Soulbound: A Lone Star Witch Novel (15 page)

Sickness—and a new worry—churn inside of me. The need to stay right here with the victim is deep inside of me. Just the thought of driving away from here, from her, is barbed wire in my gut. What am I going to do when Nate actually tries to leave? Throw myself out of the car?

The rational side of my brain says that will never happen, but it isn’t exactly in control here. Obviously. If it was, I never would have left the Paramount, or if I had, I would have taken a cab straight home instead of wandering downtown Austin in search of a mutilated woman.

As Nate walks away a second time, I slide my feet out of Lily’s prize—and now ruined—shoes and consider making a run for it. But where would I go when I can’t leave this damn lake?

A few minutes later I’m still debating what to do when I see people dressed in clothes labeled T
RAVIS
C
OUNTY
M
EDICAL
E
XAMINER
walk by, carrying an obviously full body bag. I try to look away—I don’t want to see—but the barbs prick at me until I turn back to follow their progress down the sidewalk to the big white van on the corner.

They open the back doors, slide her in, before closing the van back up.

And that’s when it happens. The second the doors close behind her, the spell turns off and the compulsion that has been riding me for the last two hours disappears. I am free to go.

As the realization sets in, it takes every ounce of self-control I have not to run screaming down the street and away from this hellhole. And even that probably wouldn’t have been enough to keep me here—I’m actually reaching for the door handle when Nate once again opens up the driver’s-side door.

This time, though, he slides into the car beside me. Despite his raincoat, he’s now as soaked and muddy as I am.

“How are you doing?” he asks as he starts up the car and pulls away from the curb.

I want to ask him how the hell he thinks I’m doing, but antagonizing the homicide detective doesn’t seem
like a good idea. Besides, he’s just being nice, just trying to be my friend. I can’t blame him for that, even if what I really want right now is just to be left alone.

In the end, I say, “Fine,” and he leaves it at that. At least for a few minutes. But when he starts to make the turn onto the major street that will lead him to the house I share with Lily, I freak out. I know she won’t be there yet and I can’t stomach the idea of being alone, even for a little while.

“Can you take me to the station?” The words are out of my mouth before I even know I’m going to say them.

Nate glances at me dubiously. “Don’t you want to go home and take a shower?”

I know I must sound like a nut-job, but I don’t care. “I can’t go sit in my empty house right now. I see her every time I close my eyes and I just—”

Nate reaches over and pats my knee. His hands are clean, at least until they touch my jeans, and I wonder how he managed to keep them from getting dirty in all that mess. Then it hits me. Gloves. “It’s okay,” he murmurs, his voice low and soothing. “You don’t have to be alone.” The soft rumble of his tone calms me on a visceral level and I wonder if they teach classes in this stuff at the academy or if Nate is just really good at dealing with hysterical women. Maybe it’s a little bit of both.

“Is there someone I can call? Someplace else I can take you?”

“My roommate will probably be home in an hour or so.”

He sighs, runs his still-clean hand through his hair in a what-the-fuck gesture that’s hard to miss. “You want to come to the station with me? I have some preliminary paperwork to get done. By the time I finish, your roommate should be home.”

“Thanks.”

He nods, keeps driving. “You know, pulling the girl
out of the lake tonight was really brave, trying to see if she was still alive. I’m proud of you.”

“Yeah, because I’m so brave. I won’t even go home to the completely nonthreatening house I’ve lived in for the past four years.”

“Hey, don’t beat yourself up. The first time anyone sees a body—especially one that got that way through violence—is difficult. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

I don’t correct him, though the other two bodies are burning brightly in my head—and my conscience.

The rest of the ride passes quickly as Nate asks me questions about what I was doing down on Town Lake in the first place. I dance around the inquiries, knowing this is an interrogation of sorts, but Nate doesn’t seem to mind the way I leap around. Or maybe he just doesn’t recognize it as such. Either way, I must do a good job, because he seems satisfied when we finally pull up in front of the precinct.

I follow Nate inside, through the main lobby and up the stairs to where he works. There are a lot of people still in the precinct—police officers and civilians—and I’m a little shocked at all the hustle and bustle at this time of night. Not that I have anything to compare it with. The only other police station I’ve ever been in is Ipswitch’s and since very little criminal activity happens in my hometown, I don’t think that counts.

“The bathroom is over there,” he says, pointing to the back of the room. “In case you want to clean up.”

“I do. Thanks.”

He just nods, yanking off his mud-encrusted coat and dropping it on the floor near his desk.

I hurry to the bathroom and one look in the mirror assures me—freaked out or not—I should have let Nate drop me at home where I could spend the next year of my life in the shower trying to get clean. Standing here, with nothing but a faucet and some paper towels,
I’m not sure that anything I do will make a dent in the disaster.

Still, I can’t spend the night looking like the Creature that escaped from Town Lake, so I gingerly make my way over to the sink. I start by doing the same thing Nate did, dropping my jacket on the floor next to me. Then I wash my hands and face. I don’t think there’s anything to be done to salvage my clothes—the sweater I’m upset about, the jeans not so much—but I try anyway. Which seems incredibly shallow, even as I’m doing it. How can I care about a sweater when that woman is dead?

Twenty minutes later I decided I’ve done the best that I can with what I’ve got. I’ve pulled my hair back from my face with a butterfly clip I found in my purse. It’s still filthy, but I draw the line at washing my hair with hand soap in a police bathroom. But at least the parts of my body I can see are all clean, as is the cut under my eye. It’s a doozy and I’m afraid it will scar, but I don’t let myself dwell on it. The last thing I want is to feel that fist hit my face yet again.

I even managed to get most of the mud off of Lily’s shoes. They still need to be professionally cleaned, but at least I can walk without leaving a trail of mud in my wake.

All in all, I’m feeling about as human as I can get when I walk out of the bathroom. At least until I glance toward Nate’s desk and realize that things have just gotten a million times more complicated. Because it isn’t Nate’s gaze I meet as I start across the room. It’s Declan’s. And he does not look happy.

N
ot that I care if Declan is happy or not, I remind myself determinedly. My first glimpse of him sitting over there like he owns the chair, Nate and this entire police station have rage shooting through me. If he’s somehow responsible for this mess—for what’s happening to me and what happened to that poor woman—I swear I’m going to find a way to make him pay.

Before I can think better of it—or think at all for that matter—I’m storming across the room, fury a volcano inside of me just begging to erupt. “What are you doing here?”

Nate looks at me curiously. “You
know
Declan Chumomisto?” I can see him processing the fact that I didn’t mention this earlier and I feel like an idiot for pulling the whole diva act. The last thing I need is to make the police more suspicious—the existence of witches with real, magical power isn’t exactly well known and I do not want to be the one to bring our coven out into the open.

“We’ve met,” I finally tell him. “Briefly.”

Declan raises a sardonic brow at my clipped answer, but he doesn’t contradict me. Instead, he smiles and says, “It’s good to see you again, Xandra. Though I’m sorry my performance earlier wasn’t to your liking.”

“I wasn’t feeling well. My leaving had nothing to do with you.” I refuse to admit how he affects me, to him or anyone else. He might already know, but if he doesn’t…I’m
not going to give him any ideas about picking up where we left off.

“I’m sorry to hear that you were unwell. Are you feeling better now?”

Yeah, because fishing from Town Lake the tortured, mutilated body of a woman who looks remarkably like me was just a barrel of laughs.

“I’m just dandy,” I tell him. “Can’t you tell?”

Something flashes across his face—amusement, remorse, anger—it happens so fast I can’t tell which emotion it is. “I’ve seen you look better.”

“Actually, I don’t think you have. Whenever you’re around, I seem to be at my worst.”

This time there’s more than a flicker of emotion on his face, and I grind my teeth when I finally peg it as amusement.

I
hate
the idea that he’s laughing at me. Or worse, indulging me, like an adult with a cranky child.

The anger ratchets up a notch to full-fledged fury, puts me on the offensive when that’s the last thing I want to do. I’m not a coward, but going head to head with Declan takes more guts than I currently have—at least in a very public police station.

“Why don’t you just leave? I don’t need or want anything from you.”

He holds out his hands in the age-old signal for surrender, which might be believable if his jaw wasn’t locked and his eyes weren’t swirling with power. “What makes you think I’m here for you?”

It’s a reasonable question. I flew off the handle when I saw him, leaped to conclusions that really don’t make any sense. Why would he be here for me? For that matter, why is he here at all? I start to ask, but am suddenly afraid of the answer.

Especially when Nate clears his throat, sits straighter. Up until this point, his head has been bouncing back and
forth between Declan and me like he’s following the ball at a Ping-Pong match.

And even now that the match has stopped, I can all but see his cagey detective’s mind trying to figure out how Declan and I fit together. Too bad for him that there’s no answer to that puzzle. No matter how you twist and turn us, Declan and I
don’t
fit and we never have. Him showing up here after I find a dead body isn’t going to change that.

Nate clears his throat. “He’s here to see me, Xandra.”

Now I’m really confused. It must show on my face because Declan clarifies, “The woman you found tonight was one of my crew.” He doesn’t sound lazily amused anymore. Instead, there’s a thread of his own rage running through the words.

“You’ve identified her already?” I ask Nate, but he’s staring at Declan with narrowed eyes.

“Her purse was found a few yards farther down the lake,” Nate tells me before turning to Declan and demanding, “How do you know she’s the one who found the body?”

Declan raises a brow, then points at me with a languid finger he shakes up and down, as if to say,
Just look at her.
He has a point. It’s not like my bathroom cleanup did much to disguise the fact that I’ve been rolling around in the mud tonight.

“She could have been mugged,” Nate answers.

“Which is why she’s hanging out with a homicide detective?”

“We’re friends.”

This time it’s Declan’s eyes that narrow. “Not such good friends that it precludes her from coming to my show with another man.” The air around us crackles with…I don’t know what. Something unpleasant.

“Stop baiting Nate,” I tell Declan, but my teeth are chattering so hard that I’m not sure he understands me.
Though the police station has the heat turned up, I’m still shivering in my wet clothes. The longer I stand here, the worse it gets.

“But it’s so much fun,” Declan answers as he stands. Without asking permission, he crosses the room to the ancient coffee machine against the wall. Pours a cup, doctors it, then heads back toward us. As he walks, I notice every eye in the place is on him. The two other women in the room watch his every move with a sensual interest they don’t try to hide, while the men very obviously see him as a threat. More than one cop’s hand moves to rest on his gun while Declan passes.

Then he’s back, standing in front of me and thrusting the cup of coffee into my trembling hands. I take a grateful sip, then nearly spew it back out. No wonder Nate hits Beanz at least once a day. This stuff is horrific. But I’m in no position to complain—it’s hot and sweet and exactly what I need to keep the shock at bay.

“Where is Lina?” Declan asks Nate without sitting back down.

“At the morgue. But it’s closed right now. I’ll set up a time for you to identify her body tomorrow.”

Declan nods. “That will be fine.” He turns to me. “Come on, Xandra, you need to get home before you catch pneumonia.”

Nate stands up. “I’m taking her home.” He gestures to the redheaded man who is sitting at the next desk, and who I also saw at the crime scene. “My partner has a few questions for you—”

“Which can wait until tomorrow. Xandra’s coming down from an adrenaline rush and when she crashes, she’s going to need to be at home.”

He wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me into his side, completely disregarding the fine cashmere coat he’s wearing. I try to pull away—the last thing I want is Declan Chumomisto manhandling me—but the adrenaline
crash he’s talking about must be setting in because I have almost no strength. In fact, I feel like my legs are going to go out from under me any second.

“Actually, the questions can’t wait.” Nate bites out the words from between clenched teeth. “And again, I brought Xandra to the station and I will be the one to escort her home.”

Declan smirks, actually smirks. “You’re welcome to try.”

Shocked and a little uncomfortable, I try to shrug him off as Nate moves out from behind his desk. But Declan holds firm even as Nate gets in his face. “You don’t get to decide whether or not you answer these questions.”