Hexed

Janet had just had another run-in,” Maya said. “He was angry at her, and he told me all about it at the fancy restaurant he took me to—through the appetizers and the wine, and all through dinner. Couldn’t shut his stupid mouth about you, Janet.”
    “Sorry.” It was hardly my fault that Sheriff Jones was clueless when it came to women, but I felt bad that his choice of conversation had hurt Maya. “What did you do?”
    “Poured my wine in his lap and walked out.”
    Mick snorted with laughter. “Good for you.”
    “This was supposed to be our makeup date. If I don’t show, he’ll assume I’m still mad at him. Which I am.”
    Mick put his arms around me from behind while I dropped another towel into the smoking mess. His dragon tattoos glowed eerily in the light from the brazier. “Tell Jones to back off Janet, or he’ll answer to me.”
    I suppose some women would be thrilled by a gorgeous man leaping to her defense for every little thing, but his tight protectiveness was starting to worry me. Mick was possessive, yes, but he usually was more sensible about it.
    “Nash is immune to your fire,” I pointed out.
    “I can’t hurt him magically, no,” Mick said. “But I can break things, like his neck.”
    “Let him, Janet,” Maya said. “I wouldn’t mind seeing Nash beaten up a little. But don’t hurt him too much. I want a turn at him, too.”
    “Enough with the bloodthirstiness, both of you.” I coughed from the thickening smoke. “Right now, we need Nash whole, and we need him here. Mick, you spent lots of time feeling up the wards. Were you able to strengthen them? Can we fight the hex through them?”
    Mick let me go, but he remained standing against me. “I don’t think so. It was a stealthy spell, latching onto the wards themselves. From there it spread through the building like a net, affecting everyone within its drag. If we could find its key, we could unlock it, but the hex itself makes anything we try to do against it or every attempt to decipher it go wrong. I’m lucky I could find out as much as I did.”
    “So what do we do? How long will a spell like that last?”
    He shrugged. “No way to say. It’s growing in intensity. I’m watching everyone become a little crazier as the night goes on.”
    “Including you,” I said.
    Mick looked surprised. “It’s not affecting me. I feel a bit of demon in the spell, but Cassandra said the ununculous could steal demon powers. And here’s one more interesting thing about it: The caster had to be very close, as in within the building.”
    Mick dropped that bombshell and closed his mouth.
    Maya’s eyes widened. “You mean, like he’s hiding in the basement? Dios mío , why don’t we go get him, then?”
    “I don’t mean that the ununculous is here,” Mick said. “I’d know. So would Janet. I meant that someone brought the trigger for the spell in with them and set it off. One of us.”

SIX
     

     
    “DON’T LOOK AT ME,” MAYA SAID QUICKLY. “I didn’t set off any curse. I think you two are nuts.”
    “We know it wasn’t you,” Mick said, voice soothing. “Of all of us, you are the only one untouched by magic. You’d have to be at least a minor mage to bring it in.”
    “A minor mage,” I said in dismay. “Like Fremont?”
    Maya snorted. “Fremont? You don’t mean all that crap he says about being magical is true?”
    There was nothing like a good, old-fashioned curse to bring out the paranoia. “He wouldn’t do that,” I said. “Fremont’s a nice person who would never hurt anyone.”
    “He could be wholly innocent of the fact that he brought in the curse,” Mick said. “He might have carried it like a mosquito carries a disease. This all started when he came to fix your leaky faucet, right?”
    “Right,” I said glumly. “Let’s go talk to Fremont.”
    I glanced at the brazier. My fire was smoking merrily, sending a heavy gray-white plume into the darkening sky. As I’d suspected, it stopped about fifteen feet up and simply vanished. But that might be enough. “Maya, can you stay here and make sure that the fire doesn’t go out?” I asked.
    “Fine with me.” Maya hunkered against the stone wall, out of the smoke. “I don’t want to go back down into Hotel Crazy.”
    “Thank you.”
    “But go easy on Fremont,” she said as we passed her. “He can be an idiot, but he’s not a bad person, you know?”
    “I know,” I said, and I followed Mick inside.
     
    “I SWEAR TO you,