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The guy turned to me. “Am I going to get everything back?”

I peeked at Gabe. He opened his mouth to answer, but this was my gig, too. I knew as much as he did. “We have no reason to believe your powers won’t return. If you think of anything else, please don’t hesitate to reach out,” I told him.

Gabe took a paper and a pen from the coffee table in front of him and wrote down his name and number. “We can help,” he said, emphasizing the word.

The witch hadn’t seemed clear on that point. We weren’t here just to wait and see what happened to people and deal with the aftermath. We were here to make sure it didn’t happen again.

Gabe held out his hand, and the witch shook it. “Thanks. I’ll let you know.”

We walked outside and met Randy and Travis by the Jeep. “The guy going to be okay?” Travis asked, his mouth tight.

“Yeah,” Gabe said, peeking back at the front window. “He’s going to be fine. Doesn’t have much trust in us though. Apparently, it’s going around Salem how there’s someone out there draining witches’ magic.”

Randy put his hands on his hips. “Of course, there is. Because all they care about is their magic. No one says a damn thing when we stop something evil from hurting someone.”

“Well, now it’s knocking on their backdoor,” Gabe supplied “When you think about it, you can’t blame them.”

“I can,” Randy muttered. His lips thinned, and he got that angry look in his eye.

Gabe ignored him. “We usually deal with things happening to normal people. Not usually Naturals or Wiccans. Here we have witches who are getting drained. It’s normal for them to be afraid. If witches were out in the open, this would be all over the news. Think about if this was happening to normal people. What if they had a serial murderer on their hands who had a certain type of victim? If you were that person’s type, you’d be worried yourself.”

That much was true. Something was happening to the witches in this town and it wasn’t good. The Order didn’t need any bad press. What if one of these scared witches decided to give the superiors a call? We’d be fucked then.

“We need to figure this shit out,” I said. “We can’t risk anyone coming to town and snooping around.”

“My bet’s on Dupre, but we’ve never been able to find him before.”

“Yeah, well, Granny says since we’re all linked now, we shouldn’t have to wait long for that.”

Travis perked up, his eyes blazing. “She did tell you that, didn’t she? She told you we were stronger now and that Dupre would be able to find us. What if we made it easy for him to find us?”

“You mean like…?”

“Call his ass,” Travis said, a smile pulling his lips apart. “He obviously wants magic and we’re the strongest witches around. Let’s show him what we can do. He’ll be drawn to us. He won’t be able to help himself.”

Randy nodded. “I like it. Let’s find a place that’s more suitable for us. No flying in blind, not knowing what’s behind the door to get us. We can do a strong spell somewhere where we’re familiar, then we’ll see if he takes the bait.”

“In the meantime,” Gabe said, “let’s send out a message to the witches in Salem to be careful. We should take a proactive stance on this. Plus, they might even be able to lead us to Dupre before we can sucker him in.”

“How do we send messages to all the witches in Salem?” I asked, genuinely curious. Was there some sort of messaging system I wasn’t aware of? Sounded awesome.

“Start with the people we know and have them call everyone they know,” Gabe said, lifting his shoulders.

That was disappointing and sounded like a hell of a lot of work. “There’s no magical way to do it?”

Gabe took his phone out of his pocket and wiggled it in the air. “Itismagic. It’s called a cell phone.”

I shook my head at him and got in the car. While Travis drove, Randy and Gabe got on the phone to every witch they knew, telling them to be careful and to look out for someone who fit Dupre’s description and asking them to let us know if they came across anyone like that.

They’d hit a big zero on the list so far. No one knew a thing but appreciated the heads up. It wasn’t until we pulled into the driveway that Randy suddenly sat up straighter. “Yeah, yeah, we’ll be there as soon as we can.” He hung up the phone and twisted around to face us. “That was Ren. He needs to see us.”

He looked at me. I saw the flame of hope building in his eyes once again. I hoped we could at least solve one piece of the puzzle tonight.

Chapter Twenty

We pulled up outside Ren’s dilapidated ranch. I reached for the car door handle, but Gabe held me back. I looked up to find him staring out the window. “Anyone else think it’s weird there are no lights on in that place?”

“It’s a magical whorehouse,” I explained. “They’re all fucked up. They probably think the lights are on.”