"I'll take that response as a no." His eyes narrowed. "I hope you meet a woman like that one day. Then you'll understand how it was between Mira and me." Jack turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

"Jack," Thomas called after him. "Damn it, don't walk away from me.”

But Jack just kept going.

SIXTEEN

FIFTEEN

Crane listened to the news of their defeat with rage building inside him. His fire answered the call of his emotion, flaring inside his chest until the need to set it free nearly overwhelmed him. Sparks moved from finger to finger on his right hand. Flame tickled his palm. He could spark it into a killing blast of fire with a mere thought. He could kill the messenger standing in front of him, burn him to ash in his calfskin loafers.

He slammed his fist down on the table in front of him instead, sending tiny lightning bolts of power in all directions. A deep ache shot through his arm at his movement. Everyone in the room took a step back.

Crane gritted his teeth, closed his eyes, and drew a careful breath. He hadn't come this far in life by losing control. Killing out of passion or for unnecessary reasons was a waste and a pain in the ass to clean up. No matter how much it might satisfy him to hear someone screaming in agony right now, smell the gratifying crisp of burning flesh, he needed to keep his anger in check.

He removed his hand from the desktop and opened and closed it, feeling the ever-present soreness in his body flare brilliantly to pain for a moment.

This damn cancer. He hated feeling so vulnerable, hated feeling like his body was some foreign thing that had turned on him.

He'd healed himself as much as he could, enough that he could still function, but he was nearly at the limits of his ability. In time, he'd be forced to turn himself over to weasely non-magickal doctors to poke and prod him until he took his final gasp of air, just like any ordinary human bag of bones.

More than anything, that rankled him the most.

He stared at the fine grain of the table. "Must I do everything myself?" he asked the room in a deceptively quiet voice. Fear filled the air, cloyingly sweet and luscious. He raised his gaze and everyone looked away from him. "Well?”

David cleared his throat. "We don't know what happened. All we know is that six of our men went in ready to fight and came back out on stretchers. We suspect the woman, since we sent in two highly skilled water witches to neutralize Jack. Perhaps she's even more powerful than we'd imagined.”

Crane stared at him. "Powerful or no," he ground out, "she hasn't had time to learn to control her abilities.”

David shrugged. "Beginner's luck?”