Free Poison Tree by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

everyone,” Lynzi answered, understanding why Alysia asked, “but I don’t normally pay attention unless I feel another Triste or someone unusually powerful. I didn’t feel anything noteworthy before the attack.”
    “Interesting,” Christian commented, then turned to Alysia. “I’ll stay in town today. If there’s another attack, or if you just want to talk without a babysitter around, you’ll be able to find me.” He looked back at the other Triste. “Lynzi,” he said, and offered his hand, which she shook. “Happy hunting.”
    Alysia waited until Christian’s taillights faded in the distance before saying to Lynzi, “So what now?”
    Lynzi gave her a long, measured look, before asking, “Are you still in Bruja?”
    “No.” No matter what doubts and questions Christian had put into her head, Alysia found herself thoroughly glad to be able to answer the question honestly. She suspected that Lynzi would know if she were lying.
    “Do you know who shot us?”
    “No.”
    “As long as you’re living here peacefully and honestly, you are welcome to stay,” Lynzi said. “You are also free to leave, if you want. But if you choose to stay here and you bring bloodshed into my home, then I will need to respond. Is that clear?”
    “Yes,” Alysia answered around the hitch in her throat.
    “Let me know if you and Christian come up with any theories. But you should probably let him sleep a couple hours before you visit him. He’s exhausted.”
    “Remind me never to underestimate you,” Alysia said, resisting the urge to step back from the witch.
    Lynzi smiled and said, “I think I just did. Now, I’m going to go back to bed until a decent hour of the day. Take care, Alysia.”
    “Yeah. Take care.”
    Unsure what else to do, Alysia returned to her room. What next? Did she want to track Christian down? She needed to, if she wanted to solve the riddle of this attack before someone else was hurt, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to face him without her so-called babysitter.
    A knock pulled her from her spinning thoughts.
    “Yeah?” She approached the door to peer through the peephole, and saw Ben leaning against the far wall.
    “Do you have a minute?” he asked. “I’m trying to get this virus cleaned up so I can get the hell out of here, but I could use a second opinion on the code.”
    She reached for the doorknob and then hesitated, feeling some old instinct kick her in the shins. “I can probably help you out, but how did you know to come to me?”
    Through the peephole, she watched Ben’s face fall. Histone stayed mostly upbeat, but his expression was crestfallen as he said, “We worked together on the Mahoney issue a few months back. Just that once, though, so no big deal you don’t remember me.”
    She remembered the job, which had been ten times as difficult as it should have been because SingleEarth seemed to think it would go faster if they assigned as many techs as possible. She had been too busy being angry at everyone else working with her to bother to remember their names or faces.
    “Right, of course,” she said as she opened the door. “Come on in. You can set your computer up anywhere,” she added when she realized he was carrying a laptop bag.
    As he reached into it, she hesitated again; her body tensed for no obvious reason except that some part of her brain was expecting something more dangerous than a computer to come out of the beat-up black bag.
    Ben wasn’t a threat; he was even still limping, as the muscles in his thigh continued to knit themselves together. And Christian had looked right at him without recognition.
    “It’ll just take me a minute to load this,” Ben said. “Don’t suppose you have a Coke or something I can steal?”
    Geeks and caffeine
, Alysia thought, with some humor. “I wish,” she answered. “I haven’t had a chance to stock the fridge since I got here.”
    “I wonder what got in the way,” Ben said, so dryly she wasn’t completely