"We lost them," Nissa said. Keller sat back and let out her breath. For the first time since she'd entered the mall, she allowed herself to relax minutely.
We did it.
At the same moment, Winnie turned. She pounded the backseat with a small, hard fist. "We did it! Keller-we got the Wild Power! We..." Her voice trailed off as she saw Keller's face. "And, uh... I guess I disobeyed orders." Her pounding was self-conscious now; she ducked her strawberry-blond head. "Um, I'm sorry, Boss."
"You'd better be," Keller said. She held Winnie's gaze a moment, then said, "You could have gotten yourself killed, witch-and for absolutely no good reason."
Winnie grimaced. "I know. I lost it. I'm sorry." But she smiled timidly at Keller afterward. Keller's team knew how to read her.
"Sorry, too, Boss," Nissa said from the front seat. She slanted a glance at Keller from her mink-colored eyes. "I wasn't supposed to leave the car."
"But you thought we might need a little help," Keller said. She nodded, meeting Nissa's eyes in the mirror. "I'm glad you did."
The faintest flush of pleasure colored Nissa's cheeks.
Galen cleared his throat.
"Um, for the record, I'm sorry, too. I didn't mean to charge in like that in the middle of your operation."
Keller looked at him.
He was smiling slightly, hesitantly, the way Winnie had. A nice smile. The corner of his mouth naturally quirked upward, giving him a hint of mischief in all but the most serious moments. His green-gold eyes were apologetic but hopeful.
"Yeah, who are you, guy?" Winnie was looking him up and down, her dark lashes twinkling. "Did Circle Daybreak send you? I thought we were on this mission alone."
"You were. I belong to Circle Daybreak, but they didn't send me. I just-well, I was outside the shop, and I couldn't just stand there..." His voice died. The smile died, too. "You're really mad, aren't you?"
he said to Keller.
"Mad?" She took a slow breath. "I'm furious."
He blinked. "I don't-"
"You stopped me. I could have killed him!"
His gold-green eyes opened in shock and something like remembered pain. "He was killing you."
"I know that," Keller snarled. "It doesn't matter
what happens to me. What matters is that now he's free. Don't you understand what he is?"
Winfrith was looking sober. "I don't know. But he hit me with something powerful. Pure energy like what I use, but about a hundred times stronger."
"He's a dragon," Keller said. She saw Nissa's shoulders stiffen, but Winnie just shook her head, bewildered. "A kind of shapeshifter that hasn't been around for about thirty thousand years."
"He can turn into a dragon?"
Keller didn't smile. "No, of course not. Don't be silly. I don't know what he can do-but a dragon is what he is. Inside." Winnie suddenly looked queasy as this hit home. Keller turned back to Galen.
"And that's what you let loose on the world. It was the only chance to kill him-nobody will be able to take him by surprise like that again. Which means that everything he does after this is going to be your fault."
Galen shut his eyes, looking dizzy. "I'm sorry. But when I saw you-I couldn't let you die...."
"I'm expendable. I don't know who you are, but I'm willing to bet you're expendable. The only one here who isn't expendable is her." Keller jerked a thumb at Iliana, who lay in a pool of pale silver-gold hair on the seat beside Galen. "And if you think that dragon isn't going to come back and try to get her again, you're crazy. I'd have died happy knowing that I'd gotten rid of him."
Galen's eyes were open again, and Keller saw a flicker in them at the "don't know who you are."
But at the end, he said quietly, "I'm expendable. And I'm sorry. I didn't think"
"That's right! You didn't! And now the whole world is going to suffer."
Galen shut up and sat back.
And Keller felt odd. She wasn't sorry for slapping him down, she told herself. He deserved it.
But his face was so pale now, and his expression was so bleak. As if he'd not only understood everything she'd said but expanded on it in his own mind. And the look of hurt in his eyes was almost insupportable.
Good, Keller told herself. But then she remembered the moment she'd spent inside his mind. It had been a sunlit place, warm and open, without dark corners or shadowed crevasses. Now that would be gone forever. There was going to be a huge black fissure in it, full of horror and shame. A mark he would carry for the rest of his life.
Well, welcome to the real world, Keller thought, and her throat tightened and hurt. She stared out the window angrily.
"See, it's really important that we keep Iliana safe," Winfrith was saying quietly to Galen. He didn't ask why, and Keller had noticed before that he hadn't asked why Iliana wasn't expendable. But Winnie went on telling him anyway. "She's a Wild Power. You know about those?"
"Who doesn't these days?" He said it almost in a whisper.
"Well, most humans, for one thing. But she's not just a Wild Power; she's the Witch Child. Somebody we witches have been expecting for centuries.
The prophecies say she's going to unite the shape-shifters and the witches. She's going to marry the son of the First House of the shapeshifters. And then the two races will be united, and all the shapeshifters will join Circle Daybreak, and well be able to hold off the end of the world at the millennium." Winnie finished out of breath. Then she cocked her strawberry-blond head. "You don't seem surprised. Who are you, guy? You didn't really say before."