“Let her down,” I ordered Bones.

He stepped out from the corner, and her heart sped up. With his black clothes, long coat, dark hair, and gaze back to its natural brown, he must have almost blended into the shadows to her.

“I’m Bones,” he stated in a crisp tone. “It’s my power that’s holding you up there, and I could do far worse if I chose to.”

“Bones,” I hissed. “Stop scaring her!”

“I’m not scaring her,” he replied evenly. “I’m speaking to her in terms she understands.”

His cool gaze never wavered from Katie as he slowly lowered her with each step that he took.

“I know a bit about growing up under harsh circumstances,” he told her. “Makes you understand two things straightaway—who’s got the power and who doesn’t. I do, and you feel it as well as see it, don’t you?”

She nodded, her expression still giving nothing away. I’d seen people centuries old that didn’t have as good a poker face. That she could suppress displays of emotion at such a staggeringly young age was further proof of the warped way she’d been raised. Most children wore their feelings on their sleeve, but whatever Katie’s were, she’d locked them behind that mask of detachment.

That’s when it occurred to me that I couldn’t hear her thoughts. Maybe it was because I was still under the weather from the recent silver-staking she’d given me. I concentrated harder, but got nothing except a solid wall of blankness. Amazing.

Aside from her glowing eyes, she looked totally human. Her skin was too dirty to see if it had the same luminescence mine had when I was a half-breed, but her breathing, heartbeat, and scent all screamed mortal. No wonder it was so easy to forget that she wasn’t.

“Since I have this power,” Bones continued, “you can trust that we won’t hurt you for the simple reason that if we wanted you dead, you already would be.”

“Bones!” I snapped.

“Way to win stepfather of the year,” Tate muttered.

Katie, however, pursed her lips in the first display of emotion I’d seen: contemplation. Then her feet touched the ground as Bones finished lowering her. Once she tested her weight and found that she was standing under her own power, her eyes lost their preternatural glow and began to darken. When they turned to gunmetal gray, I almost let out a sob.

She had my eyes. My nose, too, and here’s hoping that edge to her chin was dirt instead of signs of the trademark Crawfield stubbornness. Without realizing it, I sank down until we were eye level.

And then she spoke.

“You heal like them, but you’re not one of them because your heart still beats sometimes. Why?”