Page 51
And she believed him.
“The problem is we’ve only been at this for a couple days. And as much information as we’ve gathered on our own, I think we need the help of someone who…” Bradley paused, his bent knee bouncing up and down.
“Someone who does what?” Devra asked.
“Deals with this sort of stuff all the time. You know, professionally.”
“A professional hex breaker?” She couldn’t keep the skepticism from her tone.
“Not a hex breaker, exactly, but like, a professional someone. A mystic. A witch. A person familiar with the dark arts. Someone who could point us in the right direction.”
“I don’t suppose Ms. Esmeralda has a contact form on her website?”
“Unfortunately not. Trust me, I checked.”
His reply made her giggle—how seriously he said it, how invested he was. How thorough. A man who worked hard to give her what she needed.
Her thoughts strayed to how he’d touched her yesterday. The feeling of his hands and his mouth being everywhere at once. Massaging her inner thighs, pressing inside her, hitting that perfect spot, embracing her from every angle until her pleasure was all- consuming. I haven’t done that in a long time, she’d told him. In truth, she’d never had someone touch her that way. Noah had been decent in bed, or so she’d believed at the time, but with Bradley, it felt different. The eagerness of it, the selflessness. How her climax seemed to ripple through him too, with him groaning in ecstasy as she came undone under his patient and skilled hands. He hadn’t even asked her to reciprocate. And she had wanted to reciprocate. Badly. To taste the salt of his skin. To feel him twitch and shake as she took his length into her mou—
“I know!” Bradley exclaimed, snapping her from her straying thoughts. “The tarot card reader at the Mayfair Mall.” He jumped back over to his keyboard and began typing.
“The what?”
“The tarot card reader. At the mall.” He pressed a button, and the printer churned out a page. “How did I not make the connection before?”
“A tarot card reader. A mall tarot card reader?” Devra experienced another twinge of concern, her emotions bouncing around from blind ecstasy to a knocking apprehension. Was Bradley guiding her toward a solution or zigzagging around and making things up as he went?
She pushed her doubts away as he grabbed the page off the printer and returned to the stacks of research sprawled out on her living room floor, flipping through papers, searching for evidence. Evidence, she reminded herself. They were working off theory supported by actual evidence. For as much as Devra believed in her curse, in this supernatural element that was as much a part of her as her wavy brown hair, it was logic and patterns she revered the most.
“That case from several years back with the boy who developed those inexplicable headaches, remember?” Bradley was still searching through one of the piles. “The mother was desperate to find a solution, willing to try anything. She took him to an infamous fortune teller and practicing Wiccan a few towns over.”
“Right…”
“And the fortune teller used tarot cards to help the mother find the missing link. The hexed toy train the boy had inadvertently been given by his grandmother.”
“Okay. But that was in a tiny borough in Pennsylvania. You really think a big city mall,” she emphasized the word again, “tarot card reader is going to have the same insightfulness and abilities as a practicing Wiccan in—?”
Bradley slapped a paper onto her desk. He pointed at one of the sentences. “Look at the name of the fortune teller in Pennsylvania.”
“Lysandra Thornfield of the Whispering Moon Coven.”
He slid a second page next to the first. “And now look at the name of the woman at the Mayfair Mall.”
“Adele Ariadne.”
“Read the whole thing.”
“Adele Ariadne of the…Whispering Moon.”
“It’s the same coven. So if Lysandra was able to break this boy’s curse, Adele Ariadne could be just as legit. They might share the same level of knowledge, the same level of magic.”
“Maybe…”
“It could also be a coincidence, I know. But maybe it isn’t. Adele could be the real deal.” Bradley took Devra by the hand, pulled her up from her work chair, and spun her around. “Come to the mall with me, Devra.” He dipped her then, and Devra’s head rushed from the abrupt movements, up and down and up again. “What’s the harm in trying?”
“The harm is it’s the mall. At Christmastime.” Her breathing was already growing unsteady at the thought. “The last time I dared to shop in December, this potential serial killer who drives an unmarked white van chased me around an unending maze of my worst holiday triggers.”
Bradley just laughed. She loved that laugh. The fullness of it, how it undulated over her like morning light.
