“We’ll believe you if you tell us the truth,” I said.

Paloma rubbed her forehead. “Can we—can we go sit down? I’m getting one hell of a headache. It’s the magic. It gives me migraines.”

She rustled through a bead-covered doorway along the back wall.

We followed her down a hallway that led to a restroom and a small office. The office held a desk and two visitors’ chairs. It was organized but full of boxes, paperwork, and collectibles. A paper lantern hung from the ceiling, and a poster demonstrating yoga poses was stuck to the brick wall. And the room was thick with old magic, pungent layers that seemed to permeate the air and the furniture and left the air feeling oily.

She sat down behind the desk, closed her eyes, and rubbed her hands over her face. Then she sighed heavily, seeming to contract in the room, and put down her hands again. She looked tired and miserable. Unfortunate those feelings hadn’t pushed her to find us before.

“He came to me because he had a problem.”

“He who?” I asked.

“Zane. He was alone, and he was frustrated. He came in near midnight one night, roamed around the store, seemed nervous or agitated. I watched him, because I thought he was going to steal something. He had that kind of jitteriness. But then he came up to the counter. Handed me a piece of paper and said he needed that.”

“And what was on the paper?” Theo asked.

Paloma swallowed. “A spell. Ingredients for a potion, instructions for use, an incantation.”

“And what was the spell for?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and jerked when Theo leaned forward. “I don’t know,” she said again, but didn’t meet his gaze. “I know how to follow directions, but I don’t, like, have a degree in spell theory. Based on the ingredients, I thought it was supposed to make them stronger.”

We let silence fall in the wake of that statement.

“Do you believe that?” Theo asked, glancing at me.

“I’m not sure yet,” I said, and glared at Paloma.

She put her hands flat on the desk, leaned forward as if to work harder to convince us. “I swear to god, that’s all I knew.”

“And what did you tell him?” Theo asked.

“I played it off at first, said I didn’t do any real magic, and then that I wasn’t licensed. He didn’t believe any of it. Said he could feel my magic. I said fine, even if I did magic, I didn’t do dark magic. I wouldn’t make a compulsion spell. Couldn’t do it, as I didn’t even stock those kinds of ingredients. So I asked him what the issue was, if there was any other way around it.”

“Because you wanted to sell him some real magic,” I said, my irritation rising.

“Because I want to pay my rent,” Paloma countered. “He said someone was hurting his family, and he wanted to stop it. So I made the potion, told him to follow the instructions and say the incantation.”

“So you gave him the potion that night?” Theo asked.

“No, he had to come back for it. I had the ingredients on hand, but you still have to be careful in the making. There are steps you have to take, stages you have to follow. You can’t just dump everything in and expect to get a good result.”

“How long until it was done?” Theo asked.

“Maybe a week?” A faint flush rose on her cheeks. “It was done faster than that, but he hadn’t been able to get all the money together, so I held it.”

“Do you know where he got the money he used to pay for it?”

“No. Why? Should I?”

Not if you were willfully oblivious, I thought. “So you gave him a weapon.”

“I gave him the magic he paid for. I didn’t have control over what he did with it afterward.”

But her eyes skittered away from mine, focused on a stack of papers on the corner of her desk. She wasn’t telling the truth, or at least not all of it. But we’d get to that. . . .

“How did he pick it up?” Theo asked.

“He came back to the store with three of his friends. Beyo and”—she squeezed her eyes closed, as if trying to remember—“I’m not actually sure of the others’ names.”

“John and Marcus?” I offered.

“Maybe.”

“What do you know about the Sons of Aeneas?” I asked.

Her eyes widened. “The cult? I had a treatise on them—a little paperback. I keep some materials on the occult—kind of a ‘true crime but paranormal’ version. We get a lot of demand for that around Halloween. Mostly kids looking to be entertained.”

She sounded so absolutely certain of it that I both pitied and disdained her. She’d armed Zane, and who knew who else, with weapons as sharp as any blade, as powerful as any gun.

“Can we see it?” Theo asked.

“Oh, sure,” she said. “I’ll go get it.” Then she squeezed around the desk and our chairs and into the hallway.

“Odds it’s gone?” Theo asked. “Pilfered by Zane and the others?”

“High,” I said. “Nice little bit of background for his growing obsession.”

“Yeah,” he said, then looked up when she entered again.

“It’s gone,” she said as she stepped back into the room. She was wringing her hands, working her fingers over and over as if that would solve her problems.

“Oh, my god, shock,” Theo murmured.

“Zane or the others probably took it,” I said. “What do you know about it?”

“Not much, other than what’s on the cover.” She wedged behind her desk again. “It’s a small book, paperback sized but much thinner. Blue-and-yellow border on the cover. It’s from a press in North Carolina. They did an entire series on cults and paranormal groups in the late seventies, and they’ve been reprinting them since. I think the Sons of Aeneas must have been around that time period, because there was one of those ‘ripped from the headlines’ type stickers on the book. Like, ‘Hey, check this out. It’s going on right now. You just heard about it on the news’ or whatever.”

“But you don’t know what they did?”

“No. I didn’t read it.”

Another irony—that the woman who operated the magic store seemed to have very little understanding of how it actually worked.

“Did Zane talk to you about the SOA? Or anyone else?”

“Not to me, and not that I’m aware of to anyone else.”

“Do you know Loren?” I asked.

She swallowed, began to shuffle a stack of papers into a precisely aligned block. “The clan leader who died? Why do you ask?”

I glanced at Theo, got his small nod. He’d also seen she wasn’t telling the truth. I watched her until the silence stretched taut and tense as a wire. I was tempted to push a little magic into the air, use my own glamour just to nudge her along. But it proved unnecessary.

“I knew him,” she said.

“You don’t say,” Theo said, tone flat as the documents she’d just organized.

This time, her eyes went hard. “You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me or who I am.”

“You’re right,” I said. “We just know you’re selling unlicensed magic, and because of that magic, one shifter’s dead and others have been injured.”

“I didn’t know they’d become monsters.”

“You’ve said that,” Theo said. “But you knew they were angry, that they wanted to be stronger, that they wanted to hurt someone. And you sold them the weapon they used.”

“It was just a potion.”

“It was a weaponized potion,” I said. “You knew exactly what they were going to use it for. You might not have known the mechanism—that they’d become monsters—but you knew they wanted to punish someone.”

Tears welled, and she looked away, face tight with anger. “A few years ago,” she said, “I had a friend in the compound. We’d have dinner every couple of weeks, maybe play cards or fish. I was walking back to my car one night, and Loren found me. He said he saw me across the yard, wanted to make sure I got back to my car safely. And when I did and tried to unlock it, he cornered me against the door. Said I was beautiful, and I deserved better than someone who made me walk around by myself after dark. ‘There are wolves in the woods,’ he said.”

She nibbled at the edge of her lip, as if working over the words, then looked back at us. This time, a tear tracked down her cheek. “He put his hands on me, moved in to kiss me. Slid a hand up my skirt and . . .” She cleared her throat. “He assaulted me. I managed to get the door unlocked, told him to get his hands off me or I’d scream. He raised his hands and stepped away, smiling the whole time. I left the resort, had to stop on the old main road to be sick.”

She swiped beneath both eyes. “I made it home, lost it. And I haven’t been back to the resort since.”

Theo leaned forward. “I’m very sorry that happened to you. He had no right to do it, and he should have been punished for his behavior.”

“Yeah, well. I told the sheriff. He said he’d talk to Loren, and did, and Loren told him it was just a misunderstanding. He told the sheriff he’d been worried about me and had a witness who’d confirm he’d walked me back to the car, said good night, and that was it. The sheriff recommended I let it drop.”

“I’m sorry for that, too,” Theo said.

“People looked at me funny for a good month afterward. I just said I’d had a nightmare and got confused, and it wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t talk to him again after that. But I heard rumors that I wasn’t the only one he approached. Zane told me what he’d done to Paisley. That he’d killed her. So I gave him what he asked for.”

“And you didn’t tell us about that last time because you didn’t want them to get into trouble?” I guessed.