Page 17 of Relics of the Wolf (Magnetic Magic #2)

17

As we took an exit that would lead us toward the town of Arlington, my phone rang. My first thought was that Mr. Raspy was calling back, but this was my phone, not the one we’d returned to the back seat. Jasmine’s name popped up, and I answered, hoping she or her father had learned something useful. According to the GPS map, we were only twelve minutes from our destination.

“Are you okay?” Jasmine asked before I could utter a hello .

“Did you hear about the attack at the apartment?” I guessed, though I didn’t know how she would have, unless my cousins were still spying on me. Reminded of the wolf we’d heard howl near Ballard, I considered that a possibility.

“It’s on the news . Sylvan Serenity, that’s your place, right? Not that I really need to ask when the media is saying four guys were killed by wild animals. Did Duncan do that? I knew he was dangerous.”

“Really,” Duncan murmured.

“We… fought them together.” I didn’t think Duncan had lost control the way I had. I didn’t ask him, and, with my hazy memory of the fight, I couldn’t be certain, but I suspected he had only injured people, helping to keep the brutes off my back. All those deaths might be on my shoulders.

Since the men had been attacking me and had threatened my tenants, maybe it was all justifiable, but it sat uneasy with me. Losing control like that always sat uneasy.

“Oh, gotcha,” Jasmine said. “Well, that must have been an epic fight. Are you okay?”

I touched my shoulder. “Yeah. It could have been a lot worse. It was the same guys who attacked Mom and Emilio. They had rifles with silver bullets.”

“Damn, you’re lucky then.”

“I am, but I wish I’d been able to capture and question one of them to figure out who’s behind all this and where they are.” I eyed the navigation map. It was possible we were about to learn the answer to both those questions. It was also possible we were visiting a random shopping spot where the driver had stopped to pick up a gift for his girlfriend.

“They wouldn’t tell you? Or… Oh yeah. Are they all dead? Or did some get away?”

“I… think some got away in the other cars, but it’s kind of a blur.”

I looked over at Duncan, realizing Mr. Raspy might have gotten a different report from one of the men who’d escaped. Would that complicate things? Another report wouldn’t necessarily contradict what Duncan had said. The men in the other cars had left before the fight had been over. For all they knew, their comrades had prevailed and had indeed captured me in the end. We’d more likely be in trouble if Mr. Raspy knew his subordinates well enough to recognize their voices on the phone. I would cross my fingers that he had a lot of underlings and found them interchangeable.

Duncan only lifted a shoulder. Most likely, his memories of his time as a wolf were also hazy when he returned to human form.

“Okay,” Jasmine said. “Well, I’m glad you’re alive. I’ve got a lead for you, and it might help.”

“Good.”

“Like I told you, my dad has been combing through those servers, digging up logs and going down rabbit holes—whatever computer stuff he does in the basement with all his robots and spaceships dangling from the ceiling and shelves behind him.”

I blinked at this new information about her father and envisioned Jasmine rolling her eyes. When she’d first said her dad worked at a software company as a game developer, I hadn’t thought much of it, other than deciding he might be the first geek werewolf I’d encountered. Later, I would have to ask her where he’d come from since I didn’t remember anything about him from my youth. I assumed he was from another pack.

If he’d been a lone wolf, and our pack had eventually accepted him, maybe there was hope that my relatives would stop trying to kill Duncan. I looked wistfully at him. But with the power he emanated that all magical beings could sense, he was more threatening than a geek werewolf waving robot toys around.

“He found another wolf-related artifact that was mentioned in a couple of different spots about four months ago,” Jasmine said. “There was a picture of it. A goblet or a chalice, I guess you’d call it. It was gold with tiny jewels, and the jewels made a wolf head on the side.”

“I guess there are chalices in the Seattle area,” I murmured, thinking of my conversation about them with Duncan. “Or was this not a local find?” I asked Jasmine, realizing those servers might be global.

“It was in Bellingham. A guy dug it out of a storage unit full of crap that his mom left him when she passed. From what Dad could uncover, the owner had been a lover of one of the Cascade Crusher pack’s male wolves years ago. No, I guess it had to have been decades ago. The lady who passed was ninety-three.”

“You don’t think a werewolf could have fallen for an older retired lady?” I asked dryly.

“No. And ew.”

I snorted since I’d reached the age where retired folks didn’t seem all that old anymore. Of course, Jasmine had a long ways to go before she reached that stage of life. She probably thought I was well on my way to ancient.

“Anyway, she must have gotten the chalice from her male lover or was holding it for him until he came back, but then he died or something. Whatever. The point is that her son figured out where to put it up for sale, and someone with the name Erik Burlington bought it, after lots of people bid a ton for it. That’s a fake name, Dad thinks, but it was dropped off at a warehouse in Arlington. The warehouse is owned by the Tumwater Tonic Corporation. They’ve got businesses all around Puget Sound that specialize in perfumes and stuff like that.”

Our faces lit by the display, Duncan and I exchanged long looks.

“Do they own TBL Luxury Perfumes and Potions?” I asked.

“I don’t have a list of their companies, but, like I said, Dad thinks their headquarters is up in Arlington. Do you want the address to check it out?”

Duncan read the address of our destination off the map.

“Did you hear that, Jasmine?” I asked. “Is that it?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“Just a hunch.”

Nerves tangled in my gut. We were only four minutes from our destination now.

“Thanks for the research,” I told Jasmine. “I’ll let you know if anything comes of it.”

“Welcome. If you find the guys and kick their asses, make sure you tell your mom that my dad helped, okay? He didn’t ask for credit, but I know he wishes he could fit in with the family more. Nobody shuns him, but most of my cousins and aunts and uncles don’t talk to him much or invite us to all the hunts.”

“If you mean Augustus and his thugly brothers, it’s probably the lack of common interests. From what I’ve observed, they aren’t the robot types.”

“That’s the truth, but, really, no werewolves are the robot types.” Jasmine lowered her voice—maybe she was calling from her parents’ home. “Dad’s kind of a nerd,” she whispered.

“He sounds like a good guy.”

“He’s offered tech support to everyone in the pack. Some of the family appreciate it. Some of them just throw their router across the room if it stops working and get a new one.”

“Ah, Luna?” Duncan asked, a weird note in his tone.

We were two minutes away now, driving back roads that ran near Arlington. House lights were visible from the road, but the homes were on acreage, so it felt like we were still in the country.

“I need to go, Jasmine. I’ll talk to you later.” I hung up and asked Duncan, “What is it?”

He lifted his hands from the steering wheel and gave me another significant look.

“Did you activate the self-driving? Teslas have that, right?”

“They do have that, but I didn’t touch anything.” His hands remained in the air, not on the wheel.

“Can you brake and deactivate it?” I had no idea how the self-driving feature worked.

Duncan tried pumping the brake. The autopilot didn’t disengage.

He toggled the levers and tapped different spots on the display, but nothing happened. Only the navigation map with our route remained, the screen showing us getting closer and closer to our destination.

The car signaled and made a turn of its own accord.

“That’s ominous,” I said.

“I concur.”