I rolled my eyes. “Has anyone mentioned anything?”
“About a casing? No. About a mage? Yes. But it sounds like they’re in the same boat you are.” He looked at the bar door. He was definitely waiting for someone. Probably a shifter, but I was here on legit business, so it didn’t matter.
I had to keep reminding myself of that fact.
“What boat is that?” I asked, putting the casing back into my pocket.
“Not the booze cruise, at any rate. Your teeth are red.”
I leaned forward, losing patience.
He read the writing on the wall. “Okay, okay.” He put his hands on the table and glanced at the door again. “That guy you picked up the other night?” I nodded. “I asked around about him, out of curiosity. I wanted to know why the vampires were after him. That’s newsworthy, right?” He waited for my nod. “He was selling a sort of drug. It came in the form of blood.”
He stared at me, clearly waiting for a reaction.
“Go on,” I said.
His lips tightened. “We think it must have been vamp blood, and it certainly wasn’t taken with approval, because they ended up killing him.”
“Vamp blood? Maybe.” I wanted him to think I didn’t know the real source of the blood. “It’s pretty hard to trap a vampire. Maybe while he was sleeping, but it would take some extreme presence of mind to pull that off without getting killed before you reached the door.”
“That’s what we’re thinking. It doesn’t quite add up.”
“We being the shifters?” I asked.
He looked toward the door again. “Yeah. So we’ve been looking for any other explanation.”
“And you heard about a mage,” I surmised.
A troubled look crossed his face. He ran his finger down the sweating bottle of beer. “I’ve heard about a few, actually. All of a sudden, it seems like mages in this area have gotten really powerful. Like…one can create hellfire.” He shook his head. “He went missing a couple days ago, but they say he does that often. He disappears for a while, but he always comes back, usually with some spells.”
That sounded like the guy I’d taken out, though the spell he’d thrown at me hadn’t been hellfire. Close, but it wouldn’t have killed a vampire. It hadn’t been hot enough. “Where does he disappear to?”
Red shrugged, glanced at the door, and lowered his voice. “The witch who was telling me was really drunk. He didn’t think it was the Realm, but he wasn’t sure where else the mage would go. Maybe he disappeared to re-up his supply of the blood?”
“That’s all you’ve got?”
His eyes turned shifty. “Yeah.”
He was the worst liar. I said as much.
“That’s it. He’s been gone a while.” Red fidgeted.
“You guys killed him, then?” I tried, watching closely. His head jerked, like he stopped himself saying no, and his shoulder ticked upward, like a shrug in process, but there was no surprise or defensiveness in his expression.
The shifters knew the mage was dead, but they didn’t know I’d killed him. Huh. Captain Lox was keeping his secrets, and so were the mage’s neighbors. That was good.
“What else?” I asked.
Red shifted in his seat. He licked his lips and eyed the door.
“What else?” I repeated before upending the bottle and gulping down the liquid. For some reason, my heavy drinking scared him more than an out-and-out threat.
“The rumor is, there are a few mages involved,” he said in a shaky voice. “They’re selling the blood, but that’s just a monetary scheme. They’re also trying to amass power.”
I rolled my eyes. “They are always trying to amass power. Is this all you’ve got?”
“No!” He scooted toward me. When the man had information, he hated to be disbelieved. Hence the shifters keeping most of the juicy bits from him. “Rumor has it, they’ve enlisted a few covens of witches for their army. Those witches have somehow turned into full-scale mages. Their power has doubled. Doubled. Now, the witch who told me was drunk, as I said, so he could’ve exaggerated, but still…a witch who couldn’t even get into the Realm, suddenly talking about it as a second home?”
That was something.
I leaned back, not liking that news at all.
“Exactly,” he said, matching my lean. “Exactly. We’re a little worried about what this might mean. And even more worried that the vampires will stumble onto all this, and try to bring the leader into their fold. Can you imagine if the vampires suddenly had access to this much power? They could easily use the mages to force us out of the Brink…and, eventually, maybe even take on the elves.”
I couldn’t hold back a dark look as I remembered what Darius had said: “We won’t bow forever.”
Red had a point. My job had started as a bounty hunter gig, but now it seemed like I’d be leading them to a large source of power with an amassing army. Not to mention, I had a lot of power myself. Once I found the mage in charge, the vampires would have both of us in the same place, ripe for capture. I was pretty sure this hadn’t started as a setup, but if the shifters had made this connection, I could damn well bet it had occurred to Vlad and Darius.
“Not good,” I mumbled.
Before Red could reply, a burly man walked through the door. Stacked with muscle that didn’t steal any of his grace, complete with a barrel chest and heavy tree-trunk arms, he held himself like he owned the world and everything breathing within it. I groaned when I caught sight of his eye color. One blue and one green.
The most powerful of the shifters in North America had just walked into the bar. My day couldn’t get worse if I intentionally sabotaged it.
Chapter Fourteen
“Hey, Roger. Nice to see you. I was just leaving.” I got out of my seat as he stalked up.