I focused on the photos again. The more I looked at the pictures of the witches, the more I doubted they were involved. Zane aside, witches and their covens were a close-knit group. Refining Blue Alhuirn on the scale that Max had mentioned would require a lot of space. Not an easy secret to keep.
I tapped one of the photos. “Do you really think witches are refining the plants?”
“Makes the most sense. They’d need magic to conceal what they were doing and an in-depth knowledge of how to do that sort of thing.” He glanced at me. “You get taught all about plants and how to extract their properties, right?”
“Yeah, to a certain extent. And there are plenty of books on the subject if you want to take it further.”
“So yes, a witch or witches seems most likely. Why?”
“Because it would be hard to keep something like that from your coven, and nearly all witches belong to a coven. The rare few that don’t are still heavily monitored. Even more so, sometimes.”
My gaze lingered on the fae guard. I rubbed my jaw as an idea tickled at the edges of my mind.
“What are you thinking?” Max murmured.
“What if the witch or witches weren’t known to the council?”
“Is that possible?” Max asked, frowning. “I thought all of you are registered from birth.”
“Fuck, that’s true.” I stared at the board, still clinging to that train of thought. “But what if somehow the council thought they were elsewhere?”
Max’s lips twitched. “You mean elsewhere as in a fae prison, perhaps?”
My head shot up. “You’ve already thought of that?”
“It had crossed my mind. If for some reason a witch is convicted of a crime against the fae, it’s not unusual for them to be transferred to the Fae Realm to face punishment. In that case, the council would rightly assume that there was no need to monitor them while they were incarcerated.”
I sat up, excited. “And if for some reason they were released early, yet the council weren’t informed, then they could, in theory, slip under the radar.” I was clutching at straws, but I was too caught up in the whole thing to let that bother me. No wonder Mase had chosen to stay on and work with the paranormal police. This shit was exciting.
“How likely is that to happen, though?” Max mused. I didn’t know if it was rhetorical or not, so I kept quiet. “Our communication with the high court isn’t always the best, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility.”
“Were there any witches at the prison when Melhak worked there?”
Max smirked. “Like I said, you’re not just a pretty face, are you?”
“Fuck off.” I grinned because it felt like we were on to something.
“I’ve put in a request for information on witches handed over to the Fae Realm in the last five years. Hopefully that should come back today. Tomorrow morning at the latest.”
“What about any that have been released recently?”
Max grimaced. “I can’t do that from here, and I’d rather wait until Axel comes back and send the request for information through him rather than through another gateway.”
I nodded. “Makes sense.” If one guard was involved, what was to say more weren’t? “You reckon it’s the same witches who killed the hunter?”
“Seems likely.”
We lapsed into silence then, both of us looking at the board. My gaze kept coming back to the fae guard. If he’d worked at the prison, he’d have had access to all sorts of nasty specimens. From what I’d heard, fae prisons were notoriously awful though. What had made him risk becoming an inmate? I had no idea, and thankfully, it wasn’t my job to find out.
As interesting as this had been, my head was starting to ache, and I had plenty of my own work to do. “So,” I said, throwing subtlety out the window. “How long do you reckon Dathal will be needed to consult on this investigation?”
Max’s expression softened and I didn’t like the way my chest tightened. “If these leads pan out how I think they will, then I don’t think it’ll take us all that long to track down the witches responsible. But things rarely work out that easily.”
I huffed out a frustrated laugh. “So you’ve no idea, basically?”
“No, not really. Dathal is here until we find out who’s responsible, and then he’ll return to the Fae Realm. Whether that takes a week or a month…” He shrugged. “You like him, eh?”
My knee-jerk response was to say no and laugh it off, but something told me Max would understand. “I do. More than makes sense.” Dathal’s magic seemed to have had an effect on my words too, because I wasn’t normally that quick to talk about my feelings. “I hardly know him. We’ve been together once, but he’s all I can think about.”
