One More Bite by Jennifer Rardin

when Tolly clomped up the stairs in her open-toed platform slides and called out, “Let’s have ourselves an entrance, shall we?” The wooden rocker beside the royal-blue couch I sat on began to move on its own. Immediately afterward the candles Cassandra had arranged in the fireplace all flamed at once.

    “Nice,” I said as she sashayed through the door. I tried hard not to wish Cassandra was beside me. Psychics pick right up on that crap, and she had nobody else to mind the store today. Plus, what harm could there be in a little magic lesson from one of her buds?

    I tried a laugh and just managed a weak cough as Tolly introduced herself and in the same breath said, “Cassandra tells me you’re a Sensitive.”

    “Yeah.” I told myself if she didn’t touch me she couldn’t See how wide my powers had stretched since I’d shared my blood with others—Vayl and Trayton included—not to mention accepting the tears of an Iranian power named Asha Vasta. She might not like knowing that now I’d scented her psychically, I could pick her out of a rioting crowd and follow her through a sandstorm.

    She closed the space between us, holding out her free hand for a shake, her other weighted down by an enormous bag covered with quarter-sized metal plates that jingled softly when she moved.

    Putting off the inevitable, I said, “Wow. Your fingernails are really—”

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    “Spew green,” she informed me. “It’s my own brew,” she went on, like we were discussing a great piece of cake. Her eyes sparkled. “Don’t worry, my Sight isn’t based on touch.”

    I shook her hand. “Sorry. I’m just—trained to be cautious.”

    “And private?” When I didn’t answer she nodded. “Okay, we don’t have to go into the event that birthed your Sensitivity. Nobody likes to remember that kind of violence anyway. Just tell me. What did you feel when I lit the candles?”

    “I never feel anything. It’s what I see in my mind. Like a new color mixed with the memory of a dream.” I shook my head. “I don’t know how to describe it any better.”tretter.”<

    “And?”

    “Yours is fresh. Like silver rain on a mountain lake.”

    She nodded. “That’s Wicca. True witchcraft will always show the same shade to you now. What Cassandra tells me you’re about to face is not real witchery. They only call themselves that because they know it hurts the rest of us, and they love spreading pain.”

    “How do you know so much about Floraidh and her coven?” Despite Tolly’s connections to Cassandra, I found myself mentally reviewing the weapons I currently carried. Just in case. She dropped her bag on the floor, where it landed with a metallic clunk. Sinking into the rocker, she clasped her hands in her lap and asked, “How old do you think I am?”

    What the hell? Weren’t we just talking about witches? “I don’t see—”

    “Humor me.”

    I shrugged. “Twenty-seven.”

    “I’m fifty-three.”

    I stared at her for a full thirty seconds, looking hard for the plastic surgery scars. But that still shouldn’t have been able to hide the youthfulness.

    “Bullshit.”

    She shook her head. “I was one of them once. I worshipped Scidair right alongside them. If I told you the things our coven did to cheat death you’d puke all over Cassandra’s furry white rug here. As you can see”—she gestured to her face—“they’ve learned how to put the brakes on. But they still haven’t succeeded completely. Floraidh’s group is the most powerful both because they descend from the first priestesses who buried Scidair, and because they still guard her cairn to this day. We think Floraidh is nearly a hundred and fifty years old.”

    This was all news to me. Her birth records put her age at just over forty, and nobody knew what her coven wanted beyond the power its alliance with Samos had given it. “Did Scidair live a