“The attack Friday night wasn’t about that,” Spencer interrupted. “The werecreatures attacked, yes, but they were possessed by demons.”
Everyone in the room turned to look at him. Levi put down whatever he’d been trying to read. “What?”
Spencer sighed, meeting Levi’s gaze across the table. “Werecreatures were possessed. So were two guests hanging out with Caitlin before the attack occurred.”
Levi dragged one hand down his face. “Well, fuck.”
“Do you know of any active hunter groups in the area?”
“Dowe,” Hudson drawled. He and Kori shared a look before he turned his attention back to his computer. “I’ll get you a list.”
“Why would a demon possess werecreatures and attack a coven?” Levi asked.
“Maybe they don’t like the fact she might have the Ouroboros Mirror. There’s recent precedence of this happening, and we need to factor this new angle into the case,” Spencer said.
“Did you exorcise the demons?”
“Not while I was pretending to be a human servant.” At Levi’s exasperated look, Spencer raised a finger. “The second Caitlin catches wind that I’m a mage and I break souls, we lose the Ouroboros Mirror before we even find it. We still don’t know which coven might have it. I know we’re focused on the Cascade Coven, but we can’t ignore the others.”
“Then what was the whole point of your little expedition Friday night?”
“To see who is circling around Caitlin and figure out which coven might become a problem. We got lucky I saw the demons. Now we just need to figure out if they’re working with Caitlin, for her, or against her.”
Levi grimaced and leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. “And the werecreatures? The Cascade Coven has already started a war of words in the press because of the attack, and the Seattle god pack is responding on behalf of the accused pack.”
“So we ask the PCB if they’re willing to share information on the identities of the werecreatures in their morgue, and we go talk to their packs.”
“They’re never happy to share.”
“Then we go to the source.”
“What makes you think the alphas of the Seattle god pack will talk to you after you pretended to be a human servant? There’s no love lost between the werecreature community and the Seattle Night Court.”
“I know someone who can maybe smooth things over for me.” He wondered if Patrick would charge him a consulting fee. Eh, probably, but it’d be worth it.
Levi reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “We can’t let Caitlin know the SOA is investigating her. Not yet. We don’t have solid proof her coven has the Ouroboros Mirror. Anything less than that won’t get us a subpoena or a warrant.”
Spencer knew from the case notes that the team was following the money, but money meant jack shit when demons were in the mix. He took a long swallow of his coffee, the sugar making his back molars ache a little. “We might not be able to avoid that. We still need to know who the werecreatures are, and the god pack alphas need to be told about the demons.”
“If we tell them, they’ll use it to push back on whatever story Caitlin is feeding the press. People will want to know how they learned that information, and it’ll point back to you. I thought you wanted to stay unknown.”
“I do, at least for now.”
“Going about it this way won’t keep your identity locked down.”
Spencer drank more of his coffee. “I’ll think of something. Do you think the PCB will share the security footage from the gala?”
“Probably not unless we take over the case.”
“What if you asked really nicely?”
Levi pursed his lips. “Why do you want the security footage?”
“I want to find the two possessed people who were with Caitlin and see if we can’t run their faces against the national database for hunters.”
He didn’t trust that those two were innocent. Yeah, people got possessed all the time, but werecreatures? After what happened in London, Paris, and New York City when it came to demons and werecreatures, Spencer’s mind always went to the worst possibility. Demons inside willing hunters and unwilling werecreatures wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities these days. Something like that, once the idea was free of the maybe-not-so-metaphorical Pandora’s box, was never going to be hidden away again.
Hunters would do anything to rid the world of the monsters they hated. They’d justified partnering with demons once before, and Spencer knew they were capable of doing it again. People—not just hunters—could twist anything to suit their point of view when it came to how society should be and the places for people in it.
