Chapter Four #3
“I don’t think Joe did this alone,” she said.
Creating the magical drug was a dangerous and difficult process based on an old spell that had never been bound to a Noctis rune, given that it was …
well, illegal. It also required the use of an honest-to-god cauldron, and those were nearly impossible to come by nowadays.
Artifact magic was one of the many kinds of old magic that had gone by the wayside when Noctis’ safer, more efficient runes came along.
She couldn’t picture Joe doing all that planning when his brain was already so preoccupied with his fantasy football team.
“He wouldn’t give up any accomplices, but he’s gotta have one,” she continued. “Joe couldn’t manage even the most basic old magic without blowing his head off.”
“Do you have any suspects?”
Katherine sucked in a breath. “Byron Chambers.”
Sylvia tapped a manicured nail against the wood of her desk. “I see.”
Byron Chambers was one of the coven’s most powerful members.
His family had been in LA for generations, making a name for themselves in Hollywood as actors, writers, directors, studio execs, and all of the other positions that nepotism could hand someone.
They were influential with ordinaries and witches alike, and they’d been instrumental in keeping Aestas in the good graces of the local government and Noctis.
They also donated a significant amount of money to keeping Aestas afloat.
Katherine was fairly certain her salary came entirely from donations from the Chambers family.
Katherine had suspected Byron’s involvement in making the magic drug for weeks now. He was friends with Joe. He was, she hated to admit, smart. His family’s wealth and history would make it easy for him to get the rare cauldron needed to create it.
But she didn’t actually have any proof. Even if she managed to find other dealers like Joe, she wouldn’t be able to get any of them to give up their supplier—not if it was Byron.
Not with what he’d be able to afford in order to pay them off.
The only way she could prove it was him would be to catch him in the act, and that required legwork.
Byron’s family didn’t make him untouchable, but if Katherine was wrong about him being involved and she managed to ruffle any feathers in the process of looking for evidence against him, Aestas would be in big trouble.
The fact that his position protected him from even being investigated for his potential wrongdoings ate at Katherine like an ant on a crumb.
“I want to question him.”
Sylvia shook her head. “No.” Katherine’s heart fell. “Not now, at least. Not with Noctis coming. We need to get through this visit without incident.”
“And after?”
“We’ll see.”
Katherine knew from Sylvia’s tone that they would not, in fact, see. Sylvia took big risks with the coven, but she was also deeply careful. This, apparently, was not a risk she was willing to take.
“What if—”
“No,” Sylvia said, in a voice that brooked no argument. “I have something else for you to do.”
Sylvia pulled out her phone and slid it over to Katherine.
Her breath caught as she took in the photo on the screen—a yearbook picture of a young teen smiling awkwardly against a navy-blue backdrop, her pale skin marred by blemishes, her blond eyebrows and straw-like hair making her look like a patch of monotone.
Katherine’s last class picture—the one taken just a few weeks before everything happened, the one that was pasted all over the news after—looked almost exactly the same.
Her face now was a product of magic, but before all that changed, this girl could’ve been her sister.
“Who is she?”
“Lily Woodson. She’s fourteen.”
Katherine sucked in a breath. So young. Usually they had a year or two more before it happened. “Did she snap?”
Sylvia nodded. “I think so. Bolted from her apartment yesterday after sending her little brother through their coffee table.”
Katherine’s heart pounded in her chest, drowning out the sound of her own words as she asked if Lily’s brother was okay.
Please let him be okay.
“He’s all right. He’s in the hospital, but he should make a full recovery.”
Relief. She should feel relief. But it was impossible to feel anything other than the death grip of anxiety around her heart.
“It’s okay, Katherine.” And it was, Katherine reminded herself. It would be, because she’d make sure it would be. She forced her heartbeat to slow, her ears to clear so she could listen to what Sylvia was saying. “We can get to her before anything bad happens.”
Anything worse.
“Where is she?”
Sylvia took her phone and navigated to the maps app.
Katherine stared at the blue spark blinking on the screen, sitting on a side street in Glendale.
The dot came courtesy of a locator spell, tied by Noctis’ developers a few years ago to a smartphone rather than a paper map.
It was what Katherine had used to track Joe that morning.
A burst of magic that she sent out, bouncing off his own, showing her where he was.
“Bring her back safe. We both know what will happen if she’s left out there on her own with all that power.”
Katherine grabbed her car keys as she rushed out the door. The clock on Lily’s life was already ticking.