Page 64 of Killing Time

And that meant Jasper wasn’t anything close to all-seeing or all-knowing. Sure, he was probably the most powerful warlock alive, but that still didn’t make him a god.

While I couldn’t exactly relax, that bit of knowledge gave me just the tiniest sliver of hope.

I shrugged and sipped some coffee. It was too hot, but I’d rather deal with that than have to respond to his comment.

His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t say anything for a moment and instead appeared focused on drinking his coffee. Then hesaid, “I can tell you’re a Wilcox. How is it that I’ve never seen you before?”

The swallow of coffee wanted to get caught somewhere in my throat, but I managed to gulp it down. Was that something clan leaders could always do — know who did and who didn’t have their family’s blood flowing in their veins?

I remembered how Ruby had been able to sense that Seth was standing only a few yards away from her hotel room, and guessed something similar must be operating here as well.

Smiling thinly, I said, “I don’t get out much.”

Jasper’s impassive expression didn’t shift even an inch. “This is not a joking matter.”

“No, I suppose it isn’t,” I replied. “So, is it because you realized I was a member of your clan that I’m not locked up in a dungeon somewhere?”

“Flagstaff is rather short on dungeons,” he replied, and for the first time, I thought I caught a flicker of amusement in his black eyes, so similar to Jeremiah’s in color and shape, although there was something about this man I instinctively distrusted.

I’d never had that reaction to Jeremiah Wilcox.

“Point taken,” I said. “To answer your question, I was raised on a ranch outside Williams, and my family never came into Flagstaff. So I suppose that’s why I was overlooked.”

Jasper drank some more coffee. “I’m afraid I don’t believe you. There’s something more going on here than a farm girl coming to the big city for the first time and deciding out of nowhere that she’s going to free theprima-in-waiting from a rival clan.”

When he put it that way, I had to admit my story sounded a little far-fetched. I’d been grasping for anything that might have sounded like a reasonable way to explain why he could tell I was a member of his clan but had never seen me before.

Before I could speak, though, he nodded, as if something had just occurred to him. “You were the young woman I saw at the café the other day. I assume your companion had something to do with the way Ruby McAllister vanished from La Posada last night?”

“Possibly,” I allowed. It didn’t seem like too large a risk to admit to Seth’s involvement, not when he was more than seventy miles away in Jerome and far from even Jasper Wilcox’s reach.

Or at least, I didn’t think Jasper would try anything like that again in the near future. I wasn’t a McAllister elder or even a member of their clan, but I had to believe every single person in that witch family who had even the slightest bit of defensive magic at their disposal was doing their best to make sure a Wilcox would never set foot there again without tripping all sorts of alarms.

“He looked like a McAllister to me,” Jasper went on. “And while I’ll admit it makes sense that they would attempt to steal her back — hence all the protection spells on her hotel room to prevent that very thing from happening — I also have to say that you don’t seem to fit in anywhere. You’re a Wilcox, but I’ve never laid eyes on you before, and I should have been able to sense that both you and your McAllister companion were of witch-kind the second I entered that café.”

“I guess you were just having an off day,” I said blithely, and sipped some more coffee.

Without warning, he reached over and took the mug from my fingers and set it down on the counter. For a second, I could only gape at him, since never in my life had I ever had anyone do something so downright rude.

“Whoever you are, your tone needs some correcting,” Jasper said, night-hued eyes narrow.

So do your manners,I thought, but I realized I needed to tread a lot more carefully than I had these past couple ofminutes. The current head of the Wilcox clan was nothing like Jeremiah, and I needed to remind myself of that.

This man was an enemy, not an ally, even if he might have been my great-great-grand-uncle or something along those lines. To be honest, I’d never been that big on genealogy, even if certain people in my clan seemed almost obsessed with it. I guessed some of that obsession made sense, since it was important to keep track of people’s connections within the family and not have to worry if that distant cousin you had a crush on might suddenly turn out to be not so safely distant after all.

I certainly had no desire to tell Jasper the truth about me, or to let him know I had the ability to travel in time. A fairly shaky ability, true, but I still had a feeling he would do whatever he could to exploit it.

But a little sliver of truth might be enough to put him off the scent.

“It’s probably my talent, if you even want to call it that,” I said, and one eyebrow lifted slightly.

“What talent is that?”

“It hides my witch nature,” I explained. “For a long time, it wasn’t anything I could control, so everyone thought I didn’t have any magic at all. So even if you might have seen me when you visited Williams, you would have thought I was just a civilian girl and ignored me.”

Jasper’s expression had gone impassive again, so it was hard for me to tell whether he believed a single word of what I had just said or whether he was doing what he could to mentally poke holes in my story.

“That is an unusual gift,” he said after a long pause. “One I don’t think anyone in my clan has ever had before. Where did it come from?”

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