He usually only did that when he was nervous, bored or angry, and it was kind of obvious which was the case here.
“I just meant,” I paused, because my brain was still half asleep and I was making a hash of this. “I meant that it would have bothered anybody. Jonathan is a nightmare—”
“Yeah. Who’s gunning for you.”
“And who’s not going to get me.”
Billy paused to scrape a match across the sole of his boot and light up. The match was his energy, and so was the boot and the cigarette, all part of the same ghostly package. Yet the movements had always seemed to calm him.
And he looked like he needed it.
“I’m going to be blunt,” he told me, when he’d taken a couple of puffs.
“All right.”
“There’s death and then there’s death. I’ve seen a lot of shit, but I’ve never seen anything like that skinny bastard of a mage, and I don’t want to. What he did to Jo—”
Billy paused to smoke some more.
“It was awful,” I agreed.
“It was worse than awful. Look, we all got a time to go, right? Even us ghosts. You can’t dodge the Grim Reaper forever, and maybe we shouldn’t want to. Maybe there’s something better out there, who knows? But Jo’s never gonna get a chance to find out. She’s stuck, she’s suffering, and she’s permitting a mad man to cause a lot of other suffering. And if he gets his clutches on you—”
Billy shivered all over, and then abruptly put out his cigarette on the railing. It concerned me that it actually smoked slightly, as if he was exerting power on it. Or, more likely, that he was leaking power, because he was upset.
“This is really bothering you, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Cass! What part of he wants to wear your face did you not get?”
I started to say something, but he held up a finger.
“Look. Just promise me that you’ll see to it that he’s taken out, okay? He’s under your jurisdiction—he’s a time traveler, and one you brought in! You make the decision on this, not the Senate, not the Circle, and not goddamned Marsden! All right?”
I stared up into eyes so bright that I could actually see the hazel in them. I knew what he was asking, and it would definitely not make me popular with the Circle. I was already on Jonas’s shit list for stealing his favorite war mage; if I killed his prized prisoner, too . . .
Not to mention that I hated killing, particularly the cold-blooded kind. I’d had to kill Lizzie that way, an acolyte who had teamed up with Jo for a while. And it had been . . . horrible. Absolutely horrible.
But when Billy was right, he was right. I’d give Jonas some space, let him get whatever he could out of the man, if anything. But then, if he refused to act . . .
“I know it’s tough,” Billy began.
“All right.”
He blinked. “You sure?”
I nodded, but didn’t say anything.
He bent over and wiped a melted bit of snow off my cheek, and I swore I could feel the brush of a fingertip. “You always get the shit jobs, don’t you?”
“So do you.”
“Guess it runs in the
family, huh?”
I looked up at him, surprised.
He shrugged. “I been dead a century and a half, Cass. You’re my family, if I got one at all. And I don’t like people messing with my family.”