Page 22 of A Heart of Winter
“You—you—my magic,” he whined, somehow loud even through the crack in the door. “You stole my magic.”
Stolehismagic?
“I did,” Morwenna agreed, tone congenial, pushing past Kai and me to throw the door open. What the hell was with the people in my life, acting like we were having a tea party and not dealing with attempted murder? “It’s not like you had enough magic, for long enough, that taking it away is going to kill you. Unlike Johannes, whom you were in fact trying to murder. And the only way to make sure you’ll never try this on anyone else was to make sure you had no magic at all.”
“It’s mine! You can’t! You have to give it back. You?—”
Morwenna’s response was to reach out and tap his foot with her own, which made him gasp and curl up in a ball. Apparently slamming the door on it had done some damage. From the tears on his face, maybe a lot of damage.
She darted forward and grabbed the gun from where he’d dropped it on the front porch and handed it to Kai. “Why don’t you two get rid of this, and I’ll get rid of . . . that.” She looked Michael over like he was a leaky bag of trash. “I’ll drop him off at a hospital in New York and say a cabbie ran over his foot. Not like anyone’s going to believe a witch in Minnesota slammed a door on his foot while he was trying to break in and murder him. Hells, he wouldn’t even tell such a ridiculous story.Would you, Jerkwad?”
Michael didn’t really answer, just curled up tighter and whined. Morwenna seemed satisfied enough, sheathing her dagger at her waist and turning back to us. “I trust the two of you can see to yourselves?”
“We can,” Kai agreed, pocketing the gun and pulling out a handkerchief to wrap around his hand . . . or no. No, he turned to me and started wrapping my hand up in the cotton. “Though I’d love to meet up again in the future, with less stabbing. Morwenna, yes?”
The smirk she gave him boded well for their future, as did the approving nod that came after. Then she leaned down and grabbed Michael’s shoulder, and a second later, she was gone.
Kai closed the door, pulling me inside, all the way to the kitchen to clean and dress my hand, while I protested that his hand should be bandaged first. By the time we were both taped up, I’d calmed down, and instead of worrying more or cooking, I pulled out the pudding and cookies. Screw whether a sugar bomb for breakfast was a good idea. We’d earned those calories.
We’d beenstabbed, for fuck’s sake.
“So Michael was trying to kill you?” Kai asked, bringing us around to the rather long conversation that we needed to have.
I sighed and nodded. “Apparently he was trying to steal my magic, which, as old as I am, would have killed me.” I flushed, my cheeks going hot. “And Morwenna used you to re-anchor mymagic in me. She, um, ripped it out of Michael, sort of . . . ran it through you, and back into me?”
He blinked, shaking his head and staring at his bandaged hand. “Wow. That’s . . . something else.” He looked up at me with that bright smile. “But also, now you have to fly to visit me first. I mean, I got stabbed for you. That’s got to count for something, right?”
Incredible. All that, and the man still wanted to be with me at all.
“Something doesn’t cover it. The spell she did needs a non-magic-using human, and I don’t know many of those. You literally saved my life. Not that she asked your permission, but?—”
He waved off the very notion. “Don’t care. She’d have had it if she had asked, and it’s not like she had time to explain in the heat of the moment.” The glint in his eye said he suspected Morwenna could have easily come to us before that morning, but he didn’t care to press the matter. At least not now, and not with me. And he was right, so if he wanted to ask Morwenna for an explanation, I couldn’t fault him.
I was sure as hell going to ask why she hadn’t talked to me when I saw her again. Though, probably, she hadn’t trusted me to look at it rationally, and expected me to continue to trust Michael, like I had for twenty years.
Twenty years. Michael had no more magic. He was going to start aging soon. A tiny part of me, the part of me that had loved him, felt sorry for him.
But the rest of me remembered all too well what happened to witches like me who had their power ripped out. It wasn’t pretty and left not just a dead witch, but scars on the very land. Wildfires, earthquakes, and explosions weren’t uncommon. Me? I might have buried the entire city of New York under snow. Killed millions of people.
Michael hadn’t thought about that, apparently.
Or he hadn’t cared.
“Hey, don’t drift off on me now.” Kai wrapped an arm around my shoulder and started tugging me toward the den and its huge sofa. “I need an expert to explain everything. Maybe I can’t be a witch too, but I can know what it all means. Besides, you’re going to train my best friend, right? Or your friend is. I’ve got to know everything I can, for both of you.”
Both of us.
Yes, that was it. I was going to have to keep Kai Mori.
Beach Party
“Snow on the beach?”
The voice came from close enough that it could be meant for no one but me, so I opened my eyes. It was Kai, of course.
He was holding a pale blue drink in a martini glass out in my direction.
“I thought it was supposed to be sex on the beach?” I stretched luxuriantly in the poolside deck chair, then turned and sat up, reaching for the drink. It didn’t matter too much what it was. If Kai had made it for me, it would be good.
