I took the folder with a glare, a little faster than was strictly polite. “You couldn’t have led with that?”

  Taliyah gave me a cool, neutral look that made me grind my teeth together, which would have made Lorcan have a fit, I was sure.

  As I flipped through the distressingly formal report, Taliyah went back to whatever report she was writing. The clack of the keyboard was as jarring as it was loud, but I did my best to ignore it.

  I’d never gone through a formal coroner’s report before, and I was strongly suspicious that this wasn’t a truly formal one. It was pages and pages of cramped handwriting, nothing typed, with a few esoteric scribbles in the corners that could have been runes, doodles, or someone testing whether their pen still worked.

  There were a lot of details: male, Caucasian, thirty-four years old, blah blah blah. I tried to skim, but trying to decipher the telltale doctor’s scrawl made that difficult. I sat there for a long time, with the chair digging into my legs and my bottled water growing tepid. Taliyah didn’t try to rush me, but she continued to answer phone calls and do her work as I read. The distraction didn’t help, but I didn’t quite have it in me to tell her to keep it down in her own office.

  Finally, after long minutes of painfully dry reading, I came to the good part. I read it over three times before I turned back to Taliyah.

  “So, he did find the remnants of some kind of spell that drained their energy. The spell fed off the man until he just collapsed in the street and died?”

  Taliyah typed a few more words before sitting back and rubbing the bridge of her nose. “That’s what it looks like. Whatever the spell was, and no the examiner didn’t recognize it—”

  “You can refer to him by name, you know? It’s not like I’m going to look him up and go pay him a visit.”

  She frowned at me. “I wouldn’t put it past you. Anyway, the remains were still caked onto the victim when my examiner got possession of the body. The doctor said the spell had drained the man’s energy until his body just couldn’t function any longer.”

  I turned the page, a little peeved that Taliyah couldn’t have just told me that instead of making me read the book report equivalent of Wand and Peace. “But what about–”

  “—and because I’ve learned to bank on the fact that there are no coincidences in Haven Hollow, ever,” Taliyah continued, her cop voice running right over the tail end of my question. “I also had him take a look at the old man, the victim’s neighbor, who’d passed away.”

  I leaned forward. “And?”

  Taliyah, if anything, looked more tired. “And signs of the same spell were present on that man, as well. The curse had started to break down, since the victim had been deceased for more than a day, but the examiner still found traces.”

  “Hmm.”

  Her hand twitched, like she was going to reach for the report but then thought better of it. “I believe the term he used was that there were still ‘sticky little strands of the curse clinging to the body’.” She looked up at me then. “I don’t know if that means anything to you.”

  Spell, did that mean something to me. “That’s exactly how the woman I found last night felt when I was trying to peel the curse off her. Like it was clinging to her like a spiderweb. The feeling it brought to mind was like walking through a web and trying to scrape it off afterwards.”

  Taliyah made a face. “That’s vivid.”

  I couldn’t help the smirk that twisted my lips. “Not a fan of spiders, then?”

  Taliyah’s expression was mild, but she did roll her eyes. I liked it when bits of her personality leaked through the mask of the Chief of Police. Taliyah was the hardest woman I knew, and I figured that was a good way to be when you were in her line of work.

  “I’m not scared of them. But that doesn’t mean I want to be picking their webs off my face or out of my hair.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. Cobwebs could cling like nothing else.

  Still, the implications of similar magic being on all three victims weren’t great. “The deaths are connected. And it seems like the woman I found last night was marked to be victim number three.”

  “And she’s only still alive because you managed to stumble across her.” Taliyah lifted a pen off her blotter and started tapping it against the desk.

  That was an uncomfortable thought. Of course, I’d also had to pry the woman up and off the road, which wasn’t the safest place to have a magically induced depression nap, so I suppose I’d saved her life either way. It still felt weird, thinking that if I’d left a little earlier, or later, or taken a different route, someone wouldn’t have woken up this morning.

  It was all a little too butterfly effect for me, so I brushed it off and decided not to think about it.

  Taliyah dragged a notebook towards herself and clicked her pen. “What was the woman’s name again? I’ll need to have a talk with her.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked, smirking as I decided to play her game.

  “She’s the only link to two murders that I have a chance of getting some answers from. If she has a connection to the other victims, that might give us motive as to why they’re being targeted.”

  “Her name?” I blinked. “I didn’t get her name.”

  Taliyah looked up, incredulous.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I snapped. “I was focusing on things like ‘are you dying’, and ‘why are you lying in the middle of the road’. We weren’t at a social gathering, for spell’s sakes.”

  Taliyah dropped her head forward into her hands and rubbed her eyes like she couldn’t handle my ineptitude.

  I crossed my legs, one foot bobbing angrily in the air as I tapped the report folder against my leg. “She was taken to the hospital by an ambulance. I’m sure they have some record of her.”

  “That’s fine.” Taliyah drew a deep breath and let it out through her nose. “I do appreciate you looking into this, Wanda.”

  Well, she had a very strange way of showing it, even if her comment mollified me a little. I was a witch, not a detective. I was in charge of figuring out the magic, not the motive or the suspect or that sort of thing. It was nice to be appreciated, though.

  “I’ll go to the hospital and talk to the victim.” She was back to tapping her pen against the desk, like she needed some outlet to burn off her pent-up energy. “What about the spell? Is this anything you’ve encountered before?”

  I thought back to that horrible, sticky mass of want that I’d peeled off that poor woman and shuddered. It had been so hungry for her life. The spell had wanted to drain every last drop, every hint of vitality in her body. Leaving nothing to keep her heart pumping or her lungs breathing. I was shocked she’d made it as far as she had into the road, to be honest. I wasn’t sure I could have done the same.

  That feeling of magic clinging, leeching off a person’s life. It wasn’t anything I was going to forget in a hurry.

  “No. Never experienced anything like it before.” I fought the urge to scrub my hand down my arm, just in case any of that malevolent power had stuck around. “I’ve seen some terrible curses. Even a hex can cause serious damage if used at exactly the right moment. But this? This is on a whole different level.”

  More to the point, curses were intensely personal. A hex could be summoned with mild annoyance. It was the kind of thing teen witches might use to bully others, or I might use against someone who cut me off in traffic. Petty spite was enough to power them.

  But a curse? A curse took real anger, a desire to hurt. It wasn’t the sort of thing a witch brewed up on a Tuesday night because she was feeling bored. It was the kind of thing that was done to an enemy, to someone that had wronged you, deeply. It was well thought-out, planned.

  I didn’t want to sound cruel, but I just didn’t know what three mundane humans could have done to a magic user that was so unforgivable that they’d be slapped with something that drained their life away. It was cruel, and it was drawn out to a degree that felt more than just vindictive. I just didn’t see a magic user going to those lengths because of some lawn care dispute or run-in at the local convenience store.

  Curses took effort, especially ones that were powerful enough to linger even after the victim was dead. Someone had been motivated, that was all I could say.

  “I can look into it,” I offered. “There are some people I can talk to.”

  Taliyah nodded and even offered a tiny smile. “Thank you, Wanda. Let me know what you find.”

  I got to my feet and headed for the door.

  “Wanda.”

  My hand on the knob, I glanced back over my shoulder.

  Taliyah quirked an eyebrow at me. “The report stays here.”

  I gave her a cheeky shrug and dropped the file back onto her desk. “You can’t blame me for trying.”

  “Oh, yes I can.”

  Chapter Nine

  Maverick was eager to go when I reached Wanda’s Witchery, and he filled me in on the major events of the day while he grabbed his coat. The biggest event was a woman coming in to waste a lot of time shopping for a dress that she was never going to buy, because all she really wanted to do was flirt with Maverick.

  Things were quiet after he left. Even though Haven Hollow tended towards late hours, in order to accommodate our less mundane population, the tourists that flocked here still didn’t tend to shop once normal business hours were done. And it wasn’t quite late enough yet for the evening crowd to really be out and about. That meant I had some time to kill.

  I spent a bit of it dusting, straightening the racks and generally tidying up. I made note of what clothes we were running short on and set a mental reminder to myself to get to work enchanting some more athletic wear. Summer and New Years saw such things most in demand, thank you resolutions and wanting to have a beach bod.

  But even as I was tweaking skirts to hang nicely, and adjusting hems, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Taliyah and I had spoken about in her office. The memory of the spell, and the way her super secret coroner had described it, kept turning over and over in my head. Because I’d had that sensation too, recently, and it hadn’t been a spell.

  There weren’t any customers in the store, and I didn’t see anyone window shopping or lingering outside, so I put my dust cloth down on the counter and headed for the back.

  The tragedy of silk was still sitting on my counter. I’d finally come to terms with the fact that a truly ridiculous amount of money had gone to waste, that whatever protection magic was keeping the cloth intact had faded like spun sugar in warm water, and there was just no salvaging it. I’d removed the pins and done my best to fold the rapidly disintegrating pile of thread off to the corner while I stewed about what I was going to do about it.

  In my defense, there had been a few murders. Those had been distracting.

  Silk was made from the cocoon of the silkworm, the casing that they spun in order to turn into moths. The long filaments were gathered and spun together, but originally, it was caterpillar spit, and that meant that the fibers had a specific texture that was removed with hot water during the processing. That was what I’d noticed was off with the piece, other than the fact that the whole thing was rotting on my work bench. Because when I’d picked up the little threads of the silk, they’d been just faintly sticky, when they definitely shouldn’t have been.

  Maybe I’d remembered wrong. Maybe I’d just been so ticked off at the waste that I’d imagined the stickiness, one more irritation to throw on the pile.

  Gently, carefully, I lifted one of the fraying pieces. Some of the threads were ragged at the edge, peeling away, and when I ran my fingers over them, they stuck to my skin. A faint catch.

  Like a spider’s web.

  I dropped the cloth back to the table and resisted the urge to scrub my hand against my skirt. I liked this skirt; no way was I getting creepy magic silk junk on it. I did go to the washroom to scrub my hands under the tap while I worked things through my head, though.

  Taliyah was right about one thing; I was strongly starting to believe that there were no coincidences in Haven Hollow. But I failed to see how an old bit of cloth, a very expensive, beautiful piece of cloth, granted, could have been linked to the death and near death of three random people.

  None of them had ever even been in to my store before, I was sure of that. We didn’t get that many men, for one thing, and I had a pretty good memory for faces. For that matter, I’d been the only one handling the silk. As far as I knew, no one else had even seen it, let alone touched it. I’d been the one to cut into it. If there was some dire wasting curse on the cloth, and I hadn’t seen any sign of it, then wouldn’t it have struck me?

  As much as it pained me, Taliyah was right about something else. I needed more information.

  And, fingers crossed, I knew where to get it.

  There still weren’t any customers in the store. Bad for business, but convenient for me, at the moment. I tucked myself behind the counter with my cell phone and looked up the number for the auction house.

  It was getting late, but this wasn’t the kind of place that did afternoon events that were basically jumped-up rummage sales, or estate sales. They sold not only high-end materials and antiques, but an experience. That was the whole reason Lorcan and I had even gone. We’d wanted a reason to dress up, look fancy, drink, and feel like we were doing something special or forbidden. That was part of the whole allure, and it guaranteed that the auction house wasn’t about to close their doors at four in the afternoon.

  It only took two rings before a cheerful voice answered with, “Emerald City Auction House, Claudine speaking, how can I help you?”

  “Hello, I was at the auction a week ago, and I purchased a length of white silk.” I rattled off the lot number that I had saved in my phone. “And I was wondering what you could tell me about it.”

  There was a hum over the line, and the sound of someone typing. “I’m afraid we didn’t have much for the provenance of that item, ma’am. Only that it was handed down in a family, likely descendants of the original crafter, until one of the descendants sold it to us. Its beauty and its rather special properties were what made it such a luxurious item, not anything to do with its history.”

  That was what they’d told me the night we’d purchased it, and it was actually less helpful now than it was then.

  “Yes, I understand that. But I’m having some issues with it, and I was hoping that speaking to the previous owner might be able to get those issues sorted out. Do you have contact information for them?” I crossed my fingers, hoping for the best. Talking to the original owners might be my best bet, if the auction house really didn’t know anything.

  Assuming, of course, that the previous owners had any idea that the silk was enchanted, and that they hadn’t been trying to unload it quickly for one reason or another.

  “The previous owners were interested in remaining anonymous, that was why they used the auction houses’ services,” Claudine said, a little sharp. Then her tone turned suspicious. “What sort of issues are you having?”

  It felt like a dead end, but maybe not. Maybe with a little pressure, I could push through this barrier.

  I still had memories of my mother’s voice when she was in her ‘wrecking ball’ mode, so it didn’t take any effort to mimic it. I even tilted my head back to make my tone a little more nasal. “My issue is that when I took the silk to be made into a gown, a bespoke gown, mind you, it started rotting and falling apart. And that was after I spent a small fortune on it. Not what I was expecting, to say the least. What kind of business are you running there?”

  Playing the outraged old money angle was a risky one. It could make people bend over backwards, but it also could make them dig their heels in and refuse to budge. Nothing I’d said was a lie, though. Claudine didn’t need to know that I was making the dress myself.

  There was another pause, and Claudine came back on the line, her voice so chilly I was surprised frost didn’t start forming on my phone receiver. “That isn’t possible, ma’am.”

  “Isn’t possible?” I injected some outrage into my voice, and to be fair, some of it was legitimate. “I literally have a pile of disintegrating silk that I paid an insane amount of money for, and you’re telling me it’s not possible?”

  There was another pause, and I held my breath, waiting. I thought that might have done it, pushed her over into trying to smooth any ruffles out.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to help you today,” Claudine said, her voice as smooth and cool as satin. “Any further issues, please feel free to direct them to our legal team.”

  And then she hung up on me.

  There were too many different emotions bubbling up in my chest as I stared down at the phone. Cellphones just didn’t have the same dial tone that the old rotaries did. Somehow, it made being hung up on feel even ruder.

  So, clearly there was something up there, and the auction house was in full ‘cover their butt’ mode. They wouldn’t be coughing up any answers anytime soon, at least not willingly.

  For a moment, I seriously thought about hexing Claudine. It was far away, though, and I didn’t have anything personal of hers to act like a catalyst.

  Maybe I should have just unleashed Taliyah on them, in all her ‘someone is obstructing my investigation’ glory.

  Tempting.

  Instead, I thumbed through my contacts and summoned the coven.

  ***

  Gravel crunched under my tires as I pulled into the driveway to the coven house. Lorcan had been generous, getting a place for the coven to base its operations from. It served as a meeting place, a community hub, a spot to cast rituals that we didn’t necessarily want our mundane neighbors to see, and it also had enough bedrooms for coven members to stay, or even live permanently for the ones who didn’t have other accommodations.

  It also gave Circle Scapegrace a certain air of verisimilitude. We were a proper coven, not something run out of a witch’s living room. We had a coven house and everything. We could hold our heads up among the other covens, even when they thought we were renegades for including a warlock as a full member, along with a former Blood Witch, and a gypsy potion maker who wasn’t a witch at all.