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The volunteers were from Darlington University’s Magical Archeology department and were supposed to be thoroughly vetted before they came to do any work at the museum. We’d never had problems with them before, but that was the first thing I checked when I got the call last night from a thoroughly agitated Desmon. He’d opened the box of artifacts they’d returned to him and found one of his prized possessions missing.
Sure enough, a quick check of the security footage showed one of the volunteers, a guy called Eric, removing it from the carton and pocketing it right before he sealed up the box. According to museum records, he’d been helping out there since the start of the school year, and had arrived with the other volunteers. We had a copy of his student ID card on file and everything. The problem was, the university claimed they’d never seen him before. Furthermore, they’d only sent two students this year, not three. The other volunteers had just assumed that Eric skipped a lot of classes which was why they never saw him at school.
Long story short, I tracked the guy the best I could, and it led me to this house and this woman.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I grumbled, frustration oozing out of me with every word.
“What’s there to make sense of, Einstein? I told you: he left.”
Now that she’d had some time to gather her wits, she no longer cowered from me. The delicious, prey-like spike of fear I’d smelled when I first restrained her had faded into one of general wariness. She’d even started getting a little mouthy with me, though I had a feeling it was less a lack of fear and more because this was how she reacted to stress. Which made sense. I’d woken her up in the middle of the night and invaded her home.
To be honest, I kind of liked her sassing me. It made me want to order her to get on her knees and put her mouth to a better use. But that wasn’t what I was here for. I was here for the missing locket.
“Feel free to leave any time.” She made a shooing gesture at me before pointing a blue-tipped finger at the door.
Cute. Her nails matched her robe.
She put down her cat, but instead of running away from me and under the couch like before, it lunged for me, hissing and clawing at my legs. Hmm. Like his owner, the cat had lost some of his fear of me. I plucked the indignant kitty from my leg and held him aloft, his back to me, and sniffed.
Nope. No shifter here. And he didn’t smell anything like the guy I was after, either.
I put him down and looked up to see the woman looking at me with her brows raised. Oops. I’d just sniffed her cat like some weirdo. I was used to working with shifters and other monsters, not cute little humans.
“Yeah, so, if you’re done molesting my cat, the door is that way.”
She scowled when I didn’t move.
“You said your brother’s name is Tony?”
“Yeah.”
I dug my phone out of my pocket and showed her a copy of Eric’s student ID, watching her face carefully to see her reaction. “Is this him?”
She leaned in, giving me a whiff of her fragrance. Vanilla with a hint of cassis. Delicious.
“University of Darlington. Eric Matheson,” she read out loud.
“Yes. He’s been volunteering as a student at the Darlington Museum for just under six months.”
She snorted. “As if Tony would ever get into college. He never even finished high school! But that’s his face, all right.” She sighed heavily. “Listen, I’m really sorry if he’s been causing shit, but I have no control over him. This”—she gestured to the falsified student ID—”is new. I’ve never known him to do anything consistently for anywhere close to six months before. If I were you, I’d scour the newspapers and online buy-and-sell forums. He’s always looking for the next bit of easy cash.”
I wasn’t ready to give up on my only lead just yet. “Unfortunately, this is the thief’s last known location, so you are now the newest suspect in this case.”
Her scowl turned into a look of shocked disbelief. “Me? What the hell! You looked. There’s. Nothing. Here.”
“I don’t see anything here, no, but I do sense magic. You might be using magic to hide him and the locket from me.”
“Right, because that makes so much more sense than my brother leaving this morning. Yeah, magic. That must be it. Sure.” Her words dripped with sarcasm.
“I know for a fact the culprit never left. Your neighbor’s security camera catches sight of your door. There’s footage of you leaving for work in the morning and then returning home again, but that’s it. We checked the other cameras in the neighborhood, in case he went out the back door, but he never did. That means you”—I poked the tip of her nose, then snatched my finger away hastily as she tried to bite it—“are our newest prime suspect.”
“You went to all my neighbors?” she scowled.
“For the footage?” I shrugged. “No. I hacked into the network to grab the feed.”
The ordinary security systems sold to the average consumer are easy enough to bypass. And that’s fine. Most people don’t have extremely valuable treasures to protect. I, on the other hand, am accustomed to guarding priceless artifacts for a fire-breathing dragon. The fact that the locket had gone missing right out from under my nose had been a stab to my ego and called my professional abilities into question.
Which was why, come hell or high water, I would find it. I needed to prove to Desmon, and to myself, that I was still the best of the best. Technically, I hadn’t been on duty at the time the locket went missing, but I still took it as a personal failure.
