I slowly leaned in and found his earlobe with my lips, tugging suggestively as I breathed him in, waves of sensation spilling through me. “No,” I whispered, shivering when his fingers gripped the back of my neck. “I want you to do it. You’ve done it before. Right?”

I hadn’t meant to put a sexual innuendo in there, but there it was.

“Sort of.”

His sour tone slumped my shoulders, and I pulled back. His eyes wouldn’t meet mine, but his hands never fell from around my waist and kept me where I was. Wincing, he glanced at the book. “The charm I’m familiar with affixes souls based on aura identification. Felix doesn’t have his natural aura anymore.” My balance shifted as Trent flipped to a new page, his long fingers moving the paper like fingers over a keyboard. “We can use the first part to capture the soul, no problem,” he said when he found it, “but we’ll need to tinker with the second half to find something to affix it to, something not altogether alive and coated in someone else’s aura.”

“Al and Newt have collections of souls. I bet they have a way to affix them.”

Trent stiffened under me. “You’re not asking Al.”

“I know.” I leaned to put my head on his shoulder. It was awkward, but I didn’t care when his arms went around me again. “I’ll ask Newt unless you have something in your library.” This was nice. I didn’t want to move.

“Newt isn’t any better than Al,” Trent muttered, but we had little choice. Elves and witches seldom worked with souls, and never to affix them to a nonliving thing. The Were’s focus was kind of like a soul. Maybe I could use that curse?

Trent squirmed, and I got up knowing he probably wasn’t altogether comfortable. “We’ll find something.” I needed professional guidance, but my professional guide was pissed at me. Fidgeting, I looked at the cookies, wishing I had something better to offer Trent. I’d seen his taste in cookies, and I was a bohemian by his culinary standards. “You don’t have any more books on the subject, do you?” I asked as I pulled the bag to me and snapped one to check for staleness. Flat.

“No.”

“Maybe simply capturing Felix’s soul will buy us enough time.”

Depressed, I set the open bag down and sat in the chair next to him. He was silent, waiting until I took three cookies before he reached in and pulled out five. I swear, I didn’t know where the man put his calories. Maybe a box in his basement. “Al would know,” I said softly, and his eyes jerked to me. He took a breath to say something, then hesitated.

“Is that really how you eat those?”

I looked at the bite out of my cookie and flushed. “Yeah,” I lied, brushing the crumbs off. To be honest, I usually separated them, eating the cookie part first and scraping all the frosting into one gigantic wad. But I wasn’t going to in front of Trent.