I let her voice flow over me, storing it in parts I hadn’t known existed until now. Her vocabulary was years above her age, much like the rest of her traits, but her voice held the high, youthful tenor of a child’s.

“Because once,” I said huskily, “I was like you: part human and part something else. Special.”

“Katie.”

Tate crouched next to me, smiling at her with a sheen in his eyes that he didn’t attempt to blink away.

“I know I look different since I shaved and cut my hair, but you remember me, don’t you? You crushed my neck five seconds after we met.”

“Six,” she corrected with a solemn little blink.

He grinned. “All right, six. The only other girl to kick my butt that fast is Cat. She trained me to fight, you know.”

Dark gray eyes met mine, causing me to draw in a breath. Would I ever get used to seeing my own eyes look back at me from that tiny face?

“I remember you from the base,” she stated. “You tried to make me come with you. You are very hard to neutralize.”

From her tone, that last part was a compliment, though I wasn’t sure how to respond. The person she remembered trying to “neutralize” back then had been Denise, shapeshifted to look like me. In actuality, Katie had only tried to kill me once, and she’d damn near succeeded.

“Thank you,” I settled on, adding, “you’re very tough, too, but you don’t have to be anymore. We’re going to take care of you.”

Then I couldn’t help it; I took her hand. She flinched, her fingers tightening on her knife. After a glance at Bones, her grip loosened.

I let her go. If her first instinct was still to stab me, it was obviously too soon for tactile displays of affection.

Tate’s gaze tracked what happened, too. He put his arm around my shoulders, giving me a firm squeeze.

“Cat is my friend,” he said cleanly. “I hug my friends sometimes to show I’m happy that they’re there. Or I take their hand like this.”

His fingers twined through mine, and he held our hands up. She stared as though he’d magically pulled a rabbit out of a hat.

I understood then, and couldn’t stop the tears. Katie had never been taught to touch anyone except in violence. No wonder she’d flinched when I took her hand. She thought I was about to hurt her.

“You poor little girl,” I whispered. “It’s okay now, I promise.”

“Isn’t this sickeningly sweet?”

The mocking purr didn’t come from Ian, though from his expression, he’d been thinking something similar. Tension rocketed through my emotions as Bones’s power erupted, firing toward that voice, only to have it dissipate like he’d funneled it into a vacuum.