After more whiskey and cookies, Randolf helped me back to my apartment. He handed me the mail, looked me in the eye, and said, “You are more than he knows. You can protect yourself.” He closed the door behind him.

  The letter from him went in the box, and the rest of the mail landed on the table. Before I crawled into bed, I peeked out the window. Randolf tended the garden under the light of the moon. I was safe. Secure in that knowledge, I slept.

  …Until my phone rang.

  “Pine.” I wasn’t sure I sounded human.

  “Agent Pine?” Mitchell had to be part machine to sound so alert this time of night.

  Not that I knew the time. I squinted at the clock. Three was an unnatural hour to be awake, especially since it had been after eleven when I had gone to bed. “Yes?” I cleared my throat. “What can I do for you?”

  “Another dead deer, but this time a shifter was attacked too.” She rattled off an address on the west side of town. “How soon can you get here?”

  “An hour? I need to swing by work for the charm.” And trade Fabian for the department car.

  “Try for less.” Mitchell hesitated. “This isn’t your fault or mine for not going hunting with the charm.”

  “I’ll believe that if the charm fails,” I told a dead line.

  With a groan and more than a few rude words about the hour, I got out of bed. I dug a hangover remedy out of the back of my medicine cabinet and downed that before anything else.

  Nearly half an hour later, with a travel mug of hot tea in one hand and a bagel in the other, I headed out. It took exactly thirty-five minutes for me to retrieve the charm, swap cars, and drive the rest of the way to a rundown strip mall on the west side of town.

  Between the gift shop and golf store, they didn’t look the type to be open late. I parked at the edge of the lot and grabbed the restocked purification kit. Glancing around, I saw a lot of police but not Mitchell. The first officer I asked directed me to a waiting ambulance.

  I found it, back doors open, and three paramedics surrounding a muscular man with short cropped hair and a bloodstained shirt sitting on the back. Mitchell stood over them, arms folded across her chest.

  Even before I switched my sight over, I could feel the corruption. Sure enough, he was coated in blood magic, which was slowly transferring to the people around him.

  “Pine, you made it.” She tipped her head toward the man. “He keeps trying to leave, seems agitated. Is he contaminated?”

  “Him and the paramedics.” I tugged the rune embroidered cloth out of its pouch.

  “Clean them up. Maybe then I can get real answers,” Mitchell grumbled.

  I’d never tried to make a salt circle from the ground to the back of a car, but it worked just fine. The purification didn’t take as much magic as I’d feared, and I felt like I had enough in the tank for a few more rituals before I needed to rest.

  When I finished, Mitchell crouched down next to the man. “Ricker, what were you doing out here? Your ID says you live in Virginia.”

  “I told you, looking for a place to do laundry. My suitcase got wet, and I don’t want to wear musty clothes.” He glared at her.

  “At two-thirty in the morning?” She sounded incredulous.

  He shrugged. “Still close to the full moon. I didn’t want to shift, but I couldn’t sleep. Seemed like a good time to do laundry.”

  “Did you hear about the problem we’re having with a rogue werewolf? Do you see how this all looks suspicious to me?”

  I was with Mitchell. Well, mostly with her. He’d had the same feeling as everything else that had been contaminated, but he wasn’t the source, of that much I was sure.

  He held up a bandaged arm. “I showed you the bite. It wasn’t me!”

  “You could’ve bitten yourself.” Mitchell sighed. “All I want is the truth.”

  Ricker leaned close. “And I want a lawyer.”

  “Fine.” She handcuffed him. “We’ll give you a ride to interrogation, and you’ll get a lawyer.”

  He protested the entire way to the police cruiser, not that it did any good. Mitchell watched the car drive away before coming back. “Well, I’d hoped the purification would help.”

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  “Sorry. It doesn’t change a person.”

  “Pity.” She rubbed her face with both hands. “I’ll walk you through everything. I suspect that won’t be the last purification you do this morning.”

  “That’s what I thought too.” I needed to figure out how to store energy better. At this rate, I wouldn’t survive two weeks with the bureau.

  Mitchell led me to a car parked in front of Crazy Coins. Across the windows, the word Arcade did its best to cover as much territory as possible. That explained Mitchell’s disdain for Ricker’s story about washing his clothing. While I could see a logic to Crazy Coins being a laundromat. I didn’t get why Ricker would get out of the car and walk around when the window clearly stated the real nature.

  But from the way the blood trail came toward the car and coated the door handle, he’d done just that before returning. Since the hows and whys weren’t really my problem, I skipped that and checked the magic. It was contaminated too.

  “How long is the blood trail?” Even with the spell embroidered into the cloth and the salt mixture, I might not have enough in me to purify everything if the area was large enough.

  “It runs across the rest of the parking lot, around the building, and to the edge of that strip of woods.” Mitchell pointed into the darkness.

  I sighed. “I need to walk it before I purify anything else. It may be too much for me to do in one go.”

  “If it is? What then?” Mitchell started walking, staying well to the side of the blood.

  “We make hard decisions.” The blood trail shone with the dark smudges of blood magic.

  “Like how much you purify or if we bring in another witch?” Mitchell clicked on her flashlight as we stepped off the pavement.

  “The second one.”

  She swore.

  I didn’t blame her. The point of hiring me had been to reduce the department’s magic-related costs. No one would be happy if they had to pay for another witch’s time in my first week as a special agent.

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  Away from the lights, both flashing and part of the strip mall, the blood blended into the darkness. I could feel it, but without the carefully set out flags, I doubted Mitchell would’ve been able to steer clear. The dead deer seemed to appear out of the darkness. The area around it was coated in blood, but surprisingly little of the flesh had been eaten.

  I didn’t know if that was good or bad. Maybe the werewolf was outlasting the effects of the spell. “How did Ricker say he ran into the werewolf?”

  “He was fuzzy on that point.” Mitchell said dryly. “At one point he said he had to go to the bathroom, and it jumped out at him. When I asked him for more details later, he had to remember he’d gone to the bathroom.”

  “Like anyone would forget they were taking some personal time when a werewolf attacked.” I rolled my eyes.

  “Right?” Mitchell snickered.

  My amusement faded quickly when I looked back at the strip mall. From here, Ricker’s car seemed far away. Much further than I would’ve walked to use the bathroom. With that large of an area, it was more than I could purify if I wanted to be able to cast another spell today. “I’ve seen enough. Let’s get back.”

  She waited until we were away from the deer to ask, “Bad news?”

  “Hard choices.” When I’d been training, the idea had been that I’d report to a superior when situations like this cropped up. That had held up until Monday when Floyd attacked me and the chain of command got weird.

  “I don’t know if it’s my choice, Smith’s, or yours.” My foot landed on the asphalt, and I turned to face her. “I can purify this, but I won’t be good for much else today, and I’ll be tired tomorrow. Is it worth it, or does the department pay for a witch’s time so I can help track and stay in the field?”

  Mitchell opened her mouth and then closed it. “Well… Narzel blast.”

  “I can purify this, but the area... It’s huge. And there’s no good way to scale it down.” This was why witches liked working with their clan. There was always someone else to help with a spell. With the TBI, it was me and me, even when me wasn’t enough.

  “One of us has to call Smith.” She eyed the mass of people clustering under the lights. “That decision is above my pay grade.”

  “Your case. You put in the request.” And, that spared me from being the one to wake him up in the middle of the night.

  She glared at me before pulling her phone out of her pocket and poking the screen with more force than strictly necessary.

  I moved a few feet away, enough to give her some room but still close enough that she could ask a question without announcing it to every person here.

  A few minutes later, she held the phone out to me. “He wants to talk to you.”

  I took the phone with a sigh. “Pine speaking.”

  “You sure about this?” Smith got right to the point.

  “I’m as sure as I can be without doing the spell. If you want me in the field, I need help. If that isn’t a priority, I can do the spell and be off duty for at least a day.” Given that the sun still hadn’t risen and I’d love a full night’s rest, I revised my estimate. “Day and a half.”

  “Hand me back to Mitchell.”

  “Yes, sir.” I shoved the phone at her, grateful other people, responsible and mature agents, could make the choice.

  Mitchell took the phone and a few “yes, sirs” later, hung up. “He’s going to call in another witch. Or see if there’s one available on this short of notice.”

  “Until the other witch shows up, do I hunt the werewolf or wait?” Last time I’d looked at the charm, back at work, it had pointed in this general direction. The werewolf could still be nearby.

  “We wait. Processing the scene hinges on the purification, so it has to come first.” Mitchell started walking toward a group of police.

  “Got it.” I trailed along behind her. The police were just as excited as me to spend their time waiting. We’d only been watching the stars, what few we could see past the light, for ten minutes when Mitchell’s phone rang. Smith had found a witch, and they’d be here in half an hour. It was a long half hour, during which my mind had too much fun. Given how my week had been going, I wouldn’t get Dad or anyone else easy to work with. Nope, the witch would be a traditionalist who hated that I’d gone a different direction from my clan.

  What felt like ages later, a car pulled into the lot. The tags were local, and it didn’t look like a rental. There weren’t that many witches living in Nashville. Most of them were from my clan, and all of them hated me.

  Any doubt that the vehicle belonged to a witch vanished when a man stepped out of the car with a wand in his hand. It wasn’t until he walked under a light that I started to curse. Perfect. Just who I wanted to see.

  “Kelsey.” Jamie flashed that same charming smile. “I heard you could use a hand.”