Apparently the casket druid hadn’t been lying. At least not about the phone. That was a surprise.
“Why didn’t you call here?” I asked.
Her expression went from calm and friendly to angry. “I have! I called repeatedly but I got your boss every time. He told me you dropped the case and to stop calling. He refused to give me your number. Rude fucker!”
He must’ve realized quickly that Gale was mixed up in something and was trying to protect me. It’s amusing that every time she called she got Jim. It was simply bad timing that I was never the person who answered the phone.
“Anyway, I think you have Hugo, don’t you?”
I nodded and tried to smile. “He’s back at my condo. We should go there. You can follow me.”
She frowned. “I saw pictures of a big guy holding him. Does that man live with you?”
“No, he’s only a friend,” I said.
“She’s lying,” a man said, emerging from Jim’s office. I realized two things, this guy was the source of the pot smell and I was meeting Gale’s partner in crime, Lars.
“What do you mean she’s lying?” Gale asked.
“There’s two guys, not one, and they live with her, look,” he said, handing his phone to her. I caught a glimpse of the PixUs app open on his screen.
I felt dumb. If I could use social media to find out things, so could other people.
Gale moved too fast for me to react. She grabbed hold of me and wrapped what looked like a dog collar around my wrist. Suddenly my body was frozen and I couldn’t move at all.
“Where is the dog?”
To my horror my mouth opened and started speaking without my permission. “At my condo.”
“Is he there alone?”
“No, Danzig and Marduk will be there.” Whatever she’d put around my wrist was hurting me. Sharp, stabbing pain was radiating up my arm and making it hard to focus on anything, including fighting this magic.
“Are they human?” she asked.
“No. They are Jörmungandr.”
“What the fuck is a jurgmander?” Lars asked, doing a very poor job of repeating the word.
“They are snake shifters,” I said.
This spell made me answer any question asked, not just Gale’s. Goddamn it!
“Snake shifters aren’t so tough,” Lars said. “I saw Lomis smoke a couple once.”
“Lomis might be able to destroy them, but we aren’t druid,” Gale snapped. “We have access to some of his magic, but not a lot of it. We can’t take a risk.”
Now I had a name for the casket druid. That would be great if I wasn’t in agony and unable to run. The pain had moved up to my shoulder and was spreading across my chest. It was getting hard to breathe.
“Then how do we get the dog back?” Lars asked.
“We use her,” Gale said. “If they’re all living together then she’s probably a mate or flock or something. That means they’ll do anything to get her back.”
“Oh, yeah, good point!” Lars said. “How do we….”
The spell spread up my neck. My body couldn’t take it any longer and I didn’t hear the rest of Lars' question as everything went black.
Chapter 24
