“Ashley stole the belt.”
Bob laughed, the sound muffled as he winced and raised his hand to his nose.
“It wasn’t even difficult. She said she worked for this fae bitch who treated her like garbage— wouldn’t even reply if Ashley greeted her when she was taking out her trash. She walked in one day as the fae was putting it in a safe.”
“And then she stole it.”
“Like I said, it wasn’t difficult.”
“So Ashley gave the belt to Cassie.”
“Yeah. Cassie was her best friend after that. Told us all that Ashley was an example of who we should all be.” Bob’s lips thinned. “Then Cassie put the belt on, and we realized it was the real thing.”
“And the amulet?”
“This other guy Derek, he’s been obsessed with the fae for years. He’d heard about this amulet that would give us all the information we needed to find other artifacts.”
“How did you hear about the auction?”
Bob shifted in his seat. “This girl I work with is dating an unseelie.” He sneered at the thought. “One day they drank too much fae wine and he told her about an auction they were trying to shut down. Apparently, the organizers had strong magic and they kept moving the auction every time the fae got close to them.”
“You figured out it was at the old train station.”
“Yeah. It wasn’t easy, let me tell you. We had two hundred people looking for it–” Bob cut himself off, looking slightly sick. I made a note on my phone. We didn’t have close to two hundred people in these cells. The meeting tonight was clearly just for Cassie’s inner circle. We needed to crack all of their electronics and find the rest of the members.
“So you located the auction. How’d you get in?”
“Cassie got in touch with a witch friend who spelled her long enough to make her appear seelie to the wards and the paranormals. The amulet came up and she bid on it. But she got outbid by the goblin.”
His dismissive tone made my hand twitch with the need to punch him in the face again. “What happened when Merrill won the amulet?”
“Cassie told James to go talk to him. We’d managed to get our hands on more funding and James offered him a hundred grand more than he’d paid for it. The goblin told him to fuck off. Said he had a buyer lined up who’d pay double what he’d bought it for.”
“So you killed him.”
He winced. “That wasn’t me, I swear. It was James. And he wasn’t supposed to kill him— just find the amulet.”
“Where is he now?”
“Uh…”
“Where?”
Bob hunched his shoulders and focused on the metal table between us. “We had to kill him, okay?”
“Why?”
“Once he saw how strong the belt could make him, he became obsessed with it. When you started poking around, he got convinced you were going to find us and steal it back. He attacked you where anyone coulda seen him.” Bob snorted. “Shooting up the place was a fucking idiot move. If the Mage Council had caught him, he woulda squealed and told them everything about us. He was unstable.”
Yeah, no shit. “And my car?”
The blood drained from his face. I wagged my finger at him. “That was you, wasn’t it, Bob?”
“I didn’t plan it. Cassie ordered us to do it, I swear.”
“Uh-huh. So James killed Merrill. And Cassie realized she had a loose cannon on her hands. She gave you the belt, and you tracked the amulet to Gary’s.”
He shrugged. Behind me, the door opened. Samael walked in, and Bob began trembling.
