Page 30 of Ascendant King

“What?” I asked.

“I put up a glamour to disguise the whole building before you broke the door. Unless anyone walks through it, we should be fine.” He squinted out the window, and I calmed down on my irritation at being so effectively ignored.

“That was efficient,” I said. “Next time, tell me before you do magic of that scale.”

“Do I need to ask your permission?” Cade asked sharply, finally looking away from the window. “I wasn’t aware I neededanyone’sgo-ahead to use my own magic. Unless this is part of being in a pack?”

Everyone else froze, Coral and Lily catching eyes, while Joel played deaf, sitting as frozen as a statue. I felt my lips go tight, my jaw clench. There was giving a pack a long leash, and there was giving them permission to act like a teenager complaining about curfew.

By the way his eyes slid away from mine, going back to the window, Cade knew exactly which side of the line he’d ended up on.

I approached him slowly, knowing if I rushed, I would get there before my temper had cooled enough to have anything other than a shouting match.

“Cade—” I started.

“I apologize,” Cade said immediately. He still wasn’t looking at me. “It was a great deal of effort to perform it so quickly, and I…”

He trailed off. Him doing the disguise spell had been an olive branch he’d extended, and I’d set fire to it.

“It was a good idea, and it was probably the only reason we had time to discover the bodies,” I said.

Cade nodded stiffly, his eyes still on the window. Finally, I looked out to see what had him so captivated.

In the dark, the city spread around us. The town house was in a nicer area of town, on a hill that was just slightly above the streets beyond it. In the daytime, it must have given a small view of the bay in the gaps between high-rises.

On the tops of the buildings nearby, fluorescent paint glowed, leading a path down to the bay. I couldn’t make sense of the lines, but they were intriguing, impossible to look away from, like waves undulating in the distance.

I was in the water, as warm as a baby’s bath, and it was holding me steady. All this wasn’t important. I could deal with it when I had time.

The back of Cade’s hand brushed mine, and we were floating together. It didn’t matter the history we had because Cade and I were going to be fine as long as we were together. When Cade’s fingers tangled with mine, it was electric, the feeling crackling up my arm.

Something fell behind us. Joel swore, and I jerked away from Cade, breaking the spell. What had happened?

“Magic?” I asked, even though the painted lines didn’t move.

“I don’t know,” Cade said. “It doesn’t look like it, but at this distance, I can’t tell.”

Joel looked up from where he was crouched, disconnecting the computer tower. “Oh, the waves! Boss, you haven’t seen the waves?”

“No,” I said, biting down on a sigh. “What are they?”

“No one has any idea. But they’re all over the city. Some new street artist. The rooftop thing is new.” Joel hefted the tower.

“We good to go?” I asked.

“Found it.” Lily looked up from the folder in her hands. “The information about their renter.”

“Let’s take it to go,” I said. “Order’s up, next car is waiting in line. Let’s get this drive-through moving.”

We headed out, stowing everything in the trunk. Lily handed over the file folders she thought were important, and Cade paused at the top of the steps, staring up at the roof of the house across the street, but the paint wasn’t visible at this angle.

After he collected the magic he’d used in his glamour spell and the ink on my nose and mouth, we got in the back of the town car, Lily and Coral jogging down the block to get their own ride. I stared back at the dark house.

“Someone should call it in… They don’t deserve to be left there,” I said.

Cade didn’t say anything, but I could feel his eyes tracing over my profile. He exhaled finally. “Let’s go.”

In the car, I reviewed the rental application, the results of the credit check, the work history. “Our mystery dealer is Craig Kaur.” The passing streetlights illuminated a near perfect credit score. “He worked for some companies I don’t know. We’ll have to look into it. But everything on here is corporate. How did he go from that to working a corner?”