Heart breaking, I rushed around the table and wrapped my arms around Elizabeth. At first, we were of a similar height. Then pain radiated down my limbs as the bones elongated and skin stretched. I smoothed her hair and rocked her while jagged magic buzzed through my body, transforming me until the world took on a different perspective. Lori was gone—my hold on her had slipped. I was Camille now, but the girl didn’t care. She just wanted to be held and told everything would be all right.

As much as I wanted to speak the words, I kept them in where they couldn’t make me a liar.

The door burst open behind us, and a couple smelling of burning leaves charged into the room. The woman’s hair smoldered, red and glittery, as she scooped up Elizabeth and cradled the girl against her chest.

A thin crimson rim flickered around the irises of the brown-eyed man who must be Mr. McKenna. When he spoke, smoke poured from his mouth. “She’s suffered enough.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “She has.”

The couple exited with their daughter nestled tight in a blanket I was now willing to bet was flame-retardant. I stood there, expecting Vause to bustle in behind them and critique my performance in her detached way. When she failed to appear, I sat back down and braced my forearms on the table that was much easier to reach now.

I must have dozed off, because when a deep throat cleared, I jerked upright and wiped drool off the corner of my mouth. Time had passed, but I wasn’t sure how much. A minute. An hour. However long it had been, it hadn’t been long enough to rid my eyelids of their sandpaper texture. “What?”

Graeson set a paper cup of steaming chai on the table and scooted it toward me with a finger. “Drink that.”

After our morning spent inhaling carbs together, I didn’t argue. I wrapped both hands around the paper cup and let the warmth thread through me. I brought it to my lips and moaned while knocking back the best latte I had ever drank. He watched me lick my lips with unsettling attentiveness. I tapped the rim with my fingertip. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“I know,” he said, a world of meaning saturating those two words, but I was too exhausted to ring the intent from them.

With the cup drained, I searched for a trash can but came up empty. “Where’s Vause?”

“Otherwise occupied.” He took the opposite chair, the better to lock stares with me. “This is why you were grieving.”

There was no point in lying. He would smell that too. “Yes.”

His jaw clenched. “Vause had no right to ask you to do this.”

“We got our ID.” I wasn’t ready to discuss Lori with him yet. “Now we know Charybdis is a kelpie.”