Page 96 of Stubborn as a Shadow

I nodded.

“Hi, Morgan,” Van said with a smile. He had an air of sincerity about him that made me trust him. Maybe it was because I knew he was a hellhound, and I knew their kind was as opposed to lying as I was. “Are you ready to start?”

“I don’t think I know anything helpful, but okay.”

“Can you explain why you were at that market?” Van asked.

“I don’t use black magic,” I said quickly. “That’s just my alias. It isn’t true.”

“We’re not asking because we think you did anything wrong,” Van said. “We just want to understand why people were coming after you.”

I’d told Nelson, but this was different. As if sensing my apprehension, Nelson slipped his hand in mine and gave it a reassuring squeeze. Before I could answer, though, the front door banged open, and four other people hurried inside with a whirl of cold air.

Gage turned to face the newcomers. “Did you have any problems?”

“None at all, boss man,” one man with long blond hair said. “No one followed. Teague made sure of that.”

“Good.”

The four new arrivals came over and sat down. They were a strange mix. The blond man looked like he belonged in advertisements for surfboards. The two women were compelling, but in different ways. The older one had gun-metal gray hair and was dressed in black. She would have blended right in at the black magic market we’d attended. The younger woman wore a pantsuit she could have borrowed from a Katharine Hepburn movie set. And the other man had a boy-next-door look, all sweet and stuff.

“I guess we need more introductions,” Nelson muttered. “The centaur with the hair. That’s Isaac. Beside him are Edie and her partner Davina, our medium. And over there is Teague, our death mage.”

“Teague… He’s the one…” I whispered to Nelson.

Everyone was listening, and I wasn’t sure how much more I should say.

Nelson nodded. “Yes. He’s the one I want to check the crystal.”

Teague leaned forward. “What crystal?”

Nelson pulled out his little pill box. With a flick of his thumb, he opened the thing and fished out the crystal.

Teague went unnaturally still. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yes,” came a voice from above us. Then in a swirl, a small bat swept through the air over the table to the only empty seat.

Now I understood what I’d seen earlier at the cabin. I had thought he had some kind of shadow magic like Nelson, but this made a lot more sense. I always thought the rumors of vampires shifting into bats were stories dreamed up by humans, but here he was. A tiny little bat. He was so cute, I wanted to pluck him out of the air and put him in my pocket. But I doubted Nelson would like me touching another supe. Not yet. Not when we’d just mated.

In a shimmer of magic, the bat transitioned to Keenan. He didn’t seem at all bothered by the morning light coming in through the window. The sun was on the other side of the building, though, so maybe direct sunlight would be different than whatever was reflecting off the snow.

“Vampire,” Teague snarled. The death mage didn’t look so sweet anymore.

“Hello, my darling,” Keenan dipped his head. “You were asking about the crystal. It is indeed the Time Traveling Crystal.” He turned to Nelson. “I don’t know why you want the little mage to look at it. There is nothing wrong with it.”

My skin didn’t itch, so I knew he wasn’t lying.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Teague snapped.

Keenan dropped into the empty chair and slouched back in an insolent pose, like he didn’t have a care in the world. He motioned toward the crystal Nelson cradled in his palm. “But of course.”

I had no idea what was going on, but things were definitely getting interesting. I wasn’t sure I needed more interesting things in my world right now, but here we were anyway. I glanced around the table to gauge everyone else’s reaction to Keenan literally dropping in on us.

The demon’s eyes were red. Since they hadn’t been like that a moment ago, I figured that must mean he was accessing his magic. If I recalled my uncle’s magic lessons correctly, demons could see a person’s greatest desires.

And hadn’t Nelson said that Gage was bonded to the town? That should mean Gage would have been warned if someone with ill intent crossed the boundary, shouldn’t it? Although I’d never expected to meet a demon, so I could be misremembering.

And the hellhound police officer or chief or whatever he was, he was staring at the vampire too, only instead of red, his eyes were like little bonfires in his eye sockets. He would know the vampire spoke the truth. Of course, that might be why the hellhound wasn’t jumping up to take the vampire into custody for hosting a market for black magic.