Page 61 of Lost Touch

Nate blushed and Arik sat back and rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, fair enough,” Nate mumbled, and then looked right at me and said, “We think you have magic.”

Chapter 18

Fake Mate for Real

After that bombshell left me too stunned to speak, the previously-silent Matthew stood up and took charge, handing out tasks to everyone present in a way that no one ignored, not even Nate.

Ian took the SUV’s keys and went to move it around by the garage, promising to put mine and Drew’s bags in a spare bedroom. Calder dragged Drew to the corner of the basement, stuffing one of the couch’s thin throw pillows under his head, and sat down on the floor next to him, leaning his head against the wall and closing his eyes. His body language radiated a total lack of concern. I hated seeing Drew lying there like that on the hideous orange carpet. I wanted to drop to the floor and hold his head myself, stroke his hair off his sweaty forehead. My fingers practically itched with the desire to touch him. I felt so cold without him next to me.

On the other hand, no one would be more capable of keeping him under control than Calder, and if he woke up to me touching him…I had to sit on my hands to keep them from reaching out, though. My body had become oriented to Drew’s, like a compass always pointing true-Drew-north.

Jared squeezed my arm, told me Calder would keep me and Drew safe if we needed it, and went off to “see if there’s anything edible in the kitchen.”

Not that it mattered to me, since I couldn’t taste anything—but the state of the house in general didn’t give me much hope for the rest of them.

And Matthew pulled Arik aside, spoke to him urgently but too quietly for me to hear, and then vanished up the stairs after Ian, Jared in his wake.

Which left me under the scrutiny of the pair of people I’d actually come here to see, what felt like years ago.

“Now that they’re out of the way, let me try to explain,” Arik said.

And then he did, with Nate interrupting every thirty seconds—but I got the gist.

It made my head spin so much I could hardly focus on what I was hearing.

They thought my instincts leading me to choose their website out of all the others was a manifestation of magic they believed I had latent in me. Nate used the word “divination,” and even though Arik grimaced in a way that suggested he didn’t think much of that type of magic, he didn’t argue, either. And they told me I wouldn’t have been able to see anything but the motion of Nate’s hand when he knocked Drew out unless I had something they called “magic sight.”

They seemed to disagree about nearly everything, so their identical looks of disgruntlement when I started to laugh my ass off made me laugh even more, bordering on hysteria. Because what the fuck did you say to that?

“That’s—I can’t—magic?Me?” I choked out. “I’m human, I’m—”

“I’m human too!” Nate protested. “Warlocks always are. Werewolves and the like have their own names for anyone who can use magic as a craft, and not just innately.”

“Okay, but how come I’ve never noticed before?”

Arik sighed and raised one eyebrow at me—wow, that really was obnoxiously condescending, maybe I should stop doing that myself—and suddenly Nate’s apparent state of near-constant irritation with his business partner made a lot more sense. “You have amnesia,” he pointed out. “How the fuck would you know?”

I gaped at him, my mouth opening and closing a couple of times.

He was right, the asshole. How the fuckwouldI know?

“And that changes everything about your current problems,” Arik went on. “I’m guessing you’ll have been thinking about this too, and I’d have thought they wanted to create someone who could, say, work until they dropped without complaining about the pain from injuries, and so on. That would’ve made sense if you were a boring old human. No offense.”

He seemed to be waiting for me to acknowledge that.

“Um. None taken?”

Arik nodded, choosing to ignore Nate’s muttered, “You’re such a dick.”

“But since you saw Nate’s little parlor trick—” (“Fuck you, Arik, you can’t do that!”) “—you must have some magic. It’s not in question, and they would’ve detected it. That’s probably why they kidnapped you in the first place. And that changes things. We think they might’ve been experimenting on you, trying to figure out how to suppress or remove magical senses. Only they were fucking idiots, because it doesn’t work that way. Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding—”

And thank God for Nate, because Arik sounded like he’d set up his soap box and meant to stay there for a while.

“Yeah, yeah, nobody cares,” Nate said over Arik’s protest. “Look. Bottom line. Magic doesn’t get processed in your brain the same way your other senses do. Arik and I agree on that. But opinions differ, okay? And yes, Arik, the differing opinions are wrong and stupid, thank you. They were fucking with your brain trying to shut your magic down, and they shut down a bunch of your other sensory input instead. That’s our working theory.”

He sat back and nodded, looking smug.

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