“Yeah, you’ve told me that several times already.”

“I’m serious,” he added.

“I know you are.”

“For one thing, it’s only been a coupl’a weeks.”

“I know.” I nodded assent as I spoke.

The pair of weeks he was referring to amounted to the period of time it had been since I had played a fairly significant role in the capture of a serial rapist. In and of itself a good thing, except that due to various factors in the investigation-both seen and unseen-I hadn’t been coming across as particularly stable lately. Of course, considering my gift-or curse, depending upon how you viewed it-it was the unseen that really caused the problems.

“And then there’s…” he began, but seemed to purposely allow his voice to die away on the wind. I noticed then that he was staring past me and at Felicity.

What he left unsaid was the fact that the rapist had come after her, actually managing to effect a kidnapping if for only a few short hours. Even though we’d stopped him before he could go any further, in her case, it made it only slightly less traumatic. In light of those events, I could certainly understand his concern.

I looked over at my wife and saw that she was still staring upward, oblivious to our exchange. “I know, Ben. Believe me, I know.”

“You know, Rowan, we set you two up in that apartment for a reason.”

The point he was trying to make was simple: Porter was going to be after me, no two ways about it, and my friend didn’t want me out in the open.

Of course, if your aim is to kill Witches, you might as well go after the real thing, and I definitely made no bones about being just that. Considering everything that had gone on in my life over the past couple of years, I was just about as far “out of the broom closet,” so to speak, as one could be. Therefore, I was not very hard to accuse. I had already admitted it in public-which, by the way, Porter had been sure to remind me of as he pronounced my condemnation and attempted to throw me over the side of a bridge with a noose around my neck.