“I’m a witch.” I forced the words out.

  His eyebrow arched.

  A sip of tea didn’t wash away the lump in my throat, but it eased it. “Besides, everyone knows there hasn’t been a necromancer in years. They’re extinct.”

  “You’re right. This place is too public for this conversation.” He signaled for the check.

  As much as I wanted to sneer and say what conversation, I didn’t have it in me. Breathing evenly and trying to get my heart rate back into a normal range took most of my attention, leaving just enough brain power for panic.

  The check floated through the air and landed on the table.

  Harris dropped enough money on it to cover the bill and tip.

  Under normal circumstances, I’d have protested him buying breakfast, but if we were going to fight, it would be over my necromancy, not the bill.

  He offered me a hand.

  “If you think I’m going anywhere with you, you’re crazy.” Any clan, not just mine, would pay him a fortune for turning over a necromancer.

  He leaned down and whispered, “May the earth swallow me if I lie, I mean you no harm.”

  That was a vow no one would willingly break, and we were starting to attract attention. “Fine.”

  Ignoring his hand, I grabbed my purse and walked around him. That promise left out the possibility of handing me over to someone else who’d harm me. Did he have enough evidence for the clans to believe an accusation of necromancy? Hard to say, since I didn’t know what type of evidence they needed. My clan wouldn’t need as much as some of them. Sins of the mother.

  He followed me to Fabian and his Bronco of similar age. “Where would you feel comfortable having this conversation?”

  “Nowhere.”

  A breeze curled around us, and he tucked his hands in his pockets. “We need to talk.”

  “This your doing?”

  His brows pulled together. “What?”

  “The wind.”

  Harris snorted. “Sometimes the wind is just the wind.”

  “Or a witch is just a witch,” I countered.

  “Narzel take it.” He raked a hand across his hair. “Can we please go somewhere private to talk?”

  Only one place came to mind. “My apartment.”

  “I’ll meet you there.”

  That wasn’t exactly what happened. He followed me, maintaining a polite distance but very clearly there. At the apartment, he followed me up the stairs, and when I asked him to wait a moment, he agreed with little more than a raised eyebrow.

  With a quick apology to Bubble, I dropped a sheet over his tank. This was going to be awkward enough without him seeing the fish.

  “Come in.”

  The door closed softly behind him. “Could we try honesty this time?”

  Lying seemed like a good option, but the steely look in his eyes made me think he’d keep pressing until I confessed.

  “What if we try trading secrets?” He pulled back a chair and settled in, elbows resting on the dining room table.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  The seat opposite him seemed too close, but not taking it felt like cowardice. I sat.

  “Most of us, sylphs that is, don’t show off our powers or have the types of abilities that easily attract notice.” His steepled fingers pressed against his chin. “Disciples of Kaikias are an exception. We have chosen a path where we must show ourselves to others.” The look he gave me said that should have meaning to me.

  Problem was, it didn’t. “Being a necromancer carries an automatic death sentence.”

  Harris pushed back from the table and started to pace. “Our schools, how we hide, it isn’t spoken of. I never should’ve told you.”

  “You still haven’t.” And nothing he’d said would make me admit to being a necromancer. The uniform we both wore bought him trust in the field, but not with this secret. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  He stopped in the center of my living room. “Then I’ll show you. Walk toward me.”

  “What will it prove?”

  “Humor me.”

  “Fine,” I snarled.

  Three steps forward and I couldn’t move. No matter how hard I strained, a line of air cupped the front of my body and pushed back with equal force.

  Only six feet away, Harris’s stormy gray eyes narrowed.

  A half-step back, and the air around me was simply air.

  So was Harris. He’d faded until he was as intangible as a breeze, his skin a flesh-toned haze in the air. The only part of him fully visible was his clothing, holding its shape as though something more solid than air filled it. Between one heartbeat and the next, he was back. “As insubstantial as the wind and as powerful as a tornado.”

  “That’s how you avoided the werewolf.”

  He nodded. “But you did something very different with the deer.”

  “Dancing around it won’t matter, will it? You know.”

  His silence was answer enough. I sagged back into the chair.

  “Not everything lined up when I evaluated the evidence at Get Magic Goods. Little things, but enough. You raised Officer Jameson.” His voice was bland, without a hint of judgment or blame.

  “I didn’t mean to.” The words slipped out, and I couldn’t take them back. They shattered the dam holding back my secrets. “He wasn’t supposed to rush in. He’d be alive if he’d stayed back. But he came in, and things spiraled out of control. Then I was on the floor with the man about to kill me. Jameson’s head was turned toward me, and even though he was dead, I could see into his eyes. Then he wasn’t dead. I tore him from rest so he could save me, even though I’d failed him.”

  A drop of water splashed onto my hand. Then another. When my hand brushed across my cheek, there were more tears I hadn’t realized I’d shed. For me, but mostly for Jameson. “I laid him back to rest, but I’d already used him.”

  “The deer?” Harris asked as he took the seat next to me.

  The words felt lodged in my chest, but I forced them out. “It was all I could think of without exposing both of us to the corruption.”

  Now he knew enough to take to any clan. Mine or another, it wouldn’t matter. They’d see me dead and salt my ashes to ensure I couldn’t rise. It would kill my father to lose me that way.

  “Can you raise a person outside of battle?”

  I blinked, bringing Harris into focus.

  He leaned forward and asked again. “Can you raise a person in a controlled setting?”

  “I don’t... I’ve never raised a person intentionally.” But the fey had talked to me.

  “But could you?” Harris repeated.

  Anger started pushing away my fear. “Prior to this week, I’d only ever raised a goldfish. Hardly the mark of a hardened necromancer.”

  He leaned back in his chair with a gleam in his eye. “And this week?”

  Narzel’s bones. I’d said too much to back down now. “Jameson and the fey in the morgue, both accidental. A squirrel and today’s deer. Now you know. I’m a hardened criminal who desecrates the dead and defies nature for fun.”

  “Kelsey, are you listening to me?” His voice dropped to a soothing tone that probably worked well on frightened children.

  “It’s Pine.” I wasn’t a frightened child. My fears were very real and all too likely to come to life.

  His hand, palm up, inched closer to mine. “Wayne and Kelsey.”

  “Pine.”

  “If we’re at the secret-keeping part of friendship, we can do first names.” The silence grew heavy before he spoke again. “My secrets have as much meaning to me as yours do to you. We don’t tell others of our disciplines. We don’t admit how many there still are.”

  “But would they kill you?”

  “Yes.” The word rang through the room.

  My eyes went from the table to his face, finding the same certainty there that I felt.

  “For years, we’ve cultivated a reputation of gentle creatures of air, capable of no more than stirring a breeze.” Air began to swirl around the table, sending a stack of mail crashing to the floor, where it skittered away. “But we can be more. We can blast across continents and become storms of which there is no natural match. They would kill me as surely as they would kill you, for the world is not ready to know what we could be.” The wind focused itself into a foot-tall tornado spinning across my dining room table, picking up stray crumbs.

  I hesitated, my hand hovering above his, with just enough space for the wind he’d raised to pass between. “Can you do those things?”

  A hint of a smile played across his lips. The tornado doubled in size, but the pull of the wind on the rest of the room remained the same. “I am still a young wind and a growing one.”

  “Harris.” My hand touched his wind-chilled flesh. “I am but a young necromancer, unsure of her abilities.”

  His smile broadened. “I have an idea of how you could practice and help the case.”

  “Me too.” I grinned, and for the first time since I’d raised Jameson, I felt like good could come from disturbing the dead. “Now, could that twister drop those crumbs in the trash?”