It smelled of old coffee, stale magic, and whatever Finnic had spilled in it the last time he’d used it.
“Dear God,” Didi muttered, wrinkling her nose. “Is that dwarf ale?”
Samuel released a long-suffering sigh where he sat next to me in the front.
“Finnic doesn’t drink ale,” Barney said coolly, turning a page in his newspaper. “That’s mead. A particularly potent batch, judging from the residue.”
“That dwarf is a menace, sober or drunk,” Mrs. Chen grunted. “Also, why is the vampire reading a paper?”
“He does that on stakeouts,” Samuel muttered. “It calms his nerves.”
“I don’t have nerves,” Barney said irritably.
“He’s right,” Mrs. Chen said flatly. “He doesn’t even have a pulse.” The witch eyed Barney’s newspaper. “Is that today’s edition?”
“Yesterday’s,” the vampire admitted. “I prefer to digest the news at a measured pace.”
“At your age, I imagine everything is at a measured pace.”
Barney’s pupils flashed crimson for a fraction of a second.
Didi’s expression was close to the one she wore when she was thinking of turning somebody into a toad.
“I assure you, my reflexes are perfectly adequate,” the vampire told Mrs. Chen with cool dignity.
“Good,” the elderly witch said, turning back to her herbs. “You’ll need them tonight.”
Mrs. Chen had arrived at Hawthorne & Associates that afternoon with a leather satchel of supplies and the kind of calm determination that said she’d been preparing for this kind of confrontation her entire life. Mimi had apparently been left with strict instructions to guard the apartment building and judge anyone who walked through its doors.
I decided to ignore the background chatter happening behind me and adjusted my earpiece.
“Nigel, you there?”
“Present and all tentacles accounted for.” The boogeyman’s voice crackled nervously through the connection. “I’ve got Melody’s GPS on screen. She left her house four minutes ago.” He paused. “She’s heading north on Route Seven.”
“How many in the car?” Samuel asked.
“Thermal signature shows fouroccupants,” Nigel reported. “Melody and three others. That matches the Ashgrove witches Mrs. Chen and Didi spoke to.”
He’d connected to a satellite, something I didn’t know Hawthorne & Associates had access to until Samuel had authorized it. It was apparently owned by a supernatural conglomerate.
Convincing Melody to cooperate had been hard enough. Getting the Ashgrove witches on board had been doubly so. Melody, Didi, and Mrs. Chen had spent the better part of the afternoon at their property talking in hushed tones through a barely open door while the binding magic fought to keep the witches silent.
In the end, Mrs. Chen had done what Mrs. Chen did best. She’d been blunt.
“I told them the witch subjugating them was draining the Lincoln sisters on a convergence point and that we had a werewolf who could break the spell holding them hostage,” she’d reported when she and Didi finally returned. “Two of them cried. The third tried to slam the door in my face.” She’d sniffed. “I put my foot in it.”
The story the Ashgrove witches and Melody would feed Esmeralda was simple: they’d come to warn her that Hawthorne & Associates had located the warehouse and were closing in. A panicked visit from her own pawns would be exactly the kind of thing the Thornwick witch would expect.
Unease coiled through me.
Melody’s role was the most dangerous in all of this. As the most visibly compromised witch, she had to sellher performance while fighting the binding’s grip on her mind.
“She’s turning onto Blackwood Lane,” Nigel announced.
My wolf stirred. So did Samuel’s, his alertness singing across the mate bond.
Blackwood Lane was the road that led to the Thornwick property.
