by D. G. Swank
He pulled up to a stop sign, coming to a full stop, and put the car in park.
“What are you doing?” I asked, casting a glance over my shoulder at the cars now backing up behind us.
“I’m setting the record straight.”
“Can’t you do it while you drive?”
“No, because I want you to look me in the eye when I tell you.”
“So you can manipulate my mind like you did with Caroline? No, thanks.”
“Phoebe.”
I shot another quick look behind us and winced when a car honked its horn.
“I’m not going to brainwash you. I swear.”
I let out a huff and turned to face him. “Then hurry up and tell me.”
A slow grin spread across his face. “I do things in my own good time, Phoebe Whelan. The sooner you realize and accept that, the happier you’ll be.”
The arrogance of this man! Two more horns blared their drivers’ impatience.
“And would that be any time soon?” I asked in a saccharine sweet voice.
He chuckled, clearly amused with himself, before he turned serious. “I will never lie to you, Phoebe. I might keep parts of an active investigation from you, but I won’t lie or trick you to get information. Speaking of which, I know for a fact you have information you’re not sharing with me.”
I hoped he didn’t notice my shock. What exactly did he know? “How do I know you won’t try that trance thing on me?”
He studied me for a moment. “I swear to you that I won’t.”
“And I’m supposed to just believe that?”
“I give you my word.”
Another long, loud horn blared. “Okay, can we go already?” The rule-follower in me was itching.
He shifted the car into drive and drove through the intersection. “For the record,” he said with a smirk, “I’m not interested in her.”
“So, for future reference,” I said, slipping my attitude back on, “I should accept that’s how you talk to every woman?”
“It’s how I talk when I sense a woman is attracted to me and I’m trying to get important information out of her. I use it as a distraction. That’s it. I prefer it to putting someone in a trance. Less invasive.”
I cocked my head and squinted at him. “So you’re telling me that you lead on innocent women to get the information?” I lifted my brows and mocked, “Yep, sounds totally trustworthy to me.”
“Phoebe,” he growled in frustration. “It’s part of my job.”
“And I’m part of your job—your investigation—so I suppose I’m fair game too. How am I supposed to know that you’re not using your Mr. Charming magic on me?”
He pushed out a groan. “I wouldn’t do that. I’ve never lied to you about my goal for this investigation.”
“But you think my sister’s guilty.”
“I don’t think any such thing. It’s too early to tell. Is she a suspect? Yes. Would you believe me if I said she wasn’t?”
My heart fell. “No.”
“I won’t lie to you, Phoebe. I want to protect you and your sisters, but I’m also going to do my job. Does that sound untrustworthy to you?”
Rather than answer, I stared out my window, and thankfully, he let it go and turned his attention to the road. Brandon had been a smooth talker back in high school, and I was sure he’d perfected those skills. Perhaps he was using them with me right now. For all I knew, that moment we’d shared during the drive to Pittsburgh had been carefully arranged to get me to trust him with the secrets he knew I held.
Brandon Cassidy may not have been pond scum, but I was nowhere near ready to trust him.
Chapter Ten
Ten minutes later, we pulled up outside of Pittsburgh Federal and got out of the car. As I hurried to catch up with him, it occurred to me that we hadn’t actually come up with a plan. Then again, Brandon probably expected me to just follow his lead.
Yeah, I don’t think so.
“Do you have some masterful scheme?” I asked as I caught up with him, “or are you just hoping to charm the pants off a bank teller?”
He winked, his face beaming. “Think it will work?”
After Caroline’s reaction to him, I had a feeling it would, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him that.
When we reached the entrance, he grabbed the door handle and leaned into my ear. “My elaborate plan involves walking in and asking to speak to him.”
His breath brushed my neck and I resisted the urge to shiver. “What if he’s not there? What then?”
“Then we try to find out where he lives.”
“I could try flirting this time,” I said. What had made me blurt that out? Oh, Mercy Lewis. I was going to make a fool of myself.
“You think you can do this?” He was grinning from ear to ear. He didn’t believe I could.
Why was I surprised? I didn’t think I could. My entire job involved interacting with library patrons and giving them straightforward answers to their questions. There was little to no bullshitting required of me on a daily basis.
“I’m confident I can improvise on the fly,” I bluffed.
“It’s a woman,” Brandon said as we approached the teller’s window. “Let me handle this.”
I did want to let him handle it, so I wasn’t sure what possessed me to blurt out in a friendly voice, “Hi. We need your help.”
Brandon shot me a glare.
The teller had shiny dark hair, heavy eye makeup, and a black shirt layered underneath a flawlessly matched jacket. Her nails were bright red, and so shiny they flashed under the fluorescent lights as she tapped them rhythmically on the counter. Her engraved plastic name tag read Rita.
“How can I help you?” She spoke like someone who was fundamentally, perpetually bored. Not just with her job, but with life.
A disaffected attitude was probably the best thing I could have expected to encounter in this scenario, so I launched straight into it. “We’re looking for Markus.”
I gave her a soft smile that I hoped looked vaguely apologetic.
“Who?” she asked, sounding only mildly interested.
“Markus Bieler?” I said. “He works here?” Had Caroline gotten it wrong?
“Oh. You must mean Mark. Do his friends call him Markus?” She smirked. “That’s weird.”
“I’m not sure,” I laughed. “I met Markus at a coffee shop a couple of days ago, and after our chat, he left behind his lucky pen.”
The teller blinked. “Excuse me?”
I dug into my purse and pulled out my favorite fountain pen, a gift from Rowan on my last birthday. Rowan being Rowan, she’d teased me mercilessly for loving it, saying I was living up to my librarian stereotype. It looked as expensive as I was sure it cost, which I was counting on for my ruse. “Markus mentioned how much this pen means to him, and I knew I just had to get it back to him. I don’t have his number, but he mentioned that he worked here.”
Holding out her hand, she said, “Mark has called in sick for the past few days, but if you give it to me, I’ll make sure he gets it.”
There was no way this was a coincidence. Mark wasn’t sick. He was avoiding work. Maybe he guessed we’d be coming and he was avoiding us. I shook my head. “No. His father gave him this pen for his graduation. I want to give it to him myself.” I leaned closer and lowered my voice. “He called in earlier saying there was a reward for its return,” I lied. “I’d be willing to split it with you if you tell me where I can find him.”
The teller looked over her shoulder, then back at me. “How big of a reward?”
“He teared up when he was telling me how much it meant to him, so I’m guessing big.”
“That’s our manager,” she said, nodding at a man walking out of a glass-walled office a few hundred feet away from where we stood. “This morning he told us that he fired Mark for not showing up. You’re gonna have to catch him at home.”
“Do you happen to have his address?” I asked. “I can give you part of
the reward now since he won’t be back.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I need to know how much money we’re talking about if I’m gonna risk my job.”
“The reward is two fifty.” I glanced over my shoulder at Brandon and whispered loud enough for Rita to hear, “Honey, give the lady her reward.”
His bottom lip pushed out as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He slipped a hundred-dollar bill on the counter. Rita didn’t look impressed.
“Sweetheart,” I said in a cheerful tone. “Don’t be silly. We’re going halfsies with Rita. Half of two-fifty.”
He slapped another twenty on the counter, and when the teller made no move to reach for either of the bills, he grumbled and handed her two more twenties.
A grin spread across her face as she slid the money toward her. “Give me just a moment.” Turning toward her computer, she started typing on the keyboard. “I know you just met him,” she said as she scanned her computer screen, “but I feel it’s only fair to warn you that something’s been off with Mark lately.”
“How so?” I asked.
“He used to be an outgoing guy, but lately he’s been paranoid, literally watching over his shoulder like he thinks someone’s going to sneak up on him.” She wrote an address down on the back of a blank deposit slip. “Get your reward and get the hell out of there,” she said as she pushed the address toward me and gave me a piercing look. “You didn’t get this from me.”
“Get what?” I asked and winked. Then I spun around and made my way to the exit, leaving Brandon to follow.
As soon as we hit the parking lot, he snatched the deposit slip out of my hand and headed toward his car door.
“Hey! That’s mine!” I protested.
He opened his car door and shot me a grin. “I paid for it.”
Good point. Besides, we were both going to the same place.
“I didn’t know you had that performance in you, Phebes,” he said, resurrecting the old nickname he’d given me way back in the day.
I knew I should stop him from doing that. It led to familiarity, which was undoubtedly his reason for doing it. All part of his plan to make me trust him. I wouldn’t have put it past him to have purposefully thought about me in the coffee shop, just to ensure Caroline noticed his interest and told me. But that was beside the point at the moment. “I guess all that pretending to be nice at the library paid off.”
He pulled out of the parking lot. “It was unfortunate he wasn’t there. It would have been good to gauge his reaction to seeing us.”
“Two people have warned us that Markus Bieler is bad news. I’m not so sure confronting him in a public place would have been a good idea. It sounds like we’re not dealing with a rule-abiding mage.”
He grimaced, refusing to outright admit I was right.
“How is it that you didn’t know about Old Man Hess’s family tree?”
“The Valerian Council is so focused on assimilating they have deemed it antithetical to their purpose to keep detailed records on magical people. They worried the information could fall into the wrong hands. The long and short of it is that when it comes to things like locating a certain mage or witch, I find the internet and local police forces much more useful than the Council.” His irritation with the situation was evident.
“You make their refusal to keep a record of witches and mages sound like a bad thing.”
“It is. I often waste valuable time tracking down information I should have at my disposal.”
I found myself surprised to be in agreement with the Council. “It could be disastrous to keep comprehensive records of every mage and witch in the country. A list of everyone’s names and locations? We’d be giving anyone who wanted to start another witch hunt a blueprint and a road map.”
“That’s true,” Brandon admitted. “But sadly, I’ve learned there are too many times when we need to hunt down one of our own. It would be really fucking useful to have some way to store the information.”
“Couldn’t you use some type of protective magic to keep it out of the wrong hands?” I asked, instantly regretting the question.
His eyes darkened. “Look how well that worked with the Book of Sindal.”
I decided to ignore his jab. “Do you have trouble getting information from the police?”
“In my line of work, it’s best if you get in good with the cops. We hide our true purpose under the guise of a nonprofit the Council set up to rehabilitate wayward mages and witches. Law enforcement doesn’t know about the magical part, but the perpetrators usually commit nonmagical crimes as well. They know we’re working to set them back on the straight and narrow and that we generally have a high success rate of making them productive members of society.”
His tone suggested he no longer wished to carry on with this conversation, so I resumed staring out the window, and we passed the rest of the drive to Markus’s home in silence.
It was my first time visiting Pittsburgh. It really was a cool little city, nestled in a cradle of rock that had only been made passable because early developers had blown tunnels through the sides of the mountains that surrounded it. Brandon guided the car through downtown and up some winding suburban roads that twisted through a little neighborhood full of hipster shops, outdoor dining areas, and green spaces with playground equipment.
It struck me how different these people’s lives were from mine. Whereas they lived in a blissful bubble of lattes and seesaws, the well-being of an entire community depended on my sisters and me. I would have to stay put in Mount Vernon to impart my knowledge to a female child and then pass my obligation on to her with my death. The thought made my heart twist, and not for the first time. If none of the three Whelan sisters had children, the book would leave our family. But Celeste’s magic was too fragile to consider adding children to the mix.
The open areas of the suburb gave way to a heavily wooded area, where the houses grew progressively larger until we were gliding down perfectly maintained streets lined with small mansions. These weren’t McMansions—these houses had stood the test of time. Most featured weathered walls, some covered with ivy. Leaded windows caught the sunlight that filtered through the trees, winking back at me as I catalogued their patterns—diamonds, hexagons, even some spiderweb spirals in their fanlight windows.
“Here it is,” Brandon murmured as he pulled into one of the long driveways.
“Hells,” I said, lifting my gaze to the towering home before us. But the number didn’t match the one on the deposit slip. “The numbers don’t match up.”
“No, it’s right,” Brandon said, glancing from the paper up to the house again. “The address is the carriage house. Likely rented out to Markus by the family that lives in the main house. At one time, I’m sure it was used to house servants. Many of these old estates are large enough to support servants’ quarters—little cottages behind the main property. When the economy busted, even the richest people had to scrounge a little, and these days, the smaller apartments are often rented out for extra cash.”
“Seems like a pretty ideal spot for hiding out,” I said, peering out the side window as he drove around back, rolling to a stop in front of the little structure.
“Exactly,” Brandon said, shifting the car into park. He hopped out of the car, and I joined him on the driveway. He recoiled, his nose wrinkling.
“What?”
“The smell,” he said, closing his eyes and blowing out a long, heavy breath. “We’re definitely in the right place.”
I paused for a second and drew in a deep breath, concentrating. There was a trace of a flowery smell, then an undercurrent of burnt pastry.
He shot me a look. “These spell trails hit me like a ton of bricks. Can’t ever forget what they smell like, or feel like, or look like.”
A series of numbers in what was probably fake iron identified the carriage house as the correct address. The little cottage matched the look of the main house, with its leaded glass windows, paint mottled by wea
ther and mold, and ivy snaking up the sides. Sunlight filtered through the trees above, angling fingers of brightness down onto the roof. It dappled the whole scene with warmth.
“I’ll knock, and do the talking,” Brandon said, striding ahead of me without leaving me an inch for argument.
A half foot shorter than him, I had to trot to keep up. Despite the patches of sunlight on the roof, the carriage house was surrounded by trees, casting most of the building in deep shadow. I thought I saw a flicker of light in one of the upstairs windows, but the next moment, it was gone. I was so tired, my mind was probably playing tricks on me.
“He’s probably not even home,” I muttered, but Brandon raised his fist and gave the door a strong, decisive series of raps anyway.
Silence enveloped us, only occasionally punctuated by the chirp of an autumn sparrow. Which was probably why the cat startled me so much.
A sharp, accusatory meow pierced the air, and I jumped so dramatically I fell against Brandon, nearly knocking him over. The cat was a tortoiseshell with arresting lime green eyes. She was bigger than any cat I’d ever seen—nearly the size of a small beagle.
Standing no more than six feet from us on the windowsill, her eyes bored into us, accusatory.
“Do you live here?” I asked, taking a few steps toward her, and was answered with a low, long growl.
Brandon knocked again, then walked along the front of the house, peering into the windows while I kept an eye on the orange and black hellbeast that hadn’t moved an inch or taken her eyes off me.
“Definitely a mage’s house,” he remarked. “Windows are blacked out. The light’s charmed to recede from the glass, I think,” he said.
Great.
“We can’t let this be a dead end,” I said, feeling panic start to rise in my chest.
He smirked. “There’s no chance of that, little witch.”
Instinctually, I narrowed my eyes at him.
“What?” he asked. “You’re little, and you’re a witch. What would you rather be called?”
“I don’t know, maybe… and this is kind of crazy… but how about my name?”
