Witches for Hire (Odd Jobs #1)(41)
“Don’t make this into a fight.”
“I won’t.”
“We’ll see about that. She wants to meet at the memorial.”
After wishing the senator a safe flight and ending the call, Jeremy leaned away from the steering wheel. His magic poured off him in green waves, wanting to consume all that it touched in tandem with his fury. He steered the car with his mind, knowing that if he kept holding the wheel, his power would destroy it. Anger was irrational when too much magic flowed through his body, but the Great Mother had no right to sully Levi’s spiritual resting place. Anyone could visit the bloody thing. In fact, children played among bronze statues erected to symbolize each life lost because their bodies remained in the Council’s custody. It was a token gesture to say that despite most of the victims being poor, they mattered. But, if the murderer wasn’t caught soon, the park was going to get pretty full. Putting an end to the killings was his first priority. The glow surrounding Jeremy diminished, and he continued driving manually. His second priority though would be extorting a queen’s ransom out of the hag for payback.
The forced meeting was the perfect opportunity to dump information into the Great Mother’s hands that he’d squandered by not possessing enough ill will in his death curse to finish off Rosaline. Jeremy licked his lips. Keeping Rosaline out of his thoughts protected him from saying her name out loud and suffering Gulley’s fate if he didn’t personally prepare every drink or morsel of food that entered his mouth until she was caught. He did relish the Great Mother being saddled with the same deadly annoyance. Despite her public persona of the kindhearted maternal figure, she was nothing but an extortionist…. If she couldn’t blackmail witches to do what she wanted by divining their futures, then she threatened them with catastrophic outcomes that only she could prevent, like some common thug. Jeremy’s father had called her bluff and refused to join her coven and become her puppet in the Senate. And oh how she’d dangled a terrible future for Senator Ragsdale’s loved ones in his face. She’d just failed to mention it was a son he didn’t know about from a former lover who’d been brainwashed by her horrid family to think that no man would want anything to do with her bastard.
Jeremy was a rational man. He could accept that those past events weren’t the Great Mother’s direct doing, and she’d just profited off it by making the senator an example of what happened to people who ignored her demands for allegiance. But the parcel addressed to his father that Jeremy mistakenly opened when he first moved to the States had been the final cut. A spread of tarot cards dictating the misfortune fell into his hands a week after his mother’s funeral, with the Great Mother’s condolences. He didn’t remember burning the table or the cards falling into ashes, just his father shaking him to his senses. The Council’s oath of maintaining Jeremy and his father’s restraining order against the Great Mother was the only thing that stopped Jeremy from going after her. That, and knowing her cards failed to see his connection to Desmond.
ARRIVING FASHIONABLY late to spite the Great Mother was his intention, but every school’s football team having games on the same night turned his childish plan into a genuine delay. By the time Jeremy drove into the lot, he was too irritated to lie cockily about his tardiness and just wanted to get the meeting over with. On the grassy area away from the cars, a roundabout spun. A lone female figure sat on a bench, gazing down at it. Her hair was piled on top of her head to twist down the side of her face in a wide curl. A pristine cream suit completed her illusion of old Southern charm. Jeremy opened his mouth to speak, but a metal glint from the floor of the roundabout caught his eye. The shine came from the streetlight reflecting off a watch attached to a dangling arm. Three other bodies were draped similarly around each rung. When Jeremy walked to the Great Mother’s side, her gaze never left them. “The crazy bitch wants to start a war with both of us.”
“You and Desmond are near the top of the food chain.” Jeremy stepped toward the bodies. The two men wore black suits, and the two women floral dresses.
“They disappeared when they left church. The shuttle-bus driver found a note with my name and number on it but was too inconvenienced to tell anyone about the strange envelope until my people called him.”
“Probably just as inconvenient as you thought it was to contact the Council about your missing witches.” No bloody remains or the lingering magic that normal dead witches emitted for days. The bodies were probably drained of all life, but the fact that there were no organs damaged was a greater cause for concern. When an energy vamp wasted food, they had a bigger source to feed from. “Where are our benevolent overseers?”
The Great Mother pointed at the swing set, where Jeremy could barely make out three people standing in the shadows. They stood as still as the statues with their hands behind their backs, poised as if they would spring on any threat that presented itself. There was no hint of shapes on their faces resembling eyes or other facial features.
“Faradin’s dolls,” Jeremy whispered. Faradin was supposedly the leader of the Council, but he made so few appearances that Jeremy almost thought the man was a myth. Most only knew about a specific sighting of him from a hundred years ago, about Faradin using faceless shadow dolls to strike down a rogue firebug witch trying to burn Atlanta down. “Why did you use my father as an excuse to meet me?”