I needed to get her.
And I couldn’t understand why.
A column of fire shot up in the air and I fell to my knees, grasping my horns and feeling like I could rip them out of my head if I wasn’t careful.
Everything was wrong. I’d never lost control like this before, never felt like this for a bounty before, but there was no stoppingme. I burned and burned, saturating the air with the foul odor of brimstone.
Violent energy poured out of me until there wasn’t a drop left and I went down to my hands, gasping for breath.
The werewolf kid from earlier skidded to a stop on his scooter from the other side of the street, safe from the residual licks of flame. He stared at me wide-eyed.
“My mom says it’s important to get the big feelings out.”
I let out a pained chuckle. “Is that right?”
“Yeah. Do you feel better now?”
I groaned, resting back on my heels and wincing in pain. My lungs felt like they’d been barbecued, my throat ashy and raw. “A little.”
The kid nodded knowingly. “Ice cream helps, too.”
6
Home Sweet Home
Ilicked the melting drop of ice cream from the cone before it hit my hand, my other hand on the wheel and the windows rolled all the way down.
That kid was on to something.
I’d officially run out of leads in Noctis. The other two witch apothecaries had been dead ends, so my next stop was to go back to Cindralis and start looking up her family. I’d found the address of her parents’ house easily enough. That generation of Magiks still thought online phone books were a good thing, not knowing they should keep that kind of personal information private.
It was a long drive, which gave me plenty of time to think on the way and organize my thoughts.
I re-listened to the few conversations I’d recorded and made a basic timeline.
Five years ago, Sage, a witch omega with some heart problems, was a hard-working double-major at Umbris U with an elf boyfriend and merfolk best friend. One night, at her part-time job at the Sable Mansion, she spilled a little blood, and after that, she was gone in a puff of smoke.
A team of vampires in uniforms came to clean out her apartment, and Sage withdrew from school, a few months shy of graduation. After that, Sage or another person went to great lengths to scrub the internet of her presence, and then both her boyfriend and best friend died by what I would say are suspicious circumstances.
For nearly five years, there didn’t seem to be any evidence that she was still even alive herself, until she showed up at a witch’s apothecary a few days ago injured, looking for safe passage out of Noctis. There, she’d been put in touch with Morgana Vale, noted Magik ferryman for those needing to hide.
My nemesis, if I dared claim one.
Finally, a day and a half ago, the Premier of Noctis hired me to find her, claiming she’d stolen something valuable. But he wouldn’t tell me what she’d stolen or how she’d stolen it, only that he wanted me to deliver Sage—unharmed and untouched—to him so he could retrieve it from her personally.
Those were the facts as I had them.
Now for the conjectures.
Whether it was someone else’s doing or her own, she’d been in hiding for the past five years. And since she wasn’t wealthy, that meant someone else was footing the bill for her basic needs. But it wouldn’t have been out of the goodness of their heart, so she was likely providing them with some sort of service.
She was also covered in scars that looked like bite marks she hadn’t had before she’d disappeared, which meant she’d been attacked at some point.
I began to growl, and with no one around, let it run its course before taking a bite of my cone and continuing with my train of thought.
Okay, so after five years of that, she escaped with an item of great importance to Premier Corvane. She had to have been connected to him somehow, either personally or through a mutual acquaintance, for her to have gotten close enough to steal something.
And what was the item? I sincerely doubted it was the cat. It had to be small enough you wouldn’t necessarily notice it on her since she had shown up at the apothecary without any large items.
