Witch Hunt(13)

“You recognize this man?” Suzy asked, jerking a thumb at me.
“Hell yeah I do,” said Thandy. “That’s the asshole that yelled at Erin for twenty minutes before dragging her out of here last night. That’s the guy who killed her.”






 
    Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure,   Magic
    
 


 

CHAPTER EIGHT

Suzy was good at her job in a different way than I was. She was a witch, too, a jack of all trades. But that wasn’t what made her effective. It was the fact she would do anything to clean up a mess.
Today, that “anything” was bribery.
She was smooth. She made a few benjamins appear from her wallet and Thandy and Ladasha promised not to talk about what they’d seen, quick as you please.
That money made the waitresses sign the standard nondisclosure agreement. The paper flashed with magic when Suzy tucked it back in her jacket. Thandy and Ladasha wouldn’t be able to say a thing about seeing me leave with Erin, even if they wanted to—the curse would choke them when they tried to speak. A pretty piece of magic from the OPA’s very best witches.
I was still numb with anger when Suzy took me home. I didn’t even realize she’d taken me back to her place until we were already there.
“You shouldn’t,” I said as she parked in front of her townhouse. “You’ll get in trouble if you’re seen with me.”
She punched the remote and her garage door lifted. “What else are you going to do if I don’t give you somewhere to sleep, huh? Go to your apartment and curl up in bed, wait for someone to find you? Use your ID to check in at a strip motel?”
“I’m not that stupid.”
“You could have had me fooled.” She pulled into the garage. “Get your ass inside, Hawke.”
Her townhouse was a cozy two-story wedged between a pair of identical units. The HOA kept a tight grip on exterior decorations, so from the outside, there was no telling them apart. She had the same blinds that the others did. Her lawn was maintained by the same service. Only difference was, her front door was painted bright blue. And once you walked through that door, the whole world changed.
Suzy’s townhouse was bigger on the inside—more like a Victorian mansion than a barebones townhouse. I’d measured it inside and outside once. One living room wall to the other was sixty feet across. But if you stepped out and measured the space between her neighboring townhouses, it was barely thirty feet wide. Don’t ask where that extra square footage came from. I was pretty sure even Suzy didn’t know how it worked.
She packed that extra space with enough ingredients and crystals to supply three covens, making her townhouse the magical equivalent of a hurricane. The amount of mystical energy swirling in her house was even crazier than Suzy herself.
Technically, dimensional distortions were against the law. Not to mention that she probably would have given the HOA board an embolism if they realized what she was doing to the neighborhood’s metaphysics. Luckily for Suzy, the HOA board didn’t include any witches—but the OPA did. We caught her as soon as she finished casting the spell. Her wards weren’t good enough to hide what she’d done from us.
But this was Suzy. An agent had shown up to arrest her and she’d ended up with a job offer instead.
She’d been hired a month after me. We had shared a cubicle ever since. And she still had her crazy-ass townhouse two years later.
The room flexed around me as I stepped through her doorway. I had to duck under dried herbs and step over a cat to get inside. “Bad kitty,” Suzy said, scooping up her cat in one arm before he could escape between my legs. He had a big gold bell hanging from his neck that glinted red out the corner of my eye. Some kind of protection spell.
“New familiar?” I didn’t recognize this particular cat. Not that I’d been to Suzy’s place since she’d bought new furniture last year. I’d helped her carry some couches upstairs as a favor. When you were as big as I was, you were always the first one to get called when someone needed heavy crap moved.
“Witches of my ilk don’t have familiars. We have sacrifices. Cat is not one of them.”
“Cat? That’s his name?”
“I’m not a poetic soul,” she said, tossing her jacket on the hook, fluffing out her hair, and heading into the living room.
Her living room was filled with smoke from smoldering incense cones. Every shelf was covered in crystals and she had herbs drying in every window. There was a permanent altar where most people would have a TV. Her assortment of deity figures could put a museum to shame—Horned God and Mother Goddess, a weeping Buddha, a crucifix with a tiny Jesus in the middle. Ready for any ritual at any time.