Spell Bound - Kelley Armstrong [17]
After I’d been quiet for a few minutes, Adam glanced over.
“Case files?” he said. “I’m sure if we’d had witch-hunter investigations, we’d remember them.” He looked closer. “Oh.”
My search was for all cases where we’d helped someone who’d been screwed over by demons. Not surprisingly, they comprised a healthy portion of our business.
“You want to talk about it?” he asked.
“No.”
He paused, then said, “All right.”
“I’m oka—” I inhaled. “No, I’m not okay and you know it. But if I think about it too much, I’m going to really not be okay. I just want to concentrate on the case and try not to stress out until I’m sure there’s something to stress over.”
“Agreed. So focus on the witch-hunter.”
He shot a pointed look at my laptop. He was right. My parents had much more experience with demonic pacts, and they were on the best side of the veil to investigate them. Let them handle it. Concentrate on the immediate threat.
I shut my laptop.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “Whatever happens, you’ll be okay.”
I nodded, chugged the rest of my beer, and headed to the bathroom to get ready for bed.
The next morning, I called one of my black-book contacts. Molly Crane, a dark witch. Molly always had time for me. Not because she was a good friend. Not even because she’d been good friends with my mother. No, Molly had time for me for the same reason I had time for her. I was useful. She was useful. Sometimes, in our world, that’s what it comes down to.
When I asked whether she’d ever heard of witch-hunters, her sigh was so loud, I swore my phone vibrated.
“Not that bugaboo,” she said. “Let me guess. Paige told you about them. Typical Coven witch bullshit. She may think she’s above that, but let me tell you—”
“It wasn’t Paige.”
“Oh. A client, then? A witch claiming someone wants her dead just because she’s a witch. Dig deeper, Savannah, and you’ll find that she’s crying racial profiling to cover up the fact that she’s done something to deserve being on a hit list.”
“That’s what Paige thinks, too.”
That was all the incentive Molly needed to give her opinion a oneeighty spin. Molly was the type of person who’d never moved far from a high school mentality. To her, Paige was one of “those” kids—the cute, smart, popular ones that girls like Molly hated. Whatever Paige said was wrong. Dead wrong because that Harvard degree she’d earned didn’t mean she was actually clever, just school smart.
Molly didn’t go so far as to say she believed in witch-hunters. But she trotted out every scrap of information she’d ever heard, and promised to canvass her contacts and send me anything she found because, you know, the legend of the witch-hunter has been around a very long time, and there could be something to it.
“All Molly has is the same basic folklore we heard,” I said to Adam when I got off the phone. “A line of women, raised to kill witches, go on a murderous walkabout when they reach adulthood, then return to live normal lives and raise their daughters to do the same. They have no supernatural abilities. It’s all training. Ideally, they never even face their victims, just kill them in a way that looks like an accidental or natural death.”
“Such as injecting them with poison while they nap. Or pushing them in front of a truck.”
“That last one was lame. It wasn’t even a very big truck. I think someone just wants to get a second notch on her belt and go home. Maybe if we see her again, we can make a deal. I’ll play dead. She can snap photos. Everyone’s happy.”
“She may have decided you’re more work than it’s worth.”
“I’ve heard that before,” I said. “Usually from guys. I’m high maintenance.”
“Nah. I’ve had high maintenance. You’re just stubborn. And opinionated.”
“Don’t forget difficult.”
“That goes without saying.”
I smiled. “Well, as tempting as it is to hope this girl will give up on me, it only means she’ll latch onto another witch, one who won’t see