Spellbound (Otherworld 12)

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 her coming. Which is why we need to stop her."

Before we left, I downloaded the office general in-box. With everything else going on, it'd been a few days since I'd retrieved it.

"Seventy-eight e-mails?" I said. "I think our spam blocker is broken."

It wasn't. Either a well-connected supernatural had been at Jaime's show or the sorcerer was spreading the story himself. Over half of our in-box was notes from supernaturals wanting to know what the agency was doing about this exposure threat. Or what the interracial council was doing about it. Or what the Cortez Cabal was doing. We were one-stop shopping for all three.

"You start at the top and I'll take it from the bottom," Adam said. "File the ones just asking for news and we'll mass e-mail them a chill-out note. Hopefully some have news themselves."

E-mail after e-mail asked "what's going on?" and "what's being done?" Damned few offered to help, that's for sure.

In the human world, I could understand that. When threats emerge, you turn to the police and military and expect them to fix it because that's what your taxes pay for.

But the council is strictly a volunteer organization. It's an interracial policing and mediation body made up of delegates from the major races--Paige for witches, Adam for half-demons, Jaime for necromancers, Elena Michaels for werewolves, Cassandra DuCharme for vampires--plus a handful of others who help out, like me and Hope. We'd attracted cash donors as we'd become more effective, but they weren't the ones demanding to know what we were doing about this mess.

The e-mails that made me laugh the most, though, were the ones contacting us as a shortcut to the Cortez Cabal. Lucas did play a role in his family's Cabal, now that two of his brothers were dead. But demanding that the Cabals take action was like pounding on the door of a multinational corporation during a terrorist threat, asking what they planned to do about it. Yes, the Cabals would be concerned, but not because Joe Nobody wanted answers. If this activist or group posed a threat to business, they'd shoot them down . . . and shoot Joe, too, if he happened to be in the line of fire.

"No way panic is spreading this fast on its own," Adam said. "Not after one sorcerer starts shouting in a concert hall. I don't think this is one guy. It has to be a group pushing for us to expose ourselves. A movement. They had the sorcerer pull this stunt, now they're using it. Fanning the flames hoping to scare up converts."

"Easy way of letting supernaturals know there is a movement underway. Why pay for billboards when you can harness the power of the Internet?"

He paused as he read another e-mail. "Well, they may have already tried more traditional means. The guy who sent this one heard that a few activists were distributing flyers last week. That definitely suggests we may be dealing with a group, not one crazy guy."

"Damn."