Page 26 of The Most Wanted Witch

I made a show of stirring my tea. “No.”

He crossed his arms, leaning back further. “What am I talking about?”

I took a step away, drinking my tea. “The thing. You know, the thing I did that you’re upset about.”

“You reached out to immigration.”

Dammit. How’d he find out so fast? I didn’t know if the mailbox trick would work, and he already knew about it?

“Are you going to talk?”

“You tell me how you know and I’ll talk.” I hadn’t planned on letting him in, but if anyone would help keep me here, it was Hawk. More than anything else, Hawk was a survivor. Sometimes I was afraid to know what ends he might go to in the process of surviving. Right now, it worked to my benefit, because he thought I was a key to his and Xest’s survival.

“I have an agreement with the mailman,” he said nonchalantly, as if that were nothing.

“You know him?” In Xest, that was like saying you knew the Rolling Stones. How was that even possible?

“Yes. Now, why did you reach out and not fill me in?”

He was watching me intently. Every time he looked at me this way, it made me a little tingly inside where I shouldn’t tingle. I walked over to the couch, a safer distance away.

“Did you stop my letter?” I asked, the thought suddenly occurring to me.

“Answer my question first. That was the deal. An answer for an answer.” He closed the distance, sitting on the other couch, eroding my buffer.

“At my immigration appointment, you alluded to them having been around for thousands of years. They’reimmigration; they must have some record of my mother. I’m tracing back my origins, trying to find a thread back to Dread so we can figure out how to get rid of it, once and for all. And I didn’t tell you because we’re not speaking.”

I sipped my tea, acting as cool as he did.

“Which is why I was reaching out to them as well. Now that we both did it, we look scattered,” he said.

He had too? I should’ve guessed. “Why didn’t you tell me? It’s okay for you to do it and keep it to yourself but not me?”

“I was going to tell you, but as you mentioned, we’re not speaking.”

We both fell silent, the new problem obvious. Neither of us knew who would hear back first. What if they contacted him? I wanted to be told immediately. There was only one thing to do: broker a deal with the enemy.

“Speaking or not, whoever hears first tells the other.”

He made me sweat it out for a couple of minutes before he finally said, “Deal.”

12

I grabbed my jacket, heading to the door as Zab yelled from the table, “Hey! Where are you going?”

I stopped walking as I pulled my jacket on. “Was going to get some air.”

“Want company?”

Zab was good at keeping things light when he needed to, and considering my brain was weighed down with two tons of worry, I was ready to bribe him to come along.

“Yeah, definitely. We can get a cocoa while we’re out—my treat.” If there was one thing that got Zab moving, it was Sweet Shop cocoa. Gilli had a way with chocolate that couldn’t be touched. Even Bertha seemed to avoid making anything chocolate based, and I’d bet coin it was because she didn’t want to tarnish her reputation, coming in second with anything edible involved.

“All you had to do was ask. You didn’t need to bribe me.” He grabbed his jacket, moving a little faster.

“Does that mean you don’t want cocoa?” I asked. “I’ll drink them both if you want.”

He held the door open. “Oh no, you offered and I’m getting a cocoa.”

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