Other people. Not you, I told myself as I went to go put my dinner tray away. I didn’t need to play love roulette right now. I didn’t want it. Challenging that statement, Nero was suddenly beside me. My heart stuttered a surprised beat in my chest.
“You really have to stop doing that,” I told him. “It freaks me out.”
“If you were more aware of your surroundings, you wouldn’t be surprised,” he said. His tone was so cool, so professional, that I almost wondered if I’d imagined that whole scene in his office earlier.
“No matter how aware I am of my surroundings, I have a feeling I still wouldn’t sense you unless you wanted me to,” I replied with equal coolness.
“Yes.”
I nearly laughed at the cold certainty of that single word, but the look in his eyes stopped me. His tone might have held no emotion, but his eyes burned with fiery intensity. I didn’t know what I saw in those eyes, but it scared me.
“I have a job for you and Fireswift,” Nero said, waving Jace over. “You will read through the records of all the witches the Legion captured last month, the ones who joined the demons’ army. I want you to look for any connections between those witches, anything they have in common. If we can find a common link between them all, we might be able to determine which other witches are still free and doing the demons’ bidding. And that will lead us to the witches behind the string of recent attacks on the supernatural community.”
After his jealous speech earlier, I was surprised that Nero had assigned Jace and me to work together again. But then again, maybe it hadn’t been jealousy. Maybe it had been just angel possessiveness at work. Or maybe he was simply a professional soldier and could separate his feelings from his work. Assuming he really did have feelings. He’d told me many times before that he couldn’t afford them.
Jace and I had been sitting in the library for over four hours, reading through the Legion’s files on the nine witches we’d captured in the Wicked Wilds last month, looking for connections that weren’t there, grasping at straws that slipped through our fingers.
“Let’s go through this one last time, and if we have no new brilliant insights, we can call it a night. What do you think?” I asked him.
“That I wanted to call it a night three hours ago,” he said with a heavy sigh. He sat up straighter and rubbed his hands together to wake them up. “Ok, let’s do this.” He glanced down at our notes. “Are the nine witches from the same coven? The answer is no. The nine witches represent six different covens, some of them not even based in New York.” He slid the sheet of paper over to me.
“Did the witches go to school together?” I read. “No, their educational backgrounds are all over the place too. We decided that those nine men and women seemed to share absolutely nothing in common with one another except for their desperation. The reasons for their hopeless situations are all different, but it was that feeling that led them all to the same place: into the demons’ service.”
“In other words, we know nothing,” Jace summarized. “Colonel Windstriker won’t be happy.”
“Well, he’ll just have to deal with it. We can’t turn straw into gold. If there is nothing there, then there is nothing there. Glaring at us won’t change the facts. Those witches had nothing in common… Wait, maybe we’re going about this in the wrong way.”
“What do you mean?”
“We were trying to find a connection between the witches.”
“Because that’s what Colonel Windstriker told us to do,” Jace reminded me.
“I know, but I think we need to look at the attacks instead.”
“The victims of the recent attacks—the vampires, us, and the shifters—have nothing in common either,” he replied.
“Well, we are all supernaturals.”
“So is a third of the population of New York.”
“They are supernaturals, and they were attacked by supernatural means,” I said. “More specifically, by witchcraft. The attacks themselves were all clearly the work of witches. The vampires’ were killed by animal venom. The attempt to blow us up was powered by Magitech. And the black cloud that tried to kill the shifters came from plant poisons. The specific venom, Magitech, and poison are all experimental new spells found in only one place: the New York University of Witchcraft. The witches are in this so deep, you can read the writing on the wall.”
“But we knew that already. This just brings us back to the witches, and we can’t find anything they have in common.”
“We couldn’t find anything the nine witches in Legion custody have in common with each other, or anything that links them to the four New York coven leaders,” I said. “But what if the two groups of witches aren’t connected at all? What if the witches behind the recent attacks aren’t working for the demons?”
“Each attack used magic from a different department, a different coven,” he said. “And since the coven leaders don’t get along with one another especially well, I think we can rule out the possibility of them all working together.”
“Maybe two covens are working together, but not all of them,” I agreed. “Morgana and Constantine are allies at the moment, and so are Aurora and Gwyneth. One of those allied pairs might be behind this, and they could have stolen supplies from the others.”
“But why attack vampires and shifters? And you’d have to be crazy to attack soldiers of the Legion,” Jace said.