Page 46 of Borrowed Time

But, as my cousin Jeremy had once cheerfully said, wish in one hand and spit in the other, and see what happens.

Well, unless you were Autumn Garnett, another of my Wilcox relatives, who actually had a magical talent for making wishes come true. It, too, hadn’t done her much good, except at least she’d finally been able to wrangle it to a good outcome.

“It’s fine,” Seth said, and came over so he could take me firmly by both hands. “I’ll need you to hang on tight, though — I don’t know what exactly happens when I’m between places.”

Maybe he folded space somehow, or dematerialized himself. I didn’t know how his talent functioned, and I doubted he did, either, not when you really got down into the weeds on how it all worked.

“I have a better idea,” I told him, and unclasped my hands from his and instead placed his arms around my waist. It felt a little awkward with Jeremiah standing there a few feet away and watching the whole procedure, but I thought that position seemed a lot more secure than just holding hands.

Seth’s mouth quirked. “Yes, that is better.” He paused there and looked over my shoulder, his gaze meeting Jeremiah’s. “You can give me the amulet now. Better put it in my pocket.”

Also looking somewhat amused, theprimuscame over and dropped the amulet into the pocket Seth had indicated. “Godspeed.”

I honestly didn’t know whether God — or the Goddess the McAllisters prayed to — had anything to do with it, but I still thought it wasn’t a bad idea to have a higher power watching over the two of us.

“All right,” Seth said. “Here we go.”

And just like that, Jeremiah’s study vanished. For the merest fraction of a second — far less than the blink of an eye —everything went dark, and I thought I could see strange flashes of light around the periphery of my vision.

Before I could even begin to guess what those flashes were…stars wheeling past, vestiges of the sunlight in Jeremiah’s office…my own imagination…the world became bright again, and we were standing in the middle of the hotel room where Seth had been staying.

Well, okay, it wasn’t bright, bright, because the curtains were still shut and the space was only lit by the small peeps of sun that were able to make it past the drapes, but at least it wasn’t that utter void any longer.

Moving slowly, he let go of my waist and looked around. “It worked.”

“It sure did,” I said, knowing my voice sounded giddy with relief. “Score one for the amulet, I guess. Did you do anything different?”

“Not really,” he said. “Whenever I travel like this, I think of where I need to go, and my talent sends me there. In this case, I saw both of us standing in this hotel room, just as we are now, and then we…traveled.”

Very cool. It was good to know that the amulet had worked just as Lawrence Pratt claimed it did — by amplifying a person’s intention and strengthening their magic so whatever feat was required would actually happen.

Another question was knocking around in my mind, one that had surfaced before but had been pushed aside by all the other complications we’d been dealing with.

“Can you only go to places you’ve been?” I asked. While his teleportation gift was a very useful one, if it was limited in such a way, then it still wasn’t a carte blanche to travel wherever he wanted.

“No,” he said. “That is, I have to have something to connect with, even if it’s a person’s description of a place. But when I wasaround sixteen, I read somewhere about all the saguaro cacti down in the southern part of Arizona and wanted to see them. So…I sent myself there. Not for very long, because it was awfully hot, and even though I was out in the middle of the desert, I didn’t want to risk possibly bumping into one of the de la Pazes and have them ask me what the hell I was doing there.”

While I agreed that could be something of a problem, I still said, “But aren’t the McAllisters friendly with the de la Paz clan?”

“We are,” he replied. “Still, it’s one thing to be friendly and something else entirely to appear in their territory without permission.”

He had a point there. Even now, with all three Arizona clans friendly with one another — and friendly with the Castillos in New Mexico, since Angela’s daughter Miranda had become theirprimaa few years earlier — it was still polite to let the other clan know if you were going to be doing anything more than popping in for a quick day of shopping or whatever.

“Got it,” I said. “I guess what we need to do now is see if you can repeat the trick — we don’t want to be gone too long, or Jeremiah will start to get worried.”

“True enough,” Seth agreed. He placed his arms around my waist again, only this time he bent down to press a soft kiss against my lips. “I really wanted to do that back at Jeremiah’s house, but I didn’t think it would be a very good idea, not with him standing there and watching.”

No, probably not. But although I could feel my heart beat a little faster from the sensation of his mouth pressing on mine, I knew we probably shouldn’t linger here.

“Someday, we’ll be able to kiss all we want,” I promised him. “Now, though, we should probably get going.”

Seth nodded. “Hold on.”

And again came that flash of darkness, and immediately afterward, we were standing in Jeremiah’s office, in the same spot we’d occupied before we left.

“Excellent,” he said. “It seems you didn’t have any trouble at all.”

“None that I could tell,” Seth replied, then pulled the amulet out of his pocket and handed it over to theprimus.“As you said, it seemed to amplify my magic enough that it was no problem to have Devynn ride along, so to speak.”

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