Page 3 of Wicche Hunt

“Do you like it?” Clive asked. I hadn’t seen or heard him move. If I thought too much about it, he’d scare me, and I didn’t want to be scared of him.

“I do.” I scanned the corner for a signature and recognized the name. He was a master.

“It’s the view from our hotel room balcony,” he said. “We went to Paris for our honeymoon.”

“Clive hired the artist and then booked him into the suite we’d stayed in so he could get the view exactly right,” Sam explained. “I love it so much. Sometimes I just sit here, fall into the painting, and visit Paris in my memories.”

Dave walked in a moment later, carrying a plate of lemon squares, placing them on the coffee table. Clive and I took our seats.

“Well?” I asked the grumpy demon. I hoped he was happy with the recipe results.

“You tell me.” He handed me a pair of chopsticks before sitting on the wooden barroom chair.

He’d remembered. Gloves made eating finger foods tricky. I used the chopsticks to pick up a lemon bar and place it on a napkin before using them again to pluck off a piece and pop it into my mouth.Mmm.“They’re delicious.”

He waited, clearly wanting a better critique than that.

“This is a taste thing, okay? I like a little more lemon zest in the shortbread crust and sprinkle a little less sugar on the dough before you bake.” I turned the bar over to study the bottom. “I’d go another minute, maybe even two before you combine the crust with the lemon filling.”

Nodding, he crossed his powerful arms over his chest. “Okay, good.”

Declan put his empty plate down and grabbed a lemon bar. He took a bite,mmmed, and said, “Excellent.”

Sam took a bar and curled her legs up under her. “So,” she said, glancing between me and Dave, “what questions do you have for our former resident of Hell?”

I took another bite and then put the napkin with the bar on the coffee table. “How do we find and stop a sorcerer?”

Dave blew a gust of air through his nose. “Good luck. We were hunting our own for quite a while. I can tell you that sorcery bleeds over into the mundane world, so sometimes you can track the incidents of bloodshed or death to the sorcerer’s doorstep.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’ve been seeing that. The detectives I spoke with said violent crimes have been getting worse and more frequent for a decade or more, but they didn’t say anything about a specific area where it was happening.”

He nodded. “Which tells us this isn’t a new arrangement. See if you can get them to map it for you anyway. You may notice a pattern.”

“According to you guys and my mom,” I began, “my aunt—the sorcerer causing you all those problems—trained Calliope, my cousin and our latest sorcerer. Mom says Cal began studying with my aunt when she was young, at maybe eight or ten years old, so seventeen-ish years ago.”

“And you never saw any black in her aura?” he asked.

When I shook my head, he paused, staring into the middle distance. “So why is there no black and why haven’t there been violent crimes near her the last seventeen years? Hmm. Has she changed locations, moved closer to Monterey?”

I shook my head. “She’s always lived with her parents.”

“Ask your police to check nearby communities. She doesn’t practice sorcery in the bedroom of her parents’ home. She has to have a workshop someplace where she has privacy and isolation. It wouldn’t do to have neighbors hear chanting in the middle of the night. Maybe also check records of properties owned by Coreys. She needs a place to work that isn’t too far so she can be there when a family member calls for her.”

I reached into my backpack, pulled out a small notebook, like the one Detective Hernández used, and began jotting down what we needed to do.

“I haven’t worked with a sorcerer in a while,” he continued, “but I did it for a very long time. Most of the wicches I worked with tried to hide the marks of sorcery. I’ve only known of one, though, who was able to do it.”

He scratched his jaw, thinking. “He was a Corey. I’m almost positive. Maybe four or five hundred years ago. Maybe Ireland.” He shook his head as though trying to jostle his memories into place.

“I didn’t work with him, but I remember hearing mumbles about a spell that could wipe an aura clean. I know who your cousin’s demon is now and I don’t believe he was the one working with that sorcerer either.” He shrugged one large shoulder. “My guess is there is a Corey spell, maybe even a black magic grimoire with many spells, that’s passed down from one sorcerer to the next.”

As soon as he said the words, I felt the truth of them. “That may be why there are so damned many of them in my family tree.”

“Our family tree,” Sam said, pointing to herself, Dave, and me.

“Yeah,our.” I knew that should have made me feel better. I wasn’t alone in all this. Unfortunately, hunting down and stopping Calliope felt very much as though it had been laid squarely on my shoulders.

TWO

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