Witches for Hire (Odd Jobs #1)(7)
“I’ll wait by his side,” Edarra said.
“I’ll go turn off our only defense against Hell’s minions,” Jeremy mumbled as he headed to his office. They’re both insane. Jeremy locked his door behind him and walked to his bookshelf. He pulled it away from the wall and bent down to press his hand on the wood paneling. A wooden square came off in his hand, revealing a small loom with hair weaved through it. “If you guys really want to persuade me that good things aren’t followed by dire consequences, perhaps turning off a demon barrier might not be the way to go.” He shook his head. I will not fall into that trap of hope again, he thought as he freed the ivory pen-thick hair that had taken him years to find.
AT EXACTLY four, a woman in black leather clothing with ice-blue hair that curled around her head in a misleading halo walked through the door. She didn’t take her sunglasses off as she approached Edarra, who was sitting in Simone’s seat.
Contrary to Clive’s earlier words easing his employees’ worries, his foot was within inches of his staff beneath Simone’s desk. Demons weren’t a foreign sight to Clive. In his world, they usually dressed as harmless citizens to draw in prey, or they went far in the opposite direction to ensure that no lowly human approached them lightly. This demon had obviously chosen the latter. As close as she was, though, the Trakarra ring Clive had pierced through his nipple shouldn’t have been tingling with so much power. Only five of the ring’s eleven sigils had ever flared against his skin, and that was caused by a demon just under the rank of demonlord. All of the sigils he had been trained to painstakingly sense in order to preserve his life warmed in this demon’s presence. The only reason she would be so powerful was if she was residing in the Earth Realm in her true flesh and not a possessed body.
“Are you the one who secured it?” the demon asked Edarra, blatantly ignoring Clive with her back turned to him.
Edarra nodded.
“I’m surprised you didn’t steal a few buds. Everyone else would have made me pay an arm and a leg.” She smiled. “Then I would have made them pay the same. It’s rare that I collect them without shedding blood.”
“Artemis does not condone slavery, and I will punish it if I witness it,” Edarra said adamantly.
The demon tilted her head. “You mean that. Humans can never appreciate the freedom of magical creatures.” She finally looked at Clive, her sunglasses sliding down to reveal pure black irises rimmed in bloodred.
Despite knowing his words didn’t matter to her, Clive spoke up. “That is a sentiment shared by this human.”
“We’ll see.” The demon slapped a lumpy velvet bag on the desk. “Your payment. My employer will also honor a favor in Edarra’s name. If we have future problems, I’m told that we will consider your firm.”
Edarra bowed her head. “We are honored.”
Clive bowed his head too, but the demon was already walking away with the fairy tree in hand. When she was gone, he let out his breath. “I think that was her actual body.”
Edarra’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”
“That’s not something we would have allowed in my own world.”
“Earth Realm gets stranger and stranger.”
As Clive emptied the bag on the counter, a diamond as big as his thumbnail and dark pink stones so deep with color that he couldn’t see the counter’s wood beneath them tumbled out. So many priceless jewels because human money meant nothing to the fey. He pushed the larger diamonds and whichever stones looked the most expensive toward Edarra.
“Um….” Edarra frowned at the gems as if Clive was going to snatch them back.
He stepped away a little so she understood that they were hers. I think I still underestimate what horrible people Edarra and the others worked for. “You did the most work, so you get the largest share.”
“Thank you, sir!” Edarra scooped her haul into a sandwich bag and stuffed it inside her vest. Clive almost warned her about leaving such valuables easy to get to, but chuckled at himself for even having the thought. If someone was dumb enough to rob her, that was their great misfortune.
Chapter 3
FAST BEATS and a mostly bleeped-out woman’s voice singing the details of her night of drinking shook the car’s windows. As the singer repeated the chorus, Jeremy didn’t share her need to pee in a hotel pool at 4:00 a.m., but she did help him win the battle over his drooping eyelids.
Simone spun the volume down as low as it would go. “She sucks, and that DJ can’t mix for shit either.”
Jeremy rolled his eyes. “I’m not paying a ten-dollar cover charge for it. I just want to stay awake.” He checked his watch again. “Do you want to check on her?” The parking lot had been deserted since the mall closed, and the client was twenty minutes late. The car was under an illusion so security wouldn’t hassle them, and so far their only company were floodlights and a driver making a U-turn.
Suddenly, the entrance door facing them slammed open. Jeremy and Simone tensed in their seats, but it was only their client, in a red apron and waving her hands for them to rush to her.
“You think she laid eyes on it?” Jeremy whispered as he got out of the car.
The young woman continued signaling for them to come inside.