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“Oh, sure,” she said. “I’ll go get it.” Then she squeezed around the desk and our chairs and into the hallway.
“Odds it’s gone?” Theo asked. “Pilfered by Zane and the others?”
“High,” I said. “Nice little bit of background for his growing obsession.”
“Yeah,” he said, then looked up when she entered again.
“It’s gone,” she said as she stepped back into the room. She was wringing her hands, working her fingers over and over as if that would solve her problems.
“Oh, my god, shock,” Theo murmured.
“Zane or the others probably took it,” I said. “What do you know about it?”
“Not much, other than what’s on the cover.” She wedged behind her desk again. “It’s a small book, paperback sized but much thinner. Blue-and-yellow border on the cover. It’s from a press in North Carolina. They did an entire series on cults and paranormal groups in the late seventies, and they’ve been reprinting them since. I think the Sons of Aeneas must have been around that time period, because there was one of those ‘ripped from the headlines’ type stickers on the book. Like, ‘Hey, check this out. It’s going on right now. You just heard about it on the news’ or whatever.”
“But you don’t know what they did?”
“No. I didn’t read it.”
Another irony—that the woman who operated the magic store seemed to have very little understanding of how it actually worked.
“Did Zane talk to you about the SOA? Or anyone else?”
“Not to me, and not that I’m aware of to anyone else.”
“Do you know Loren?” I asked.
She swallowed, began to shuffle a stack of papers into a precisely aligned block. “The clan leader who died? Why do you ask?”
I glanced at Theo, got his small nod. He’d also seen she wasn’ttelling the truth. I watched her until the silence stretched taut and tense as a wire. I was tempted to push a little magic into the air, use my own glamour just to nudge her along. But it proved unnecessary.
“I knew him,” she said.
“You don’t say,” Theo said, tone flat as the documents she’d just organized.
This time, her eyes went hard. “You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me or who I am.”
“You’re right,” I said. “We just know you’re selling unlicensed magic, and because of that magic, one shifter’s dead and others have been injured.”
“I didn’t know they’d become monsters.”
“You’ve said that,” Theo said. “But you knew they were angry, that they wanted to be stronger, that they wanted to hurt someone. And you sold them the weapon they used.”
“It was just a potion.”
“It was aweaponizedpotion,” I said. “You knew exactly what they were going to use it for. You might not have known the mechanism—that they’d become monsters—but you knew they wanted to punish someone.”
Tears welled, and she looked away, face tight with anger. “A few years ago,” she said, “I had a friend in the compound. We’d have dinner every couple of weeks, maybe play cards or fish. I was walking back to my car one night, and Loren found me. He said he saw me across the yard, wanted to make sure I got back to my car safely. And when I did and tried to unlock it, he cornered me against the door. Said I was beautiful, and I deserved better than someone who made me walk around by myself after dark. ‘There are wolves in the woods,’ he said.”
She nibbled at the edge of her lip, as if working over the words, then looked back at us. This time, a tear tracked down her cheek. “He put his hands on me, moved in to kiss me. Slid a hand up myskirt and...” She cleared her throat. “He assaulted me. I managed to get the door unlocked, told him to get his hands off me or I’d scream. He raised his hands and stepped away, smiling the whole time. I left the resort, had to stop on the old main road to be sick.”
She swiped beneath both eyes. “I made it home, lost it. And I haven’t been back to the resort since.”
Theo leaned forward. “I’m very sorry that happened to you. He had no right to do it, and he should have been punished for his behavior.”
“Yeah, well. I told the sheriff. He said he’d talk to Loren, and did, and Loren told him it was just a misunderstanding. He told the sheriff he’d been worried about me and had a witness who’d confirm he’d walked me back to the car, said good night, and that was it. The sheriff recommended I let it drop.”
“I’m sorry for that, too,” Theo said.
