The whoosh of the cooler door opening again spurs me to at least roll over. Is she coming back to finish me off with a dastardly spell? Or has she changed her mind about leaving me to die?
As it turns out, it’s neither of those things.
“Jensen,” a blurry figure hovering above me snaps. “What did I tell you?”
I couldn’t speak to answer, but I was all too aware.
Don’t screw this up.
CHAPTER 2
Cressida’s office is an elegantly decorated art deco paradise. Her desk—a smooth expanse of onyx black—stands before an emerald green accent wall, stenciled with a gold geometric pattern that makes me feel ever so slightly dizzy if I look at it too long. The carpets are thick enough that I’m pretty sure the agents on the floor below us haven’t heard her yelling at me for the last twenty-six minutes, although her big, brassy voice has managed to rattle the pens in her vintage pen holder more than once.
At least the chair I’m sitting in is comfortable enough.
Still, this feels like the second time in two days I’ve faced death. As if maybe Cressida saved me from an allergic reaction only to murder me herself by tearing me apart with her bare hands in her well-appointed office.
She stops ranting for a moment, and I think I’m supposed to say something here. Explain myself, maybe? Apologize?
“Captain Caine, I?—”
Her deep brown eyes darken to nearly black and she practically hisses, “Did I tell you that you could speak?”
So, okay, I was wrong. Not the moment to apologize.
She launches into a litany of all the things I’ve done wrong since I joined the MBI. It’s an embarrassingly long list, although I would argue that a list of all the things I’ve done right would also be pretty long. I’m not a total screwup.
I mean, this might not be the first time I’ve been screamed at in Cressida’s office, but it doesn’t happen regularly.
“I’m tired of this, Jensen. You’re the one agent on this team I have to have this conversation with regularly.”
Fine. I guess Cressida has a different definition of “regularly” than I do.
She finally winds down, her hands jabbing the air less aggressively, her voice lowering until we no longer need the plush carpet to absorb it. She rakes one hand through her short black hair and sinks into the chair opposite me with a long-suffering sigh. “Jensen,” she begins, “I just can’t keep covering for your mistakes. You didn’t just put yourself in danger today. You let a murderer get away. Who knows how many people will die because you just had to have a snack?”
I open my mouth to explain about how nervous Emily would have been, how I needed to be in character to keep Granny Annie from becoming suspicious, how meltingly yummy that brownie had looked in that display case.
Honestly, even though that brownie almost killed me and may have destroyed my career, it was almost worth it. That’s how good a brownie it was.
At least Granny had taken pity on me and sent a telepathic message to Cressida letting her know I was in the walk-in cooler, dying.
Possibly she’d sent the message to taunt the MBI thinking I was already dead. Either way, I hadn’t died. And that means I still have a chance to bring Granny Annie to justice.
“Captain, I know I can fix this. Just give me some time and I’ll track her down.”
Cressida folds her hands together on the desk in front of her, her skin snow white against the sleek ebony wood. She’s wearing a perfectly tailored emerald green skirt suit, as usual. It’s her signature color. I don’t think I’ve ever seen in her anything but emerald green. “No, Jensen. You’re off the investigation. And honestly, I really should fire you, but there’s been a development.” She leaned forward. “In The Witch investigation.”
The MBI pretty much exclusively investigates witches. Sure, we may look into a shifter here or there, and there’s occasionally some cryptid that shows up on our radar acting particularly dastardly. But when it comes to magical creatures going bad, it’s almost always witches.
Even so, there is no confusion at all regarding what witch she meant. At the MBI, there is only one witch that everyone refers to in capital letters—The Witch. The same way the human FBI probably has had The Criminal, or The Bad Guy, or The Mastermind on a most-wanted list at some point. This isn’t justawitch.
It’sTheWitch. And she’s as bad as they come. She makes Granny Annie look like a hobbyist. There’s a huge—and ever-growing—reward for her capture. And while we know what Granny Annie looks like and have some ideas as to her MO, The Witch was a total and utter mystery.
I sit up a little straighter. “Did they catch her?”
Cressida’s lips tighten into a straight line. “No, nothing like that.” Then, as though fortifying herself, she quickly adds, “Not yet.” Her eyes go to the wall behind me.
When I say Cressida’s office is decorated in art deco style, I mean that most of her office is art deco. The back wall, however, the wall right in front of her when she sits at her desk, is one giant murder wall. And every inch of it is covered in informationabout The Witch. Newspaper clippings. Sketch artist drawings from alleged witnesses. Timelines.
