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Good, because it would only get weirder from here. Might as well save the questions for when Santiago pulled out the blood and tiger piss.
Or, you know, when we trapped an immortal demon inside a tiny gold statue. That would be a great time to host the Q&A.
“Tansy, you’re not going to get in trouble, okay? There’s nothing we can do to you at this point that will make your situation worse. I’m not going to report you to anyone.”
This might or might not be true depending on what she’d done to Liam, and if it was intentional murder, but I’d wait until later to clarify what I meant. For now I just wanted her to start talking. Dawn would be upon us soon, and I doubted the demon would come out as willingly during the day. We’d also have a much higher chance of running into civilians in the morning light, and no one here wanted bystanders in the mix.
“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” she insisted.
“I know.” This much I believed. I didn’t know Tansy very well, but from what little I’d seen, I doubted she had a malicious heart.
Whatever she said next would confirm if I was right or not.
“Just tell us what happened,” Wilder urged. He had a knack for putting people at ease, and I hoped his presence might be the thing to get her talking.
She gave Cash one last sorrowful glance, then the floodgates opened. “He talks about you a lot,” she said to me.
Weird place to start. “Me?”
“Yeah, I don’t think he realizes he’s doing it, but he mentions you. Talks about how tough you are, how capable. I started taking this Fundamentals of Paranormal Society class this fall, and he talked about what he’d learned from you.”
Funny how I’d always thought Cash tuned me out when I talked about how stupid those classes were and how wrong the stuff they taught was. Maybe he’d been listening after all.
“We had to do this paper, and we could do it on anything we wanted. I think most people were going with werewolves and vampires, and I figured the library would run out of good material, so I picked something different.”
“Demons?” Wilder asked.
“Witches.” She had pulled her sleeves down over her fingers and tucked her legs up under her like she was settling in for the long haul. “I’d been fascinated with the whole Salem thing as a kid, and I wanted to write about the differences between real witches and the women the Puritans accuse
d of being witches.”
The former had powers, the latter were just really unlucky. End of paper.
She went on. “I couldn’t find much in the library on the modern stuff, only a lot of outdated texts about Salem and the Satanic Panic of the eighties, that sort of thing, but the Tulane library didn’t have much on real witches.”
A cold knot was building in my stomach because I could already see where this was going.
“So I started looking on the Internet.”
Ding ding ding ding ding.
“Let me guess, you found a ton of pages for Wiccans about using amethyst and rosehip to help with your cramps, or whatever.”
Tansy nodded. “Spiritual New-Agey stuff mainly. At first.”
“At first?”
Wilder had drifted off from the conversation and was walking around the outside of Santiago’s circle. The witch had been busy, laying out herbs and setting candles into place in the ground, though none were lit yet. He’d marked each point of his herb pentacle with a different offering. The jar of blood was still sealed, and the little silver bowl had a lid on. It was hard to make out the others, but I saw bones in a pile at the far point. In the middle of it all was the gold idol. I was impressed with the speed he’d set the whole thing up.
I returned my attention to Tansy.
“I was on a message board, asking people for advice on real history, and someone sent me a link.”
“Who?”
She shrugged. “Some anonymous user. They private messaged me this website address, but it was just like, the numbers? You know?”
“The IP address,” Cash supplied.
