Gypsy sat down beside me. “Well, you’re in luck, Leda, because I’m here to cheer you up.”
I gave her a wary look. “By being here, you’re not hoping to gather information that might give you an edge at gaining the one million dollars, are you?”
“Hoping, sure. I’m not an idiot. But I’m not depending on it. Besides, if you really knew where to find Sellsword, you wouldn’t have put out a bounty on him.”
“Spellsword,” I corrected her.
“Sellsword’s a nickname the dark angel has picked up. Given his defection and his rather mercenary tendencies.”
“If he’s just the mercenary carrying out a job, do you have any idea who hired him to kill all those people with their own kind of magic?” I asked her.
“No, but once I do, I’ll stop by to collect my money. Right now, though, I’m going to focus on cheering you up instead.”
I snorted. “Ok, I’ll bite. Exactly how do plan on doing that?”
“By getting you out of the house!” She pulled me to my feet. “Look at you, all floppy and dour. Go get changed into an outfit that doesn’t make you look like the Angel of Death, and then we’re hitting the town.”
An hour later, Gypsy, Angel, and I were seated at the bar of the Witch’s Watering Hole. We were on our eighth plate of chicken wings, and had already ordered the ninth. I’d lost count of how many cocktails we’d had.
The music was cheesy, the food greasy, and everyone was staring at us. We were a funny sight indeed: an angel, a bounty hunter, and a cat sitting at the bar of Purgatory’s favorite saloon.
I was dressed in a dark red minidress and a pair of black sandals with four-inch heels. I’d worn my hair up in a high twist with a blossom of cascading curls. One of the great things about having magic was I could curl my hair using only my finger. All I had to do was make it as hot as a curling iron, but not as hot as a bonfire. After gaining elemental magic, I’d spent a lot of time—and lost a fair bit of hair—finding that sweet spot.
Halfway through my dinner with Gypsy, Alec called with an update on the case.
“I should step back from work more often,” I told Gypsy as I tucked my phone back into my purse. “While I was away, my soldiers played.”
Angel batted her paw at the umbrella straw sticking up from her glass of warm milk.
“They’ve figured out how the dead supernaturals are connected,” I continued. “It turns out that the fire elementals and the ice elementals in Beyond all escaped from the vampire nest in Purgatory the night the vampires died. And so did the two witches in Abyss.”
That explained why I’d found Drummoyne’s lion ring near the witches in Abyss. And why I’d found the leather strip with the insignia of Drummoyne’s nest close to the fire elementals in Beyond.
“So they were all the vampires’ prisoners,” Gypsy said.
“Interesting.”
I knew that voice. I turned. I knew that face too. And that ridiculous dark goatee. Jinx. I’d been hoping I wouldn’t see him, but of course I’d known all along that eventually he’d pop up. He’d never ignore a million-dollar bounty.
Back when I’d been a bounty hunter, Jinx used to track me on a job, let me do all the work, then swoop in and steal my mark. He was the hyena of the bounty hunter world. I wondered how he wasn’t in prison yet—or dead, considering how many people he’d annoyed over the years.
“Mind if I join you, ladies?” he said with a silky smile.
“Yes. Go away,” I barked at him.
Angel backed me up by hissing at him.
Jinx sat down anyway. “I couldn’t help but overhear.”
“You mean eavesdrop on our conversation,” said Gypsy.
“Of course.” He shrugged, his smile easy, relaxed.
I laughed. “Why am I not surprised that you’ve been following me around?”
“Because you’re so clever, Leda.”
“Don’t suck up to me, Jinx.” I showed him my teeth. “I know you’re full of shit.”
“You flatter me.” He folded his hands together and bowed his head to me, smiling all the while. “I’m surprised your unimaginative Legion cronies figured out the dead elementals in Beyond and the dead witches in Abyss were all prisoners who escaped the vampires’ Purgatory nest.”
Alec had figured it out. Maybe I should offer him a promotion. Then again, maybe I should just give him a raise instead. A promotion at the Legion of Angels was a double-edged sword. A gift or a curse, depending on whether you were strong enough to survive the gods’ Nectar.
“Regardless, you’re going about this all wrong,” said Jinx. “Spellsword isn’t running around the Frontier, killing people. He infected the vampires with something that caused their own magic to turn against them. Then the vampires passed on that magic curse to their prisoners. And all the while, Spellsword has been sitting back and watching everything unfold. That’s why you can’t place him at the scenes of all the crimes. He was never there.”
Gods, he was right. Damn, I hated that. Almost as much as I hated seeing the smug expression creep across his face when he saw that I’d realized he was right.
“If Spellsword isn’t actively killing people, then tracking him won’t help you stop this,” Gypsy told me.
“No, it won’t.” I ordered another cocktail. I was going to need it—and about a dozen more.
“At the risk of sounding callous, does this mean you’re canceling the bounty?” Jinx asked casually.
Gypsy shot him a dirty look to let him know that he’d crossed the line.
“You don’t want her to call off the hunt either,” he replied, unfazed.
“Of course I don’t want her to call off the hunt. But no one with a lick of class would ask her outright.”
“I’ve got class.” He indicated his red-and-black leather motorcycle suit.
Gypsy rolled her eyes.
“I’m not calling off the hunt,” I told them. “Spellsword created this curse, and that means he killed those people, whether or not he was actually there when they died. And I’m not going to let him get away with it.” I pushed down my straw, crushing the ice in my glass.
“Something is troubling you,” Gypsy observed.
“Yes. Everything seems so connected. Except the incident at Desert Rose. The witch technicians who came to repair the Magitech generators were knocked out when their equipment overloaded. That sounds like the same kind of backfiring magic as in the other incidents.”
“So what’s the problem?” she asked me.
“The problem is we can’t find any connection between the witch technicians at Desert Rose and the Purgatory vampires. Those witches weren’t their prisoners. As far as we can tell, none of the Desert Rose witches have ever gone anywhere near Purgatory or the vampires in question.”
“I see what you mean,” Gypsy said. “That is curious.”
“We’re missing something. Some connection. We must be,” I said. “I feel like this is much more complicated, much messier than it seems. If we can just find the connection between the Desert Rose witches and the Purgatory vampires, we’ll be that much closer to solving this.”