Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
Ididn’t bother wrenching the wheel or slamming on the brakes. I’d been hit hard, and the Mini wasn’t a sports car. Instead, I leaned into the magic I’d absorbed today while working in the garden room.
My magic loved the soil—any dirt, really—but it especially loved the earth beneath the Siete Saguaros, and I’d been elbow deep in the stuff all morning.
As the soil had sunk into my skin with a sting that walked the line between pleasure and pain, it had flooded me with power, and that power wouldn’t dissipate—it had to be released.
I sheathed my body, the interior of the car, and finally, the exterior of the car in magic.
The best I could come up with in the moment was to treat the Mini like a bumper car, cushioning our collision with the power-line pole.
I used the momentum of the crash to redirect our trajectory away from the irrigation ditch bank and back onto the asphalt, where I managed to reverse away from the truck, hang a left at the next intersection then a quick right, and put some distance between me and my assailant.
Once it was safe, I course-corrected and headed for Pallás Place, one eye on the road in front of me and the other on the rearview mirror.
“Everyone okay?” I asked when my voice was steady again.
I received a meow and a chitter in response and breathed a sigh of relief.
“No way we lost them that easily.” I pulled into the lot behind Floyd’s bar. “They didn’t intend to kill us.”
Five minutes later, Fennel went to work magic-picking the lock on the back door. Mason had the keys, but he wouldn’t arrive for another twenty minutes. My brush with vehicular disaster had given me an unexpected boost of speed as well as a case of heart palpitations. Lucky me.
The door swung open, and I peered into the darkened room. Why did it feel like I was about to spelunk in a haunted cavern in the middle of the desert instead of stroll into an upscale bar?
And Pallàs Place was an upscale bar, the irony being that if Floyd hadn’t owned it, he probably wouldn’t have been welcome.
This section of La Paloma had been gentrified in recent years, shoving out generational mom and pop stores, interesting hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and a few shifty-looking pawn shops to make room for overpriced studio apartments, essential oil pyramid scheme storefronts, and a Japanese-Mexican fusion restaurant.
Cecil, Fennel, and I stepped over the doorjamb together. No one jumped out and attacked us, so we continued.
The air was redolent with old cigar smoke and pine-scented cleaning products. Odd. Usually, shifters hated strong scents. Maybe pine was different? A question for a wolf, which I was not, even if I was their Alpha.
Fennel assumed the lead, taking care not to get tangled in my legs. Cecil mounted the cat as if Fennel were a stallion, gripping his purple breakaway collar like a bridle.
“You could store a glacier in here.” I wrapped my arms around myself. Shivered. “Either we got here before the bill was due or Floyd has the power bill on autopay.”
I switched on an overhead light and headed down the chilly hall toward Floyd’s office. The floor creaked in places where the wood had separated from the subfloor. It was like walking into a haunted house without the obligatory spiderwebs and recorded spooky sounds.
There were ghosts, though. Not the sheet-over-a-booing-teenager type, though. No, nothing as innocuous as that.
The door to Floyd’s office had been replaced a while back. What had once been a thick wooden door with an iron grille speakeasy window was now a solid door without any inserts, sporting a heavy deadbolt I didn’t have a key to.
A shiver jerked my shoulders, and a cold rock settled in the pit of my stomach.
Cecil gave me a nervous look, which was more implied than actualized since I couldn’t see his eyes.
Fennel wound through my legs and padded to the office door. He picked the lock without my having to ask. The process was part paw, part tail, and part magic.
Though I was nervous, I wasn’t entirely distracted. I’d already checked for any explosives or magical means of keeping us out. Fennel and Cecil had also done brief checks.
Margaux and Bronwyn had put a spell in place to secure the bar while I was recovering from the beating I’d taken from Floyd, but it wasn’t bulletproof.
Nothing was, really. A strong magical with enough time could find a way in.
After all, Floyd had once ordered the local coven to spell his whole bar against me to keep me out, and I’d broken the spell using a Mara Blade and some soil from a geranium planter.
Although the room was cool, a trickle of sweat rolled from my scalp to my jaw. I cleared my throat. “Let’s get to it.”
My words echoed off the silent walls.
Fennel gave my shin an affectionate rub with the side of his face.
“I don’t want to go in there.”
Cecil darted up my body to my shoulder and chittered in my ear. Usually, the gnome’s chitters were like a buzzsaw loosed in a metal drum. Today, they sounded very close to Autry’s kitten purrs.
“Thanks, guys. I’m okay,” I whispered, oddly close to tears.
They chittered and purred in response.
I’d done what needed to be done, which meant Floyd Pallás was dead by my hand. Which, in turn, meant I was now the de facto alpha leader of the La Paloma wolf pack.
The de facto owner of Pallás Place.
The de facto owner of all the dirty secrets Floyd had kept squirreled away in his gross, nasty office.
And I needed to step up and act like it.
I took a deep breath, toed the door open, and stepped inside.
The room stank of stale beer, strong cigars, and wet dog.
It would take a team of workers to fumigate the place—probably easier to just hand Cecil a match and let him have at it, but, if I did that, I wouldn’t find out what was in those filing cabinets.
Fennel strolled down the row of metal cabinets, furry tail pointed skyward as he magicked the locks open.
I followed in his wake, opening drawers and peering inside.
I extracted three fat manila folders from the third one.
Floyd had filed them under “Trailer Trash Witch” which had been my second guess, after my real name.
Cecil leapt off my shoulder, landed on the file cabinet to my left with a metallic clunk, and snatched up a plastic sandwich baggie of what looked like loose leaf tea.
However, knowing Floyd, it was probably marijuana he’d planted on someone for blackmail purposes.
Had to be old, too, since possession of the stuff hadn’t been a crime in California for a few years.
“Drop it,” I said. “There’s no telling what it’s laced with.”
Cecil let out an annoyed chirrup and booted the bag, the contents scattering over the matted carpet like stoner confetti. He stomped a tiny foot and propelled himself off the cabinet.
“Stop throwing a fit. I’m trying to protect you.”
He did a spit-kick-hiss thing and turned his back on me.
Fennel sat in the center of Floyd’s desk on the ink-stained blotter, watching us with magic-glossed green eyes. His elegant sable tail was wrapped around his front feet.
I gave up on reasoning with Cecil. Instead, I decided to play some music.
There was a white plastic radio on a dust-sticky bookshelf, but it was yellowed with age and even grimier than the rest of the room.
Not even for my beloved KLXX was I touching that thing, so I brought a music app up on my phone, selected a random seventies playlist, and placed the device on the edge of the desk.
Stealers Wheel sang, “Stuck in the Middle With You,” a song I hadn’t heard in a long time. I hummed along and picked up the first file with my name on it.
“Sheesh.” I flipped through the pages, my fingertips picking up what looked like—oh, gross—cheese puff dust. “He listed the name of my homeroom teacher from my sophomore year of high school. I haven’t seen Mr. Harding in fifteen years. I wasn’t even sure he was still alive.”
Fennel meowed.
Unbelievable. Floyd had considered my elderly teacher a useful bargaining tool.
If I’d gotten too unmanageable, he’d have picked off people connected to me in one way or another, people I had no current relationship with, but whose death I’d feel responsible for.
His intention had been to break me down, nerve by nerve, cell by cell.
The worst part was, it would’ve worked.
Good thing I’d gotten unmanageable too quickly for him to put the high-school-civics-teacher part of his plan into play.
I continued flipping through the file, unsurprised to see all my tenants listed as well as the fae cousins who ran the coffee shop I frequented in Smokethorn, and my mom’s ex-boyfriend and the owner of Beau’s Oddities, Beau Glazier.
“Damn him,” I grumbled.
We’d been right to reach out to our people, to offer them healing charms specially keyed to them in case of grave injury. It hadn’t been an overreaction on our part. They’d been in real danger.
The last name in the file was unexpected.
Baek Ye-Joon.
Joon was a more recent friend of mine, the only magical I’d ever been tempted to sell the Siete Saguaros to back when that was still an option. He was a traveling earth mage and hadn’t been in town in months. Yet, Floyd had been tracking his every move.
“How in the world did he track Joon through South Korea and … Malaysia? And why?”
Fennel and Cecil were now both on Floyd’s desk playing some sort of hockey game with a box of paper clips and a Styrofoam cup and didn’t respond.
“I’ll tell you how and why,” a deep male voice said from behind me.
Directly behind me. As in, chin-on-my-shoulder behind me.
I leapt three feet and crashed into the open file cabinet, slamming the drawer shut with my chest. I spun around and snarled, “Damn it, Mason. Quit doing that shit.”
“Doing what? I assumed you heard me.” He gave me a shark-toothed smile and indicated the industrial grade shredder beside him. “I rolled this in here with me. You didn’t hear it?”