Read Online Touched With Sight by Nenia Campbell - Free Book Online

the Otherkind's were. It wasn't.
    Child's play.
    He fashioned a key of ice from the vapor in the air, breathing it into solidity with a rush of ice-chilled wind. It was exquisite, as fine as crystal, shaping itself to the interior of the lock perfectly, but he didn't have time to appreciate his work; the key was made out of ice, and would soon melt and lose its shape. Impossible to trace. The basis of the spell's appeal.
    Finn shut the door behind him with an inaudible click and leaned against it for a moment. Not a creature stirred, except for his own heart. Shape-shifters were highly territorial and did not take kindly to trespassers. In the past, he'd been forced to hunt down shifter fugitives and bring them in for a bounty. The shape-shifters had always resisted capture.
    Always.
    The wind he conjured up cushioned his footfalls, allowing him to stalk as silently through the house as any hunter. And tonight, he was the hunter—and she, the quarry.
    And the book , he reminded himself. That's what he was here for. The book. She couldn't be trusted to guard the tome. Not when there were so many others seeking it out, as well.
    If she was not a practitioner of black magic, or affiliated with the Slayers, Finn wasn't sure why it had chosen her to be its keeper—because it had chosen, there was no question of that—but whatever the reason, he doubted its veracity. No good could come of her keeping it.
    He glanced around surreptitiously. The furnishings were worn, but of passable quality. A vase of fresh flowers stood on an end table in the foyer. He could smell their cloying sweetness from where he stood and could only imagine its potency for the shifters. Perhaps it was to mask the odor of exhaust from the nearby roads. Or to deaden the senses entirely.
    There were portraits on the walls. A wedding picture. The two children, in various phases of childhood and adolescence. An ordinary dwelling to any untrained eye. They were taking their role of Glamor seriously. What a pity their daughter stood to compromise everything they'd attained.
    He walked up the stairs, still carried by the air. For a human, the old boards would have creaked. Part of the charm of these old houses was the additional benefit of their creakiness providing a first line of defense against intruders. Magic was the ace in the hole.
    Finn found himself in a long hallway, lined with more portraits. The children were older here, the girl recognizable as the woman she now was with her cat-like stare and her gypsy locks. The boy, with his fair hair and blue eyes, was her opposite. Finn wondered if the mother had strayed in her youth, whether the older child was the product of an illicit liaison with a foolish witch.
    It might be worth looking into.
    A sudden burst of loud snoring gave him an unpleasant start. Scowling, he peered into the doorway from where the sound was coming from—her parents, as it turned out. The boy's room was next, redolent of unwashed clothing and sweat, and something else, which made Finn wonder, with disgust, whether the child had taken to marking his territory. Disgusting creatures.
    The last bedroom, then, must be hers.
    Soundlessly, he opened the door and entered her room. It was sparsely decorated, with bare white walls and furniture that appeared to have been handpicked by her parents—it matched the haphazard décor downstairs, as if everything had been lifted from a consignment store.
    Clothing was scattered around the room. The desk was piled high with jewelry, clothes, and papers. And large, precariously stacked towers of books. She did have a number of books, which surprised him. She had led him to believe that she was a simpleton, and a fool.
    There was only one book in particular that interested him, though.
    His eyes narrowed. Where had she hidden it? Gods, her room was a mess. That was only to be expected. She wouldn't want to risk leaving the book out in plain sight. Perhaps this was all a clever ruse to thwart him. In