Hidden (Hidden Series Book One) (13 page)

“Okay,” I whispered.

He held it between two fingers, testing it.
The third time, no blood gurgled from the wound.

“Do you know any healing spells?” he
asked.

“I don’t use magic,” I said. I meant,
I
don’t think I have magic to use
. His big green eyes said what
his mouth didn’t.
It sure looks like you were using magic in
there
. “I was trying to recreate something I saw Sophia and
Emma do this morning. It involved blood and fire.”

He opened his hand and held his pinky close
to my eyes. A pink scar stretched from the tip to the middle. “I
was tested with a group. Colors swirled everywhere. Like a rainbow.
Just a few drops of my blood filled the room with royal blue
smoke.”

Why didn’t my blood do that? “Everyone had a
color?” I asked.

“Yep. I was blue. The wolves were green. The
witch was purple. They even tested the obvious ones. A bite sized
pixie fogged the whole room with yellow.”

I knew what the colors meant. The nuns had
taught us, for what that was worth, about each of them. I was
supposed to be purple. I didn’t change forms, I looked human, and I
made weird things happen. Witch. The perfect example of a witch.
Other than that I’d never used a spell or potion or snapped like
Sophia and Emma did.

Which seemed like a monumental problem in
the wake of the blood test.

“Was it so shocking that you wanted to see
it twice … with a different cut?”

“Definitely shocking,” I whispered, my head
cloudy with what all this meant, my sanity dissolving even more. I
wanted to try another finger, just not with him here.

“I can close this up for you. Warning … it’s
weird. I’ll have to lick your hand,” he said, smiling now.

It was the wrong time to let him in. I
should’ve told him I needed a minute so I could sort through this
on my own. Then he raised my hand to his mouth, and I didn’t think
that anymore.

He started with the little cut on my thumb
with the lightest touch of his tongue against the broken skin. It
burned, everywhere except the cut, in the best of ways.

“It works for me,” he mumbled over my
finger. “Hopefully for you too.”

He pulled my finger from his mouth, and the
skin was closed, but not as precisely as Sophia would’ve done it.
It was still red and swollen and would probably scar.

The second finger took longer. I didn’t mind
it. His mouth was warm, and I could feel the ridges of his perfect
teeth against my skin. I had to think of how tragic this moment was
to keep my finger still and my eyes off of his lips.

I could
not
be human. It would make
me even more insane. A complete psychopath.

But I hadn’t imagined having powers. Even
tonight I’d willed the knife to appear. The fire to light the
candles. What was I, if not a witch?

“I heard them too,” he said, dropping my
hand. He pulled my toothbrush from the cup and laid it on the
counter. He filled the cup with water, and I followed behind him as
he splashed it on my blood trail. “Paul told me that Remi was
shifting in front of a human, and they think the guy was a hunter
since he’d been staring at them all night. They
all
have a
habit of staring. He said Emma was freaking out and he wanted to
get her home after she blinded him, so he did the spell without
thinking and left the guy right there in the alley.”

He ran back into the bathroom and came back
with a towel. As he dabbed up my blood, I thought about the times
I’d moved without walking. It was immediate. I’d wanted to be
somewhere else, and I’d landed there. No spells. No talking. Just
an accidental thought.

“Emma was trying to help … but her idea of
help sort of sucked. I don’t think he saw it coming.” He snickered
at the pun.

I finally took the towel from him when it
dawned on me that he’d mostly cleaned my mess. He’d gotten most of
the blood out of the carpet, but I took another pass at it.

I gathered the candles, washed them off,
then tried to get as much blood out of the towel as I could.
Luckily, he’d chosen a navy one for the cleanup. I rinsed the blood
from the knife and buried it deep in my drawer, under my combs and
brushes.

Nathan was sitting on the edge of my bed
when I finished.

“From my room, it sounded like she made her
do a cleansing,” he said. “Why would you want to recreate that?” I
glared at the damage I’d done to myself in an attempt to cleanse
magic I probably didn’t have. What were the chances of there being
some magical blood that could pass the test? I felt very sure that
the answer was zero percent. “Does it have anything to do with why
Sophia took you? Did you do something?”

“Yeah, I wanted to hurt these girls at my
school, but I didn’t,” I said. “I wanted to do the cleansing
because I thought it would help me not want to do that again. Like
… fix my magic.” I shook my head. Magic. God, if I had magic, I
would’ve just seen it. “I don’t even know anymore, Nate.” The
pressure in my chest tilted me forward, and I buried my head
between my knees.

He rubbed my back, warming me. If I was
going to have a proper sulking session, he’d have to leave or at
least stop touching me.

“It’s amazing how much we have in common,
besides the fact that I turn into a dog at some point during most
days.” He laughed, and I surprised myself by chuckling. Nothing
should be funny right now. “I also had to figure myself out and get
over stuff. Like what living in the house with John and Theresa was
like.”

I sat up, and like I’d done it every day of
my life so far, I leaned against his shoulder. For him and for me.
I needed to lie on something, and I wanted to erase the sadness in
his voice. He lifted his arm and drew me closer into his nook. I
felt so tiny next to him. I leaned into him, so confused I could
scream.

“I was sort of bored downstairs. Is it cool
if I stay for a while?” he asked. I nodded and forced my body away
from his. He pulled me up from the bed, and I trapped the meltdown
over the complete and utter collapse of everything I knew about
myself inside of me, saving it for later. “We have the house to
ourselves. Paul and Emma went to his parents’ house, and Remi is
probably somewhere drowning kittens.” I laughed, the exact opposite
of what I should be doing. “I came here to laugh about your little
robot they’re showing on the news.” He chuckled, and I groaned.
That was even more embarrassing than the yearbook picture. I was
mortified until he put his arm around my shoulder. “We don’t have
to watch the news, but since you own this huge TV, we should watch
something.”

I corrected him on our way to the sofa,
telling him that it was more of a rental, and that sparked his
interest in how much I’d paid Sophia. When I told him, he gawked
and mouthed, “Wow.” Ten minutes into a crime show, he said, “That’s
right. You’re a high caliber, rich orphan.”

I nodded, conveniently leaving out
how
rich. For some reason, I was ashamed of the money. Like
since he’d lived on the streets and I’d inherited millions, it
would make us incompatible.

My heart sank. That might not be the only
reason we were incompatible now. I couldn’t be his friend if I
wasn’t a witch. But I
had
to be a witch. I had powers.

That thought spun in my head, looping and
twirling, until everything stopped, like I’d run out of thread and
the empty spool had the answer.

Human agents and hunters have powers. He’d
told me that last night, but I couldn’t be one of them without
knowing it, right?

“Nate…”

“
Yes
?” He dragged out the word, still
looking at the screen. The handsome detective was close to solving
the murder, at least the music hinted at that.

“What kinds of powers do those agents and
hunters have?” I asked.

He hummed like he was thinking about his
answer. “They can do all sorts of things. The first time I was
captured, I was in Los Angeles. I’m from there. It was raining that
night, and I snuck into a fast food place on four legs and got on
two in the empty kitchen. For some reason, I thought it was a great
idea to take a to-go bag.” He laughed and smacked his forehead. “So
I’m trotting along with this bag of human food like an ass, and
this woman in all black touches me. In a second, we were out of the
rain and somewhere else. She didn’t say a word.”

I slammed my eyes shut. It sounded a lot
like what I could do.

“And not just another place, a different
climate. Different region. It was so hot. And she was so skinny but
lifted me up with no problem.”

“Wow,” I said. He was huge as a dog. On his
hind legs, I wasn’t much taller than him. I’d say he was a wolf,
but his face was less wild, and his fur looked well groomed and
clean like he belonged inside.

“Then she slapped a leash on me. I didn’t
see or smell the leather in her hands before. And she opened the
cage but wasn’t close enough to do it with her hands. She flung me
inside, but I didn’t feel her touching me. It was … the scariest
thing I’d ever seen. Freaks! Human freaks!”

Was I one of them?

Nathan’s stomach growled and reminded me I
was hungry too. We went into the kitchen, and he volunteered to
make dinner. That consisted of him boiling water for spaghetti
noodles and heating up sauce out of a jar.

“Her name was Kelly,” he said. “The woman.”
We’d been talking about what to eat for dinner since we’d left the
room, but I was hoping he would bring her up again. “Her brother’s
name was Oliver.”

I brought two plates to the stove. His pot
splattered hot spaghetti sauce all over it. I reached around his
back to turn down the burner, resisting the urge to touch him. Or
maybe I should’ve just been bold and felt his muscles. If I were
human, I’d lose him soon anyway. And Sophia, this house, everything
I’d gotten since the fire alarm.

“They told me their names, so I would tell
them mine once they’d forced me to shift.”

“How’d they do that?”

“Cold water. It doesn’t bother me anymore. I
know how to control myself now.” He piled clumps of noodles on the
plates. He hadn’t stirred them enough, I guessed. He didn’t bother
with a spoon for the sauce. He tilted the pot over the plate until
the noodle clumps were covered. “Anyway, they seemed pissed that
they couldn’t figure out my name. They knew everyone’s but mine.
That’s how I found out the worst thing about them. They’re …
psychic.”

I stuttered for a second while he looked at
me with raised eyebrows. “Psychics don’t exist,” I said. “It’s just
something witches made up when they were coming out of hiding to
get humans to trust them and seem useful.”

“That’s the oddest thing I’ve ever heard,
Chris. Their powers are from their brains. I don’t really know how
it works, but they read minds and manipulate things with their
thoughts. You’d need a spell or something for that. You know that.
Witches aren’t psychic.” The plates slipped out of my hand, but he
managed to put the pot down and catch them before they fell. It was
quiet for a moment. “Let me guess, nuns told you witches could read
your mind, right?” I nodded, still in shock. He laughed. “And you
believed them even though you couldn’t do it?”

I couldn’t answer, and he chuckled again. He
took our nearly shattered plates to the patio. As we ate the
surprisingly tasty spaghetti, Nathan volunteered to school me in
Agent and Hunter 101.

“Agents work for the government. Really,
they work for Lydia Shaw and she works for the … I don’t know …
maybe the U.N. or something big. Hunters are more freelance, but
they both have powers,” he said. “It’s like they can just do things
with their minds. Lift you. Move things. And they just know things
about you. Kelly had to call Oliver in for me. She said he was
stronger. She said he could hear every thought that goes through my
head, but he couldn’t. Just me though. He could totally hear
everyone else.”

I wanted to face plant into my dinner. I
could hear thoughts and no one else here could. And I couldn’t hear
Nathan’s, just like Oliver and Kelly. I was psychic like hunters
and agents, and from the disgust in his voice, my first friend
hated hunters and feared agents. With good reason.

“So do these people sign up with the
government and show them their powers to become one of them?” I
asked.

“No. Humans don’t know the truth about Lydia
Shaw and people like her. The government thinks they use special
weapons. Silver bullets and coated arrows and stuff. They go
through this secret training to expand their minds or whatever.
They’re normal people before that. Oliver sat in front of my cage
for an hour trying to figure me out, saying he hadn’t felt that
powerless in years. I went ahead and told him everything he wanted
to know so he’d leave … since I was completely naked.”

He held his hands over his chest like he had
boobs to cover. We both laughed. How did he do that? Manage to calm
me down and make me forget to be upset? My entire life had been a
lie – a lie I’d told myself – but I was laughing over dinner with
Nate.

“Anyway. Oliver told me he trained for ten
years for his powers and he’d never had more trouble cracking
someone.”

Ten years? Finally something that didn’t
fit.

“So none of them were born that way? Like
didn’t go through the training?” I asked, my voice soft, timid.

He looked up, considering my question.
“Well, yeah. Some.” I concentrated on my breaths, keeping them even
and slow, so I wouldn’t pass out. “After two days, Kelly and Oliver
brought me back to L.A. because I wouldn’t make them any money.
They said I was a harmless boy that was sometimes a harmless dog
and the agents would never detain me. I was living behind a store,
and this shifter, a wolf who thought he was better than me,
mentioned he’d come across this really awful hunter once.”