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Chapter Fifteen
Claire
I’d slept like the dead after my fit of pique. After Jack and I had wordlessly exchanged cars, I made my way back home. I tried to forget what it felt like to have him pick me up like a caveman brute. I’d had fantasies where he had done the same thing. Only those fantasies had ended much differently than last night had. In those fantasies, he had come to his senses, took me back to his cabin, and rutted me like I’d always dreamed of him doing.
His picking me up and hoisting me over his shoulder had probably set my suppressant spells and potions back by weeks, if not months. I’d expected to climb into bed and toss and turn. Luckily, the events of the day had exhausted me enough that I had fallen asleep within minutes.
When I finally woke up, I saw my phone was filled with texts. Each of them was from Carlton.
Get to the paper ASAP.
I didn’t bother with answering any of the many texts. Instead, I quickly threw on some clothes and ran out the door.
As soon as I stepped through the doors of the Gazette offices, the zing of energy slapped me in the face. There was tension and activity. The eyes of the other reporters in the bullpen raised to meet mine, tracking my progress into the office.
Gail Lynnhurst, a beat reporter, met my gaze with a wide-eyed expression, nervously making her way over to me.
“He’s foaming at the mouth,” she said, looking toward Carlton’s office. The door was closed. “And he’s in there now.”
My nerves were already on edge after last night despite the full night’s sleep. I squared my shoulders and began the march to Carlton’s office. My mind swirled with possibilities of what could have caused the hubbub.
“Thank fuck,” Carlton said as I walked in. He looked over at another reporter, a new guy whose name still escaped me, standing just to the side of his desk. That one look from Carlton was enough to send the rookie skittering out of the door.
“Taryn Morgan went missing from her home last night,” Carlton said once the door to his office was closed.
I fell back into the chair opposite Carlton’s desk, feeling as if he had just sucker-punched me.
Taryn Morgan, unlike Darla Randall, wasn’t just any young witch. She was the daughter of a prominent witchkind couple in Mystic Springs.
Darla’s disappearance had been swept under the rug by the witchkind community. While that didn’t mean that people weren’t concerned, there was always a thread of worry that hummed beneath any of these events. That worry that if we brought too much attention to what was going on in our world it would expose us all to the humans around us.
The news of two young girls going missing — who happened to be witches - would bring down a glut of scrutiny on our community. And there were plenty of witches and warlocks who would be willing to sacrifice one young girl if it meant they could live a little longer in obscurity.
All that went out the door when a witch like Taryn Morgan disappeared. There would be no way that her parents would keep this quiet.
“And that’s not all,” Carlton continued, rubbing an index finger along his bushy mustache. “The mayor has scheduled a news conference as well.”
While that news wasn’t as shocking as the news that Taryn Morgan had disappeared from her home, it still filled me with dread. If the mayor was getting involved, he was getting scared. And if he was getting scared, this thing was likely much bigger than any of us had expected.
“The Morgans are some of his biggest donors,” I said. “He’s going to be eager to do what he needs to do to please them.”
He might have turned a blind eye to Darla’s disappearance, but there was no way he’d do the same with Taryn’s.
I wasn’t sure how much Carlton knew about my involvement with Darla Randall’s disappearance. Though, as I sat watching him scrutinize me, his big mustache twitching, I got the feeling that there were a lot of things that Carlton knew about me.
Carlton, like most people, didn’t know exactly what had happened between Jack and me.
But sometimes I suspected that his magical intuition told him more than I wanted him to know.
Carlton also had a father-figure-like demeanor when it came to me. I figured it was because he had his own brood. However, he had his dignity and wouldn’t suffer looking as if he was hovering over me or worrying.
“I don’t have to tell you that you’ll need to be down there to cover it,” he said, breaking the silence that had enveloped us. “I could send someone else, but you’ve been closer to this than they have. Furthermore, I know you’ll do a good job.”
“You can count on me,” I said, not feeling particularly confident about my abilities as a witch or a reporter at that moment.
“And if you can,” he said, leaning back and watching me, “you need to do your best to corner that damn mayor and get some answers out of him. I’m tired of him avoiding the press. Make the bastard uncomfortable.”
Now that sounded like fun. “You have my word.”
