

She was quiet while I hesitated, listening to the phone’s light static. “Wherever he… came from,” she said carefully, “he’s one of us now.”

“You knew.”

“I don’t know. But I had my ideas. Especially when he first came to me…” Her sigh rushed through the speaker. “What’s going on? You best put him on the phone, Layla.”

“Something happened.” I swallowed thickly.

Diana’s voice was grim. “All right. Tell me.”

Chapter 17

COSTI

It was cold in here now that I wasn’t burning angry, but I wasn’t about to let anyone know it bothered me. I’d seen this holding cell in the barracks—a brightly lit white room with nothing but a metal toilet—but I never figured I’d be sitting on the floor of it for hours.

Plenty of time to start second-guessing every weird feeling I ever had, trying to figure out if I was a demon. What kind of magic could stick to someone’s face for seventeen years? What kind of self-delusion made me not realize what species I was? How the fuck could I be bonded to Layla as a familiar and not even know? I’d felt different from other witches growing up, but wasn’t it just the kind of different that came from being adopted? From being Troubled?

Not human…

Resting my elbows on my knees, I pushed both hands into my hair. This was a fucking mess. There was no way they’d let me stay a guardian.

I should just bail. Go pretend to be human somewhere else. I bet I could get a job outside kicking troublemakers out of bars or something.

I’d take Layla with me. I didn’t care what these assholes thought. I’d get her out of here. Nothing mattered more than her.

I ignored the booted footsteps echoing in the hall, the opening of the locked door, and the shadow that fell over me.

“Well, well,” an obnoxious voice said.

I raised my head and tried to project the eye-rolling annoyance I was feeling. Cedar Grey, the shit who thought he was a ruler and not an elected official. His dogs flanked him—Ewan and a spell caster. He was amassing quite the little collection.

“Hello, demon,” said Grey Senior. Fate, I hated this whole fucking family.

“Gonna be like that, huh?” My voice sounded gravelly from disuse. I didn’t bother standing up.

“I’ll admit, I was surprised by this. You Northern Sea witches are typically such pushovers.” He sneered down at me. “But then, you’re not a Northern Sea witch at all, are you?”

“You believe all the weird shit Calamus tells you?”

“I could replicate his… experiment easily,” Grey said, unbothered. “But it’s plain to see there’s something wrong about you, and it’s not just that you’re Troubled. Now tell me why you were sent here.”

“Can’t help you with that,” I said. Yeah, it was insolent. But it wasn’t like he was going to listen to a word I said anyway. Witches like him were all the same. Once they made up their minds about someone, they never changed.

Grey nodded at his spell caster flunky, and he invoked his familiar. The small pale demon narrowed its black eyes at me and hissed viciously, showing its little fangs.

Am I seriously related to these things?

“Do you care to answer me now?” Grey smirked as if I couldn’t take him and his little entourage out in thirty seconds.

“Why bother?”

“Convince him,” Grey said to his pets.

The caster flicked a finger at my torso. A bloom of fiery light slammed into my chest, and the breath was knocked from my lungs as pain seared through me. The blow forced me to the floor.

My training kicked in automatically. I rolled onto my back and leaped to my feet, leveling a devastating head punch to the asshole who’d dared cast at me. He collapsed in a heap and his familiar disappeared with a tiny, satisfying pop.

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