Page 4 of Of Magic and Murder

I’m uniquely qualified for this specific situation. As a seer who doesn’t see the future but departed souls instead, if he’s dead and shows himself to me, I’ll know. And if he’s cursed? The color of his aura will give him away. Once I figure out what kind of curse he got hit with, I can get down to breaking it, and then I’ll be back on a plane to Salem—until Serena sends me off again somewhere else.

“I’ll do my best,” I tell Chief Deputy Lobo. “Now, where can I find him?”

A muscle jerks in the wolf shifter’s jaw. “Do me a favor and stay here. I’m going to go grab one of the cruisers. This way, I can lead you to the coven house and you can let the coven know you’ve arrived safely.” His gold-colored wolf’s gaze darts to the left, peering into the backseat of my rental car. “You’ve been traveling all day. Let’s bring your luggage into your room, then I’ll drive you over to the antique shop where we’ll find Morgan’s body and his ghost.”

I glance behind me at the silver car before turning to face Chief Deputy Lobo again. “Oh. Um. If you tell me where it is, I’m sure I can find it myself.”

His eyes flash again, the gold color of his irises burning bright. “I insist. You’ve come at my request, Ms. Willows⁠—”

“Penelope.” It’s a squeak. I have no idea why the name I’ve had for the last thirty years comes out in a squeak like that, but it does, and my cheeks heat up as I try again. “Penelope, if you would.”

“You are my responsibility, Ms. Willows,” he says, and though he doesn’t use my given name instead of my surname, I let that pass when the green wisps around him darken. Whatever curse he’s dealing with, it’s got him in a chokehold at the moment. To push something so silly as giving him permission to be familiar with me… that would be cruel when the wolf is already battling his own curse. “In Moonburrow, I will do my best to keep you safe. You have my word.”

My heart jolts at the chief deputy’s solemn vow. Safe? Why wouldn’t I be safe?

I don’t ask him. From the set of his jaw to the way he keeps flexing his right hand, drawing my attention to the claws tipping his fingers… that’s probably a question I don’t want to know the answer to.

After all, the idyllic town of Moonburrow believes they had a murder. Whatever happened to Ashton Morgan… it had to be something bad. The opossum shifter needs my help, and I’m going to give it to him.

And when I do?

I’m going to take a better look at the curse on Riordan Lobo, and I’m going to save him from it if I can.

Because if I can’t? Like I said, no one else will.

CHAPTER 1

DISTRACTION

gus’s wolf friend is gone,

but the magic lady has stayed.

that’s good… yes?

— gus

I’m beginning to think that Serena forgot about me.

The head of the Salem-based national coven hasn’t called me in weeks. And maybe that’s not so unusual. When I’m on the job, she trusts me to do my best and to reach out to her if necessary. Only when she has a new mission to assign me does she get in touch with me, and I keep expecting her to buzz me and tell me that there’s another cursed supe who needs my help.

So far she hasn’t. It’s been two months since I last spoke to her, filling her in on how my trip to Moonburrow went. I told Serena that Ashton Morgan wasn’t cursed, but dealing with a case of magical contamination instead, and that it was easy to fix that. However, before she could give the order that would send me back to Salem, all hell broke loose.

Officially, Serena gave me the okay to stay in Moonburrow as long as I felt it was necessary because of Morrigaine’s mirror. A powerful witch artifact that takes on different forms throughout the centuries, its most recent incarnation is as a simple silver compact that Roxy Kane—a feisty raccoon shifter and Ash’s mate—found in a local dumpster. As a thank you to me for helping bring the ‘dead’ opossum back to life, Roxy gifted me the compact.

Normally, I don’t accept payment for my services. But that’s okay. Serena does. She charges whatever they can afford to pay—and if they can’t, that’s fine, too—and it supports the coven. She also makes sure that I have everything I need, plus a bank account that is more than comfortable. That’s why, after I told her I should stick around and see if I could figure out how the enchanted mirror ended up in a supernatural town decades after it was lost, I knew I could relocate to Moonburrow without worrying about what it would cost me.

Money-wise, that is. After everything that happened with Chief Deputy Lobo, my inability to walk away from Moonburrow has cost me way more than that…

Two months. It’s been two months since Olivia Frost—coven healer turned rogue witch—faked her own death, framing me, all so she could get her hands on Morrigaine’s mirror. It didn’t matter to her that, as the last of Morrigaine’s descendants, the mirror technically belongs to me. Or that, at the time, it was still in Roxy’s possession so it was technically hers. The witch blamed me for her ‘murder’, tried to kill Roxy, and after she was thrown into a jail cell beneath the Moonburrow sheriff station, she escaped.

She wasn’t the only one who fled Moonburrow, either.

Riordan Lobo disappeared the same day he arrested me for Olivia’s ‘death’. He tossed me in the same cell that eventually went to Olivia, and then he was gone. Despite being the second most powerful wolf shifter in Moonburrow, he abandoned his job as chief deputy and his position as Beta of the Moonshadow Pack all because⁠—

I shake my head. It doesn’t matter why he left. He took off, and then Olivia escaped, and now if you ask anyone in town, Riordan is searching outside of the reinforced borders, hoping to drag the murderous witch back to Moonburrow to pay for her crimes.

Me? I… I know better. I know why he really left, and it pains me every day that I wasn’t able to remove his curse before he did.