Page 65 of Killing Time

“Where does any magic come from?” I countered, which I thought was a valid question to ask. There wasn’t any rhyme or reason as to who received what gifts or how strong they were, or anything like that. True, sometimes a gift would get passed from generation to generation, just as I’d gotten this one from my father, but that kind of situation tended to be the exception rather than the rule.

It seemed Jasper wasn’t going to bother answering me, which was fine. I’d meant it as mostly a rhetorical question, anyway.

“And why were you working with a McAllister?”

I thought he was cute,went through my mind, but I kind of doubted Jasper would be too happy to hear that particular response.

No, I had to come up with a story fast — and hope like hell it sounded plausible.

“He came to Williams a couple of days ago,” I said. “He told me his cousin had been kidnapped and he and his family were sure she was in Wilcox territory. And he asked me if I’d seen her, since he thought I would have noticed if I’d seen someone around my age suddenly appear in town.”

“McAllisters came into our territory?” Jasper asked, brow now thunderous.

“I guess so,” I replied, secretly kind of happy that I’d managed to cause him some mental distress at the idea of his enemies managing to sneak into his territory without him knowing anything about it. “He said they were looking at some of the smaller towns, just because they seemed like good hiding places…and also because they thought you might have less chance of detecting them there.”

Theprimusdidn’t respond at all to that comment, which made me think it was probably a little closer to the mark than he would have preferred. I didn’t know for sure whetherthe Wilcoxes had wards all along their borders the way the McAllisters did in Jerome — which would have been extremely impractical, considering how much bigger Wilcox territory was than the tiny mining town — or whether Jasper relied on his own sharp senses to know whether any outsiders had come onto his family’s land.

My suspicions told me it was most likely the latter, which I guessed was why he hadn’t been too happy to hear that the man who’d broken Ruby out of her room at La Posada had been lurking under his nose all along.

But then Jasper said, “If several McAllisters truly did enter Wilcox territory to search in those ‘smaller towns,’ then what were the two of you doing in that café the other day? One would think your companion would have been doing whatever he could to stay far away from downtown Flagstaff.”

Okay, theprimushad a point there. Still doing my best to look utterly guileless, I said, “Oh, when I told him about how I could hide my witch nature and that of anyone close to me, he agreed that we should look in Flagstaff as well. We didn’t find anything, though.”

“Not here,” Jasper agreed. “But you seem to have done a decent job of locating Miss McAllister in Winslow.”

“Oh, that,” I said, and waved a hand. At least I could be mostly truthful about that part of the story — and I wanted to tell him the truth because I knew hearing how we’d stumbled across Ruby in what could only be described as an utter fluke would only make him that much more frustrated about the situation.

So I gave him a somewhat edited version of what had happened, obviously leaving out any mention of Lana and Adam’s involvement in Ruby’s jailbreak and making it sound as though the wards had already been partially dissolved by the time we’d gotten there. That part didn’t seem too far-fetched to me, not when Ruby was certainly a strong witch on her own andmight have gotten started on unraveling all those imprisonment spells after it became clear no one was coming to save her.

“How would you even know how to do such a thing?” Jasper demanded once I was finished with my story. “That is not the kind of magic anyone can do off the cuff.”

No, probably not. But it also seemed clear that the Wilcoxes dabbled in enchantments that weren’t exactly common knowledge, and since it sounded as if Lana had trained herself using old spell books or grimoires that had been lying around, I didn’t see why I couldn’t appropriate that part of her past to round out my own faux biography.

“From books,” I said vaguely. “My grandmother raised me, and she had lots of old magical books lying around. It sounded like she’d been collecting them for a while.”

Once again, Jasper’s black eyes narrowed. “Who is your grandmother?”

Oh, hell. Maybe he had every single one of the current crop of Wilcoxes memorized and maybe he didn’t, but about all I could do then was bluff and hope for the best.

“Mildred Garnett,” I said quickly. “My mother was her daughter.”

Not even a nod, and tension coiled in my stomach…tension that had nothing to do with the coffee I’d just swallowed.

Then theprimussaid, his tone almost conversational, “I have a cousin named Adam,” and the knot in my belly tightened that much further.

“Oh?” I said. The syllable sounded normal enough, thank God, so I had to pray Jasper hadn’t noticed anything off about my response.

“Yes,” he replied. “His talent lets him know whether people are telling the truth.” A weighted pause, and he added, “But I don’t need him here to let me know you’re lying.”

So much for Mildred Garnett and the rest of my story.

However, I raised my chin and said, “I’m not lying.”

“Oh, yes, you are. I know you’re a Wilcox, but almost everything else you’ve said is a complete falsehood.” He sipped some more of his coffee. “Go back to your room — the sight of you annoys me.”

I supposed I could have refused, but something in his tone told me he’d zap me right back into that suite if he had to.

Or worse, throw me over his shoulder and carry me up the stairs.

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