>Where is he now?
>>I lost sight of him. He ran mighty fast for someone with extra holes in his arse.
>Thanks for the update. I owe you a month’s worth of tea.
>>I’m your neighbor and your friend. You don’t owe me anything.
A fist of emotion tightened around my throat, and I missed Samford like crazy.
Without me realizing it, I had faked making it my home until it had become one.
>>The Yard Birds are here to help me celebrate. I’ll let you know if I see him again. Or find his body.
The Yard Birds were our neighbors, and a few of her friends. They were our unofficial neighborhood watch and met every Sunday after church. Usually, they drank their weight in margaritas and ended up passed out on the porch and in the driveway, so I wasn’t sure how much watching they got done, but they always came through in a pinch.
>Thanks.
I was momentarily at a loss for words.
>I would appreciate that.
“Well?” Clay kept his attention on the road ahead. “What’s the word?”
“She shot a trespasser, has no idea where he went, and she’s having friends over to celebrate.”
“I wish I had met her twenty years ago,” Clay said softly. “What a woman.”
“Twenty years ago, her husband was alive. She would have shot you for putting the moves on her.”
“I say again…” A smile split his cheeks from ear to ear. “What a woman.”
Unwilling to touch that with a ten-foot pole, I pulled up the exterior security feeds. With a sinking feeling in my gut, I realized I had gotten notifications, but I had slept through them while recovering from magic burnout.
“This makes no sense.” I shoved upright, still leaning against Clay. “That’s Nolan Laurens.”
From this angle, I could tell sandlike grains sprinkled from his hand onto the grass. Salt?
What else could it be? What was he doing? What did that make him?
A witch? A masque? Something worse?
“Camber’s uncle?” He leaned over to get a look. “The date guy, right?”
“Arden’s uncle, but same difference. Yeah. And he invited me and the girls to dinner. It wasn’t a date.”
The sensation of being watched prompted me to flick my gaze up to the rearview mirror.
Asa smiled, a twitch of his cheek, but he didn’t say a word about Nolan.
Then again, the daemon had said it all for him.
“I need to call Arden,” I muttered, already dreading it, “but it can wait until we’re settled at the hotel.”
“We’re clear,” Asa announced. “The zombies won’t venture this close to town.”
“We hope.” I sat up, but Colby stuck with Clay. “Otherwise, this will be an incident with a capital I.”
David Taylor had knocked down the first domino in a line I had no hope of stopping, now that they were falling. I fooled myself into believing he would keep what he knew about Colby to himself. Black witches weren’t in the habit of sharing their power, and knowledge was power. But maybe I had it wrong.
Without knowing Taylor’s true name, I couldn’t ask the Kellies to ferret out any links to other witches in the Bureau. An official inquiry might tip off what I was beginning to suspect must be an entire rogue coven operating within Black Hat’s ranks. One with a sole target, and I had painted it on Colby’s back the night I saved her from the Silver Stag.
Too bad we had reduced Taylor to ash. I would have loved to have this witch bring him back so I could kill him all over again for ruining the good thing Colby and I had going.