Page 49 of Fire Dancer

I handed it to her, channelingassisting nurseat an open-heart surgery.

“Paddles,” Pippa murmured.

I whipped out a couple of chunky cork things.

Ha. I was getting good at this.

When Pippa had said she was making a wine decanter set, I’d nodded gravely. Eventually, I figured out that meant wineglasses with a matching pitcher. Really, really nice ones with a fishnet design that took an incredible number of steps to make. Pippa mentioned something about the technique dating way back to the Middle Ages in…um…Florence? Venice? Something like that. Tiny air bubbles appeared in each “hole” in that fishnet, though I had no idea how she managed that.

Magic, maybe?

I’d been watching closely for signs, but there was a fine line between skill, talent, and magic. In this case, I was willing to give skill and talent the credit.

Last night, on the other hand…

I was still reeling from the sight of a fiery pegasus galloping into the sky — and I bet Pippa’s father was too. I was sure he hadn’t conjured it. Pippa had. Pippa, who’d always bemoaned the fact that she had no supernatural powers.

How could I be sure? Other than Greg’s shocked expression was the fact that I’d been by to see Nash on the ranch a week earlier, and Claire had run over to show us her new pegasus book.

“Wow. Pegasus, huh? With wings and everything?” Nash asked, suitably impressed.

Well, duh. Wings kind of defined a pegasus, right?

But he wasn’t playing dumb. He was giving Claire the excuse to set off on an enthusiastic ten-minute lecture about winged creatures.

Yes, an eight-year-old lecturing a dragon shifter on flying.

Key point: all that had taken place last week. There was no way Pippa’s father could have known about Claire’s latest infatuation.

But Pippa did.

So many questions. Did Greg’s presence awaken or amplify his daughter’s hidden magic? Was Pippa a Fire Dancer like him? Was last night a first? And, how was it possible for her to smell so good?

That was my wolf side, chiming in with that last question.

I watched her closely in the shop, but it was hard to know. Glassblowing seemed to be part art, part science… Part magic too?

She stuck out a hand. “Blowtorch.”

I pressed it into her hand, and she sent flames licking over the glass. Although she kept the blowtorch centered, the flames had a way of reaching exactly the place she needed at exactly the right intensity. A little hotter on the left, where the glass had warped a tiny bit, a little shorter on the right, where the glass didn’t need adjusting.

When she handed the blowtorch back, I turned away and gave the trigger a quick squeeze. The flames were a fraction of what they’d been for Pippa and far less pinpointed.

The agency classified witches and warlocks into five levels, and what I’d just witnessed was about a class-four on the pyromancer scale — low, in other words. But the fiery pegasus was the work of at least a class-two pyromancer, with one being the highest rating.

So, Pippa was all over the scale.

Witches and warlocks, like shapeshifters, typically come into their skills in puberty,I remembered the agency lecturer saying, way back when I’d first joined.But their skills often emerge in fits and starts…

Pippa had been a late bloomer in terms of developing…er, girl parts. But, boy. She was a super late bloomer if her supernatural powers were only coming out now.

That, or something, had suddenly accelerated the process. Maybe that recent run-in with Harlon Greene? The sisters had been pretty tight-lipped about how they’d defended themselves against a powerful warlock, but I’d overheard hushed references to tapping into a nearby vortex.

Could that have been the catalyst that finally made Pippa’s powers start to emerge? And, hell. How far did they still have to go?

Chapter Twelve

INGO