by Tegan Maher
I took the water and pulled out a chair. “You’re right. This isn’t a social visit, though it’s good to see you. What have you been up to? Still working with Michael?”
She and my brother, who worked for the Paranormal Bureau of Investigations, had been working on some project involving catching escaped criminals of some sort.
“Yeah. We’ve expanded a bit. Once they learned about my skill with potions, they’ve started contracting me to help whenever something requiring my talent pops up.” She sighed. “It’s good money, but I’ve had to pull back a little from it. It was wearing me out trying to run the shop and help them, and this place is my heart. I won’t let it suffer just to make a few extra bucks.”
That made me feel a little better. I wasn’t completely on board with her putting herself in danger, and when she’d first started helping them, it seemed like she was always covered in bruises and scratches. I preferred to know she was right here, safe in her shop doing what she loved.
“It just so happens that I’m here because I need your help in that area, too.”
While I filled her in on the details, I pulled the bottle of potion from my bag. “This was in her purse. Since the ships are full of cameras and the safes require fingerprint verification, I suspect it’s some sort of transformation potion, but that’s just a guess. For all I know, it might be a hair tonic.”
Mila pulled the stopper out of the bottle and gave the swirling blue liquid a careful sniff. “Definitely not a hair tonic.” She held it up to the light and swirled it, her forehead scrunched in concentration. “I’m not sure, but I think you might be right.”
She snapped her fingers and a thick, dusty, leather-bound book floated off a shelf and into her waiting hand. After flipping through several pages, she ran her finger down a page. “Yeah, right here it is. Clever of her. It’s an old spell that most people wouldn’t even know about. She either knew her stuff or worked with someone who did. This stuff isn’t easy to make, and it’s time-consuming. It’s broken down into phases, and some of the steps require a week or two to ferment and rest. All in all, it takes about three months to make and you can’t scale up the recipe.”
She read a bit more. “It shouldn’t be quite this color blue, though. Unless I miss my guess, it should be darker. I might be off on that, though, because I don’t work much with aged spells. I’m more of an instant-gratification girl and don’t have the time or patience to wait on something that long unless it’s a one-off ordered way in advance. I can run some tests on it for you, but that’ll take a few hours. Do you have time to wait, or do you want to leave it and I’ll have Calamity tell Tempest when I learn something?”
“I wish I could wait, but I can’t,” I replied, standing. “I need to get back to the resort. Blake’s going to have his hands full with the board and the grand opening, so it’s going to be up to me to figure this out.”
She nodded. “I’ll get right on it, then. Surely you have time to at least finish your water, though. You look parched, and I could pack for a week in the luggage under your eyes. Are you still managing as well as bartending and serving?”
I nodded and sat back down. She was right; I was whipped. “I’ve been going through resumes and doing interviews this week, but no luck so far. Most of them look great on paper, but once I sit down with them, it doesn’t take long to become glaringly apparent that they wouldn’t be a good fit. I haven’t found a single person so far that’s even trainable.”
Mila nodded in sympathy. “I know what you mean. I was lucky to find Matilda when I did. She’s been a gift from the fates, but before I found her, I tore through a dozen would-be candidates in less than a month. They were terrible. Or at least most of them were. Some of them were nice, but nice doesn’t cut it when I’m trying to run a business.”
I scoffed. “At least yours were nice. Most of the ones I’ve interviewed have been stuffy, arrogant, dumb as a box of rocks, or a combination of the three. I’m starting to think Bob and I should just keep on splitting the duties like we have been. It’s wearing me out just trying to find someone to fill the spot.”
“You’ll find somebody,” she said. “Or maybe you won’t. Maybe you’re meant to keep doing it the way you have been, at least for now. The universe won’t let you down.”
It sure didn’t feel that way at the moment, but I knew she was right. Things would work out the way they were supposed to. They always did. That didn’t mean they’d work out the way I wanted them to, though. I drank the last of my water and stood up.
“Tempest!” I called. “Time to go.”
A couple minutes later, she and Calamity, who looked almost identical to her other than the fact that she had mismatched blue and green eyes, ambled in.
“But we just got here,” she grumbled.
“I know, but we don’t have time to visit right now. We have to get back and figure out who did this. The grand opening is tomorrow afternoon, so we’re running out of time. I’d rather not have a murderer on the loose while we’re holding two back-to-back ribbon-cutting ceremonies.”
She gave a long-suffering sigh and hopped onto my shoulder. “Fine. Let’s just get it over with. Do we have to be there for the fancy-schmancy events tomorrow?”
I shook my head. “I should probably be there, but you could probably come back if you want. For that matter, you can stay now. I know you two haven’t had time to catch up in a while.”
“No,” she replied, regret lacing her tone as she snuggled closer to my neck. “I can’t leave you on your own. Like you said, there’s a murderer on the loose. Besides, you might need my keen senses and sharp wit to help you solve it.”
“I know that’s right,” Calamity said with a solemn nod. “There’s no way Mila could get by without me now that we’re fighting bad guys. She’s way too marshmallowy.”
Mila rolled her eyes but stepped up to give me a hug. “I don’t know why we put up with them, but she’s sorta right. She’s helped me out of a few scrapes lately. I’ll get in touch as soon as I figure something out. It shouldn’t take me long to reverse-engineer this and figure out what makes it tick. I just need to do it in a way that won’t blow up my lab or turn me into a giraffe in the process.”
I shot her an evil grin. “I don’t know. I’ve always wanted a pet giraffe, so that might not be too awful.”
She swatted at me. “If you tried to keep me as a pet, I’d eat your curtains and leave giraffe road biscuits everywhere I thought you’d possibly step.”
I laughed and shook my head as I snapped my fingers. “Love you!” I called as the void sucked me in. I faintly heard her return the sentiment as it yanked me from her shop to the tiki. I figured that was the safer location considering the board members might already be descending upon Blake in his office. I cared about the man, but not enough to deal with the politics of the place.
That was all him, and he was welcome to it.
Chapter 9
As soon as we made it to the area behind the tiki, I filled Tempest in on what Mila’d said, being sure not to leave anything out, then asked her to relay it to Blake. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, then opened them again.
“Done,” she said with a decisive nod.
I scrunched my brow. “How could you have possibly told him everything I just told you in that amount of time?”
She shrugged. “I told him it’s probably a transformation potion but that it didn’t look right to her and that she was going to test it and get back to us. All that other junk is useless information that he doesn’t care about or even need to know about. He’s busy. I’m busy. No time to gab.”
I arched a brow at her as I headed around the building, careful to avoid the tiny pastel road biscuits littering the path. Apparently, we had a family of unicorns visiting. Most of the adults were good about doing their business in the designated area, but there wasn’t much we could do about the babies other than patrol and clean them up as necessary. Even though the nuggets were pretty—for what they
were, anyway—and smelled like cotton candy, the glitter was a bitch to get off your shoes if you stepped in it.
“And what, exactly, are you busy doing? I get why you wouldn’t want to waste Blake’s time, but we’re sort of at a standstill.”
“Eating,” she declared. “It might not have occurred to your stomach that we haven’t had supper yet, but mine hasn’t forgotten.”
At the reminder, my stomach rumbled. Since she mentioned it, I did feel a little lightheaded. On top of the stress, porting used a lot of energy, and we hadn’t had anything aside from the grilled cheese we’d eaten for lunch.
“Fine,” I said. “We can eat while we talk to Dimitri. Hopefully, he’s seen somebody who might match the description of the guy who was standing outside Andromeda’s room.”
Since the resort was full mostly of faeries and giants, one human-looking guy shouldn’t be hard to find.
“Welcome back,” Dimitri said as he flipped a coaster onto the bar in front of me. “Water or something stronger?”
“Definitely something stronger,” I said.
“Beer or rum fizz?”
I thought for a minute and opted for the lighter drink. It was still hot, and beer sounded heavy. I wanted to fill up on food, not hops, and his specialty cocktail filled the bill. “Rum fizz.”
“Where’s everybody at?” I asked. It was after six, which meant the place was usually in the middle of the dinner rush. Instead, only a few small groups of people were scattered across tables on the patio.
He lifted a shoulder as he set the fizzy golden drink in front of me. “We had a push earlier, but it was mostly a cocktail crowd. It’s pizza night at Marco’s, so maybe that’s where they went.”
Marco’s was the Italian restaurant in the main resort building, and they ran a special on one of their house dishes every couple of weeks. Whenever he did, business tended to be slow at the tiki.
“That’s sort of good,” I said. “I need to talk to you, and I didn’t want to do it with a crowd. Will you put us a burger in?”
“Sure thing,” he replied, shoving a loose tendril of blue hair off his forehead. He always kept it in a man bun, but the heat made it close to impossible to maintain a cool do, even for somebody as put together as he always was. I swear, the man probably used more product than I did. In fact, he made it a point to harp on it every chance he got. Apparently, I didn’t take care of my hair or skin to his satisfaction.
“Nice board shorts,” Tempest said, hopping up onto the bar. “New?”
He nodded and beamed at her. “They are. Thanks for noticing.” He cast a glare at me. “Since Destiny never bothers to pay attention to my sense of fashion.”
I blushed a little and cast a surreptitious glance at them. I had to admit, the turquoise flowers stood out nicely against the bright yellow fabric. Subtle, he was not.
“I noticed earlier,” I said in a defensive tone even though I totally hadn’t. “I just didn’t want your head to swell up any bigger than it already is.”
“Sure you did,” he said, arching a perfectly groomed blue brow at me as he put my cheeseburger order into the computer. “I know you’re lying because I didn’t have these on earlier. I had on my neon-green ones. I dropped a blob of ketchup on them, though, and had to change.”
I sighed. “Fine, I didn’t. But those are nice. They look good against your tan.”
He grinned. “Someday I’m going to turn your fashion sense around, but today is not that day. Now, what did you want to ask me?”
“You haven’t by chance seen a human-looking guy in a suit, have you? Or one that looks like he might be a suit type of person? Expensive, unless I miss my guess. As you pointed out, though, I wouldn’t know an Armani from an off-the-rack one, though, so I might be off on that. It looked tailored though. Oh, and he has dark hair and is probably close to six feet tall.”
He screwed his face up in concentration. “I might have. There was some sort of business meeting here earlier this afternoon. They put everything on one business account. Something-Enterprise. I can look it up for you, but they were all dressed in pressed khakis and polos, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they were suit guys. One of them fit the description.”
A glimmer of hope shot through me. “Can you get me the actual name of the group? That would save me some time.”
“Does this have something to do with the murder?” he asked.
I nodded. “I caught a vision of a dark-haired guy in a suit standing in front of her room talking to her. It was from the back, though, so I’m not sure what he looks like from the front. He was too bulky to be a faerie, so I’m pretty sure he was a human or a warlock.”
“Wait a second,” he said. “If you’re looking for somebody connected to her, that’s different. She was with a guy earlier that fits that description, right before she went for a walk.”
“Did he go with her?” I took a long sip of my drink and sighed when the light, fruity flavor hit my tongue. It was a little lethal because it tasted so good, and since it was light, it was way too easy to just slurp it down and have another. That was a mistake, though, unless you were planning on spending the day toasted. Then it was perfect.
“Nope,” he replied. “They argued before she stormed off. He wasn’t too pleased, either.”
“Ooh, did he stay here,” Tempest asked, “or did he storm off, too?”
“He stayed and had another rum runner, but he didn’t hang around long. He pretty much sucked it down and left.” He shook his head. “It was his third one, and there’s no way he made it too far.”
Unlike a lot of places, we didn’t use mixes or go light on the booze to boost the bottom line. Our rum runners had two shots of rum, two shots of liqueur, and a 151 floater. Three was enough to take down a full-grown man for sure, especially if he wasn’t a drinker and wasn’t used to the heat. Three even put me under the table if I didn’t space them out, and I was no lightweight.
“Was he still mad when he left?” Tempest asked. “I’d like to go ahead and track him down, let Blake arrest him, and get on with the weekend.”
I shook my head. “I hope it’s that easy, but you know it’s not going to be.”
“It might be,” she said, shrugging a furry white shoulder.
Dimitri went to the computer and pecked on the touchscreen a few times. “Here it is. Zachary Whitehall, suite 222, so he must be a bigshot.”
“That’s the next suite over from her,” I said.
“See?” Tempest said. “Easy, peasy. Go arrest him. No, wait. Let’s eat first.”
“Tell Blake,” I said. “Maybe we won’t have to.”
She shot me an irritated look before closing her eyes. “I’m not your secretary, you know.”
“No, you’re my familiar, which means we work as a team.”
“Hmph,” she replied. “You and I have a very different opinion of what, exactly, a familiar’s role is.”
“Just do it,” I said, rolling my eyes and taking another sip of my drink. I swear, it was a wonder I wasn’t a full-on lush, having to put up with her.
She peeped an eye open. “I heard that, and right back atcha, sister.”
I refused to take it back, though, and Dimitri laughed. “So did I, though I have to say I agree with you.”
“Fine,” Tempest replied before closing her eye again. “But remember that the next time you’re losing at five-card and need some help.”
She had him there. Even though I opposed her gambling, I smiled as I sucked down the last of my drink and shoved my empty glass forward for another.
Chapter 10
Once Tempest told Blake about the guy, he asked if I could follow up on it. A few of the board members had already arrived, and he was busy keeping them occupied. He didn’t say much more than that, or if he did, she didn’t relay it.
“That’s it?” I asked, cutting a third of my burger off and putting it on a smaller plate for her. “He just wants me to follow up on it?”
“Yep,” she r
eplied, snatching a pickle spear off the plate. Fortunately, Dimitri knew her and had ordered extra. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten even a bite of one.
I sighed and dug into my burger. The faster we ate, the sooner I could talk to the guy, and the sooner I could go home. I was exhausted and needed a shower, and I needed to fold the pile of laundry sitting in my living room before Colin got there the next morning.
“Hey, you,” a familiar voice said. I turned, smiling.
“Hey, Steph. What’s up?”
Stephanie was a Valkyrie, but over the centuries, the need for her services had dwindled. Now she mostly did private security stuff for elite magicals, so she found herself with a lot of time on her hands. She spent a lot of that time at the resort.
“Great bathing suit,” I said, admiring the gold-streaked black two-piece. She was built like the demigoddess she was, so she looked great in anything. As always, she wore the filigreed armbands of her kind, and her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail.
“Thanks,” she said. “Dianna got this for me ages ago, but I’d forgotten about it.”
Dianna was an angel, and I had a mixed past with her. I’d suspected her of murder at one point, and it was still a bit of a touchy subject. Still, she was Steph’s friend, so I never talked about it with her.
My friend smiled. “I know. You two have a weird relationship, but she does like you, you know.”
“I didn’t know,” I said around a bite of cheeseburger, “but I don’t have anything against her, either. We’re just probably not going to ever be best buds.”
She reached over and plucked a fry off my plate and dragged it through my ketchup. “That’s okay; you don’t have to be. But know that she has superb taste in clothes.”