Thandy asked with a sneer. “You need to know who she was dating, do you?”
“This isn’t girl talk or gossip,” Suzy said. “This is an official investigation.”
“Is that why you’re dragging her boyfriend around?”
It took me a second to realize that Thandy was talking about me.
Suzy shot me a questioning look and I shook my head. No way. I was not dating Erin. Of course, that had been despite my best efforts, but Suzy didn’t need to know how roundly Erin had turned me down. My pride was already having a terrible day.
“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.”
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
“This isn’t girl talk or gossip,” Suzy said. “This is an official investigation.”
“Is that why you’re dragging her boyfriend around?”
It took me a second to realize that Thandy was talking about me.
Suzy shot me a questioning look and I shook my head. No way. I was not dating Erin. Of course, that had been despite my best efforts, but Suzy didn’t need to know how roundly Erin had turned me down. My pride was already having a terrible day.
“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.”
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
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