“Ell?” Donovan asked, his voice shaky. He needed to get her attention but didn't want to interrupt her.
She waved her hand to him, palm outward, as if to say stop or stand back. Or maybe it was simply part of some spell. He didn't know.
In the middle of the backyard, she’d pointed to a spot for him on one side of the space. Then she’d propped the ancient, leather-bound volume between them. Tilted toward her, the pages began to turn in the light breeze. Slowly, one by one, they flipped.
Or maybe it wasn’t the wind at all.
Donovan didn't ask. His job was to stay silent.
Eleri’s eyes looked glazed. He told himself that it was okay. He'd seen this before. He'd seen Eleri work spells with Grandmére. That still didn't stop it from being creepy as all fuck. And it didn’t stop him from wondering if—maybe this time—something was actually wrong. He bit his lip and worked to not intervene.
She turned and walked solemnly into the house. For a moment, he wasn't confident that her feet actually touched the ground. Maybe she’d figured out how to walk on a slight cushion of air. She made no sound as she moved barefoot through his house. His superior hearing should have picked up the noise, however slight, had her feet actually contacted the floor.
Slowly, she moved from room to room, stopping in the middle of each, checking all four walls in turn. He could only imagine it was some spellwork equivalent of night vision goggles that allowed her to see things that the rest of them couldn't.
Eleri checked every room in his house. Every closet. In the bathroom, she slowly pulled back the shower curtain. And when she was done with all of it, she stood in his open kitchen space and turned to look at him.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
Then she was Eleri again.
“He didn't come inside.” She said it with her usual intonation, and offhandedness, and damn if that didn't freak him out as much as the rest of it had. But he knew he was going to have to learn to live with it. Eleri was constantly gaining new skills.
While she'd already shown Donavan how she could now light a fire in a bowl, he hadn’t yet figured out what use that particular trick might have. He was glancing around the room, checking to see if she’d left any psychic traces behind that he could see, but he couldn’t.
She tilted her head and closed her eyes. When she opened them, once again, they were unfocused. Turning, she headed out the front door, her feet still not quite touching the ground. Eleri walked the yard in a grid pattern, and he wondered if he was seeing the intersection of the FBI agent and the witch.
When she’d covered everything and still hadn’t spoken, she headed up the stone stairs and traced every inch of the front porch.
Blink. Blink. Blink. Then she was Eleri again.
“He pulled up the driveway,” she said, as though she hadn’t just emerged from a bizarre trance. “Then he came to the door. He knocked, but pretty quickly figured out you weren’t home.” Her eyes darted around the space, as though she hadn’t really seen it the first time. “He tried to look in the window, but it seems he didn’t see anything.”
Donovan was grateful for keeping the curtains pulled. He’d even checked for cracks in the drapes, an old practice from his father’s shady dealings. But, in general, it wasn’t smart for a wolf to be seen, even in his own home.
Her voice pulled him back to the present. “And then he got a call.”
“What?” Donovan asked.
“A phone call. Something that took him away.”
“Did he take anything?” Donovan asked.
“No,” she said, and then stopped. “Wait. He didn’t take anything. But he left something.”