9. The coven house #2
By the time I can finally find the words to speak again, I push past my red cheeks and nervous belly to ask Riordan what our first step is.
To my surprise—though I probably should’ve known better—he wants to talk to the witches who know as much about what happened to their sisters as Riordan and his brother do.
On the drive over to the coven house, Riordan fills the silence so effectively, it’s not as awkward as it could be.
Now, that’s not to say that it isn’t awkward.
I’m so vividly aware of both his alpha wolf nature and the neon green wisps joining us in the cruiser he’s driving that I’m sitting ramrod straight in my seat.
As though he could sense how uptight I am, Gus had jumped from Riordan’s shoulder onto my lap.
I absently stroked his tail while Riordan watched the motion of my hand with a strange look on his face.
He snapped out of it once he started the cruiser. That’s also when he filled me in on some of the details he learned by reading Max’s notes.
Max’s notes didn’t tell Riordan much more than we already know about how Faith died.
Another witch found her body near the edge of town early the next morning when she didn’t return back from scouting the borders and working on the wards.
The witch immediately called Delilah, who brought the sheriff right in.
Based on the precise claw marks that killed Faith, he suspected the murderer had to be a wolf from the beginning, but—just like with Olivia— there wasn’t a scent left behind for him to track.
There was, however, one other thing: a small potion bottle found near Faith’s body.
Max thought she might have tried to use whatever was inside of it to fight back, but he never figured out what it was.
According to Riordan, Delilah was trying to do the same thing, which is one of the reasons we’re going to see her first.
Delilah was also the reason Faith’s murder stayed quiet.
She and Max agreed that, until they knew exactly what happened, announcing that a witch had been mauled by a wolf would cause more trouble than it solved.
The relationship between Moonburrow’s coven and the Moonshadow Pack has been rocky at best for nearly a century.
The shifters founded the town about a hundred years ago, with the witches coming later and eventually establishing their own coven here.
Most of them seem perfectly content with that arrangement, but there have always been witches who think that because magic protects Moonburrow, they should be the ones in charge of it.
Olivia was one of them. Two murdered witches with what looked like wolf wounds could turn old resentment into something much uglier before Max ever had the chance to find out whether one of his wolves was actually responsible.
Like Max, Riordan believes that it has to be a Moonshadow wolf. So while we’re going to visit Delilah—who is expecting us—Max is interviewing as many of his people as he can. With his alpha-given lie detecting ability, he’ll be able to tell if the wolf he’s talking to is guilty or not.
As almost an aside, the Beta mentioned that he offered up his curse to see if he could order the killer to confess.
He admitted he’d had to do something similar after the first time there was a murder in Moonburrow, but the curse made him so sick for a while after that, Max refused to let him now.
This investigation will be run with good old-fashioned law enforcement methods, and that includes talking with anyone who might be another lead.
Like the head of the Moonburrow coven.
Delilah is a bubbly witch in her early fifties, a fact I only know because Serena told me before I left for Moonburrow.
She’s been the head of the coven for more than a decade, and if you saw her on the street without knowing who she was, you’d mistake her for a kindergarten teacher in her late twenties, early thirties.
It makes sense when her witch speciality is illusions; she can use magic to make things seem different than they are.
Luckily for me, her magic is a soft orange color that brightens to pumpkin orange when she’s actively using her powers other than making herself appear twenty years younger so I shouldn’t be fooled if she engages it around me.
She has shoulder-length blonde hair that has a hint of a natural curve to it.
Her eyes are a deep brown, and her skin is so pasty white, the only thing I can think of is milk.
A mid-sized woman, she follows the same sort of dress code that I do: she’s wearing a dress that goes down to her ankles with sleeves that flap as she gestures for us to step inside.
Only difference? It’s bright, bubblegum pink, almost as though she’s going for a Glinda vibe.
Are you a good witch or a bad witch…
While I have my issues with a handful of the Moonburrow coven, Delilah isn’t one of them.
She’s a good witch and a decent coven leader who understands that it’s better to look out for all of her witches rather than protect one—or, in the case of the witches who helped conceal Olivia’s plot against me, three.
Olivia escaped. No one knew how that happened until she boasted how she broke out on her own, but because Isla and Maureen claimed she was dead when they knew she had taken a potion to pretend she was, they were punished after Olivia was gone.
Delilah demoted them to junior witches, putting a lock on their powers so that they couldn’t use them until the next equinox.
It’s a spell that only a designated coven leader can use on her witches, and another reason why I’ll never join any coven but Serena’s.
It was a necessary horror, I know. Delilah gave them the choice: to accept their punishment or be banished from the coven.
Even I agreed that the options were fair enough given how they plotted outside of Delilah’s control, following Olivia’s lead rather than the head witch.
Isla and Maureen chose to stay, but now Olivia and Faith have been murdered.
And we’ve come to talk to Delilah about why.
Because she knew we were coming to see her around nine-thirty, Delilah is the one who opens the front door after Riordan knocks at it.
After greeting all three of us, she leads us into the sitting room, offering coffee, tea, and breakfast before Riordan assures her that we won’t take up much of her time.
Gus climbs down from my shoulder and onto the couch as soon as I sit, turning around twice before settling beside my thigh.
For an official deputy, he’s awfully quick to nap on the job, I think.
Then again, that might be a bit of a sugar crash.
Gus sniffed out the donuts by my boot and chittered a demand for one.
How could I say no? I ate one myself, passed one to Gus, then offered that last one to Riordan on the drive over.
He accepted it with a slightly surprised look, the normally suave Beta flashing a hint of fang as he finished the donut in three bites.
Now he’s lowering himself onto the couch right next to me, addressing Delilah as he says, “Max said you were the one who first noticed there was a problem with the wards.”
“Not me personally,” she corrects, taking a seat in the armchair opposite of the couch. “That was Faith.”