Page 47 of Magic Claimed

“I tried to tell everyone,” she screeched, her face blotched and her arms flailing with rage. “No one listened. The owner threatened me. He’s forcing me to move out. And now this. It’s revenge. But I won’t let you get away with it. Tell me what you’ve done with her!”

Her? Wait, so this wasn’t about the fire?

I didn’t have a whole lot of patience to spare, but neither would I let Kes bear the weight of this much unreasonable hatred, so I headed towards them with what I hoped was a pleasant and reasonable expression on my face.

“What seems to be the problem?”

One of the officers turned towards me. “Ma’am, do you live on this floor?”

I gestured to the door at Kes’s back. “I do. Right here, in fact. I wasn’t home last night though.”

That’s when the woman’s claws came flying at my face. I was almost too sleep-deprived to duck, but thankfully one of the officers caught her and pulled her off before she could draw blood.

“You took my daughter,” she accused wildly, and suddenly I noted her red, swollen eyes. “I know it was you. That’s why you weren’t home. You did something with her, and I’ll make you tell me!”

This didn’t seem like the right time to inform her that I hadn’t even realized shehada daughter.

“I wasn’t home,” I said evenly, “because I was at work. You can ask my boss. And once I left there, I was…”

Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t admit to a couple of human cops that I was looking for another missing kid, that my boyfriend had been poisoned, or that I’d been partially responsible for five dead fae and a handful of concussed turtles.

“…with a friend,” I finished. “I can supply the names and numbers of the people I was with last night if you would like, but I can assure you, I had nothing to do with your daughter’s disappearance.”

“Then you probably know who took her,” the woman hissed. “How else do you explainthis?” She shoved a sticker-covered laptop in my face and shook it. “All those online games. I knew they were dangerous, but then I found out she was spending all her time withyourkind. Talking about magic, and how much she wished she had it too.”

She abruptly clutched the laptop to her chest. “Corrupting my daughter with your lies. And now she’s gone.”

Something tugged at my brain… something about Monique and Jeremiah…

“How old is your daughter?” I asked suddenly.

“Only fifteen,” the woman wailed.

“Ma’am, we need you to give us more information,” one of the officers said. “Like what she was wearing, who she spends time with, and when was the last time you saw her. Are you positive she didn’t leave any notes?”

“You think I wouldn’t know if my own child left me a note?” the woman exclaimed tearfully. “She was here yesterday, and now she’s not, so why won’t you question these people? I’mtelling you, they’re criminals. Taking advantage of the fact that they have magic and we don’t. They can do whatever they want, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them. There should be laws! Ways to keep ourselves safe from these monsters!”

Ironic, considering that I was as human as she was.

“How about we talk about it inside?” the officer suggested in a calm, reasonable tone, and very gently began to escort her back towards her own door.

The second officer turned to me. “I should take your information just in case,” he said. “We’ll be in touch if we have any further questions.”

He didn’t sound as if he suspected me of anything, but maybe he had lots of practice sounding nonchalant. And he was human. Would he take my neighbor’s side simply because of that? Or would he believe my friends’ testimony that I’d been far too busy to abduct a teenage girl I hadn’t known existed?

Though if Ihadknown, I might have thought about abducting her out of sheer pity.

Again, something I definitely should not admit aloud.

I gave him my name and number, then Kira’s, and he was walking away just as Kira popped out of the stairwell and jogged towards me. She eyed the retreating officer before raising an eyebrow.

“You know I’m taken, right? Not that he wasn’t cute, but why did you give him my number?”

“Inside,” I said grimly, grabbing her elbow and tugging her towards my front door. “It’s a long story.”

By the timeI caught her up on the drama, Logan emerged from his room, yawning and stretching as he stumbled into the kitchen in search of food.

He seemed to be in a relatively good mood, and I hated to spoil it, but I didn’t want him caught off guard by the upcoming move.