“Where is it? Is anybody injured? Any fatalities?” he asked, heading back toward the house.
The woman’s mouth twitched, and he could have sworn he saw a smile curve her lips, but it was gone so fast that maybe he’d imagined it. “I’m Rose Cardinal. Are you sure you’re ready for this? That might not be enough protection.”
Alejandro’s gaze snapped to Mac, who strode back to the trunk to suit up.
“We’re ready, ma’am,” Alejandro said, his confidence in his skills and training overriding his tongue-tied fumbling. She must have put a spell on him. He’d never reacted to a woman at first glance like this before. Not even to Maria.
“Are you presently casting any spells?” he asked bluntly. Surely that much charisma had to be helped along by magical glamour.
She laughed out loud this time. “No, officer, I’m not bewitching you in any way. Don’t you have some kind of magic meter?”
He did, in fact, have a dial on his agency-issued watch that reacted with different colored lights in the presence of magic. He’d forgotten about it, like an idiot. He glanced down at it and saw that the dials remained dark. No magic detected whatsoever.
“It’s agent, not officer,” he said. “But you can call me Alejandro.”
“Call me Rose,” she responded, and an intriguing hint of pink appeared on her cheeks.
Before he could say anything else, she turned and went back into the house, motioning to them to follow.
“You may as well come through here. I’ll call my mother, since she was the one who was so hot to get you people on the job,” she called back over her shoulder.
Hot was an unfortunate word for her to use when he was staring at her lushly rounded ass. He could feel his internal temperature ratchet up to about a thousand degrees, and he blew out a deep breath.
Back to business. No staring at the civilian’s ass.
He followed Rose into the house, determinedly looking at the back of her head. He glanced back to see that Mac was headed around the corner, signaling that he’d meet Alejandro on the other side. There was no way the basilisk was indoors and, anyway, the woman who’d filed the report had stated that its location was in the garden.
The house was warm and inviting and gave him clues to its owner’s personality. A soft cream color covered the walls, which were bare except for a stunning art piece made of glass and aged wood that hung behind the bright scarlet couch. Books were scattered across a brass trunk that served as a coffee table. Framed photos were arranged in groupings on most available flat surfaces; the majority of them featured a variety of blond women who must be related to Rose, although a few were of various cats and dogs.
He took all of that in during the few seconds it took him to cross the room, and then he followed Rose to her kitchen, noting that she hastily closed a door halfway down the hall. The door opposite to the closed one held a small room lined with walls of books. The other one must be her bedroom.
He shoved the idea of Rose in her bed, all that glorious hair streaming across the pillows, out of his mind and watched as she crossed the room to a window seat, where an oddly arched statue of a cat stood.
“Alejandro, meet Bob,” Rose said, and he quickly looked around the room, only to confirm that nobody was there.
“Bob? Who is Bob?”
“Bob is my cat,” she said, that quicksilver grin again crossing her face and then vanishing. “The basilisks got him just after I rescued Ninja.”
“The basilisk attacked your cat after you rescued a ninja?” he repeated slowly, realizing he’d been right. There was no way a woman this beautiful could have a personality to match her looks.
She was nuts.
Totally insane. Probably made up the entire thing as a way to get attention.
“Ninja is the name of my sister’s dog,” she began, but Mac shouted something from outside the kitchen, and Alejandro hit the door running.
He dropped the safety gear and ran outside into the garden, lifting his gun to his shoulder, prepared for the worst, and wondering why Rose had been so calm when a monster was in her back yard. But he was too late. Mac, pistol in hand, had been transformed into a life-sized stone garden statue.
A small, lizard-like face with an improbably long snout peeked out from behind a flowering bush and hissed at Alejandro, before disappearing back behind the leaves in a flurry of flapping wings.
“What the hell was that?” Alejandro asked Rose, who’d walked up behind him and was staring at Mac with a kind of resigned fascination.
“That was a basilisk,” she said, raising one eyebrow and giving him an “are you stupid” look. “Didn’t somebody tell you why you were coming? A whole family of them invaded our garden.”