Page 360 of Castings & Curses

Well, shit.

Let’s fucking do things the hard way.

Moving plants and trees with eyes?

No.

Even with all the booze she’d downed, she’d have remembered that shit.

She was jumpy, and the worst part was Cappelli knew it.

“You okay back there?”

“Fine,” she bit out as another branch tickled her face.

She would be better off if she could just shift and let her ocelot take the reins. Her animal would have found whatever was messed up and they’d be out of here eating breakfast in an hour.

Her cat stretched beneath her skin, eager to do just that. But this was a situation that called for her to stay in human form. Besides, she didn’t know her new partner well enough to trust her. She knew she was a shifter. Let her wonder about the rest.

If she wanted to be cagey, Devi could play along.

The sound of a twig breaking nearby made her freeze. A low growl bubbled up her throat and she scanned the shadows.

Her partner was nowhere in sight.

Fuck.

“Cappelli,” she hissed.

But the night had taken her as if she had never been there.

Double fuck.

She eyed the trees and put her hands on her hips.

“Really?”

She half expected the old cypress to shoot her the bird. Huffing, she rolled her eyes and peered once again into the shadows.

She grit her teeth and moved forward. Her partner hadn’t vanished; she had probably just gone ahead to scope things out.

It was the music that lured her deeper into the congested mire of moss-covered cypress trees. The heart of the swamp loomed dark, the cicadas chirping blending with the strange echo of something melodic and infectious. Dank wet air pawed against her face and she swiped at the perspiration trickling down her forehead.

A shadow moved into her line of sight and she couldn’t help but breathe an irritated sigh of relief.

Her temporary partner traipsed through the brush ahead her in the inky black. The pale light of the moon was the only light saving her from stepping into a bog or worse, a gator trap. Cappelli had taken a chance leading the way, but if she wanted to stumble around in unfamiliar territory, it wasn’t up to Devi to tell her what to do.

The blade she carried whispered to her beneath the confines of her jeans pocket. It had awakened the moment they’d stepped foot on this cursed earth and she knew better than to take anything around her for granted.

The decorative knife was similar to ones you’d find at expensive jewelry shops in the hoity-toity shopping districts of town, except for the strange green fire twisted through the metal of the blade. Sometimes, when she looked at it, she could swear there were faces there.

Usually after a couple of beers.

Her position within the department was a tenuous one. People distrusted things they didn’t understand and she was exactly that. It wouldn’t help that she’d been dragged back to her hometown to solve whatever it was that was happening here.

She would do her job and go home to her empty apartment just like she always did. And she didn’t have a death wish. Playing with fire was fun but when you landed in the flames, too…well now. That left singe marks. She had a job to do. Weird shit was happening and they paid her to figure it out with as little body count as possible.

She thought about the 911 call that Cappelli played on the way to the scene.

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