Page 61 of Married to the Devil

Not that I’m very schooled in demon abilities. I only started cultivating my ability to teleport to stop myself from ending up in the middle of the street in my sleep.

I stay silent as Stella works through the apartment. There’s a trinket dish next to the sink with a ring that looks like a wedding band. When Stella strokes the metal, she sucks in a breath.

“You found something?” I ask.

Stella shakes her head. “Not really. The wearer was really happy. I guess this territory isn’t the worst place to live.”

Moments of happiness to blot out any simmering unease.

She walks through the rooms until she reaches a window and freezes.

“This charm is one of mine.” Her hand goes to the windchime hanging in the window.

She frowns. “It’s a pretty potent one too. It links with the house wards. No one should have been able to enter the apartment with ill intent.”

I mentally sift through what is suspected about the perpetrators. “Would it work against fae magic?”

“I’d have to do research.” Stella sounds distant as she thinks. “Charms are more cemented in purpose, but it makes them inflexible. Fae magic is wilder, but I’ve never seen any strong enough to rip a ward or charm’s intention apart.”

That sort of magic only exists in the fae realm which doesn’t commingle with this plane much past trade and other various pursuits. The fae on this side of the gate are relatively powerless since their source of magic comes from the realm itself. Those who are here have fled the realm for one reason or another. Maggie came here some years ago because her mate was involved in a rebellion and was killed.

“What if they didn’t need to rip the ward apart?” My stomach sinks. “What if they could slip past it?”

“Like Kat does,” Stella says, her face whitening. “You don’t think her skill is unique?”

Katarina has fae blood, and it’s what we think allows her the nifty trick of walking through wards which made her such a formidable thief.

“I need to talk to someone who knows about fae magic,” Stella says. “The charms that people have, the wards even, may have loopholes to that magic system.”

“If that’s true, it changes all the protections people assume they have here. How would this not have occurred before?” I ask. How could the Council, or even Kalos, not be aware of something like this?

“Maybe no fae has ever had the inclination for this?”

I frown. “Or maybe they have, but a single person going missing here or there isn’t a problem. Maybe whoever is behind this got greedy.”

“Or desperate. If they are fae, they’ll be affected by the motion going through the royal court.”

“We thought that Lorenzo was desperate when he was dealing with Kalos for that gate,” I say. “And that was before we found out about his gambling debt.”

“Do you think…” Stella trails off, horror shows on her face. “Do you think that Lorenzo was trading people from this territory to pay off his debts?”

The fact that there was no outcry when people started going missing, no record of Lorenzo addressing it at all, no confidence that the authorities would do anything.

The sum of all the variables makes my answer grim.

“I do.”

“Fuck,” she says.

Indeed.

20

STELLA

I breathein the city-tinged air as Ben leaves his card with the landlord in case the man thinks of any other information to share with us. He seems more likely to reach out to me rather than Stoneheart’s people.

When Stoneheart claimed this territory, he became the new bogeyman. The king on a throne of blood.

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