Not even at night, that sly, restless bit of him that missed it—all of it—cozened him as he headed over to the table,when Shiloh pushes sweaty sheets off himself and wraps his hand around his cock. You don’t want him to think of you then, not your mouth or your ass or—?
Nope. Jonah cut the train of thought off. Not even then.
Temptation had a crooked Carrow smirk in his mind. Jonah had seen it on his grandfather’s face, on Ram’s, often enough. He’d never checked it in the mirror, but he’d no reason to assume it had skipped him.
So it wasn’t the best lie he’d ever told. That didn’t mean Jonah couldn’t believe it. Do that long enough and it would end up true from habit. He wanted Shiloh, sure. In the privacy of his own head, there was no reason not to admit that. The reason his brain was suddenly in his cock, though, was because that’s how it would have gone back in Babylon. Where Jonah Carrow wasn’t careful or restrained, and had never met a bad idea he didn’t want to dance with.
Jonah pulled the chair, turned it, and sat down.
“What do you want from Slater, and where can I find her?”
“Did you check the phone directory?” Witch asked.
Jonah reached over the table and took her beer. “Sure,” he said after he’d taken a drink. “Then I came back from the ’80s and googled her instead. I got a few hits, but none of them went anywhere.”
It wasn’t unusual. The internet was forever, after all, and practitioners preferred their reality to be a bit more mutable. That was part common sense—like Jonah had re-learned the other night, magic had a habit of holding you to what you said… or typed—and part superstition.
“I thought you said you’d met Slater at AA,” Witch said as she watched him drink.
“Didn’t say it had worked,” Jonah said. “If you’re thirsty…”
He offered her the bottle back, and she pulled a sour face at the idea.
“Thanks, but if I wanted to swap spit with you, then you’d know,” she said. “As for Slater… she abused our trust.”
Jonah dangled the bottle between his fingers. “I don’t think I can get that back,” he said. “I need something more tangible to work with.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll need you to go fuck yourself,” Witch said. “How about that?”
Shiloh set his beer on the table and turned it in a slow, precise circle. “Slater took over the old family business ten years ago.”
“Lawyers?” Jonah asked.
“Not exactly,” Shiloh said. “They provide… banking services, of a sort.”
That would have been Jonah’s second guess, he thought defensively.
“So, what? She knows where both sets of ledgers are buried?”
Witch snorted. “That’s a problem that could be fixed with a few strands of hair and a bottle of lye. Slater knows whereeverythingis buried. That’s the problem.”
Shiloh wiped a finger down the side of the beer bottle and leaned forward. He drew a simplified outline of a house on the table, wet lines that didn’t dry.
“This is Verborgene Farm,” he said and tapped his finger inside the box. “Elijah Haddon built it back in 1741. He was plain folk, a good man, and nobody knows what he did to make someone curse the land. Nothing wholesome will grow there. Crops rot in the field. Livestock fosters diseases that taint the meat. The Haddon family sicken early and die young. When Elijah died, his wife needed to find some other way to keep body and soul together. So she dug a hole.”
Shiloh licked his finger and extended his blueprint down and out.
“To hell?” Jonah asked.
It was possible—sort of. Not the biblical hell—not as the preachers depicted it anyhow—but there were sour places in the earth. Sometimes people—miners, farmers, murderers—stumbled over them by chance. A seam of that under the farm would explain why the curse had taken so well.
“Not exactly,” Shiloh said. “She built a vault, and she put the word out that if you had anything…”
He hesitated. Witch filled in the missing word for him. “Anything unsavory,” she said. “Anything that should be kept in the dark. She’d keep it there for you.”
“For a price,” Shiloh finished. “When she died, her son-in-law took up the business. These days Haddons are still involved, but they’re minority shareholders now. Deborah is the face of the business, a pair of safe hands to keep our dirty secrets under lock and key.”
“But?” Jonah prompted. He took another drink, and Witch glared at him over the table. Her eyes were the opposite of her brother’s, one unexceptional blue and the other oversaturated to faintly unnatural navy.
