Cass placed his little palms out in an effort to calm me. “No sense in causing panic. Besides, warning humans about a demon fog that makes them turn into raging murderers will only cause mayhem.”
Raging murderers. He saidraging murderers.
“What should we do?” Brock growled, moving to my side.
Cass sighed. “We call Detective Swanson and tell him what’s going on, and we watch the news. If crime spikes, then we have a fog demon on our hands.”
Oh God. Just what we needed. I was so close to sealing that gate! I only needed two more tails and then this would all be over with.
“And if it is a fog demon, how do we vanquish it?” my father asked.
“I have no idea. In the children’s story I grew up hearing, the hero used a ten witch pentacle to kill it. Or something like that.”
Both Tianna and Cho made a slight strangling noise in their throats.
“A ten witch pentacle?” Tianna asked in an agitated voice.
Cass nodded. “Purely fairy tale, I’m sure.”
Cho and Tianna shared a dark look.
“Oh no. What is it?” I asked.
Tianna couldn’t seem to find her words, so Cho spoke for her: “Only the darkest creatures of the underworld need to be taken down by a ten witch pentacle. It’s a spell of near impossibility, and that’s assuming you have the ten powerful witches you need to recite it while joined in a power circle.”
“Ten!” I shouted.
Ten witches were hard enough to find, but tenpowerfulwitches? We had two in this room—I was still riding with training wheels—and Willemena, if we could get her.Three. We had fucking three.
“Let’s just hope it’s not a fog demon,” Cass said, shuffling his feet nervously.
The way my shit show of a life had been going lately, I’d bet my life it was exactly that.
“I’ll call Detective Swanson and give him a heads-up,” I grumbled, and shuffled to the back room that Brock and I shared.
The king-sized bed looked so comfortable. It was calling my name for a long nap. When I reached the side table to grab my cell, I noticed the unopened engagement ring box. I really wanted to open it because I knew it would be perfect, something amazing that Brock picked out with me in mind … but now wasn’t the time. We had a crisis on our hands, and I wanted that moment to be special.
Bypassing the ring box, I put in a call to the detective that Molly, Cass, and I had worked with on the siren case—before she escaped—and waited for him to pick up.
“This is Detective Swanson…”
“Hey, it’s Evie Black. The bounty hunter.”
He sighed. “Tell me the sirens aren’t back.”
I chuckled nervously. “They’re not.” The sirens had slipped out of police custody and I was the last one to see them. I’m sure Swanson didn’t think too kindly of me.
“This is a different … possible threat,” I hedged.
I could sense him clenching over the phone. “I’m listening.” Wariness dripped from each word.
“Well, my bounty hunting partner is from the underworld, and so his knowledge of underworld creatures is a bit better than mine, even though he was raised in Philadelphia, so it’s really children’s stories that he—”
“Ms. Black, I’ve got three open investigations. Can you speed this up?”
I took in a deep breath. “It’s quite possible that a greenish black fog demon is rolling into town and it could make people a bit more murderous than usual.”
Silence.
