I turned to Trent. “Excuse me?”

Once more the suave, confident city son, Trent smiled. “If you want to play with the big boys, you’ll need a chaperone. I could’ve spared you a bloody nose on the playground at least.”

He was talking metaphorically, but I still didn’t like it. “No,” I said, looking at the folded strip of paper in his hand, then back at him. “You’re not my frigging mentor. I’ve already got a demon for a teacher in the ever-after. I don’t need another one here. I just want to be left alone.”

A strangled cough came from Oliver, and I turned. “You got a problem?” I snapped.

His head was going back and forth as he stood before us. “A demon teacher,” he said softly. “It’s just … you’re so casual about it.”

“Casual keeps me sane. If I think about it too hard, I’ll go nuts.” I set my palm on the table, fingers spread. “Are we doing this, or does Jenks come in here and things get ugly?”

Oliver’s expression was unsure. He eyed Trent, who made a “we’re waiting” gesture. The witch shifted his feet, and I held my breath as he reluctantly sat back down. “How?” he stated, not looking up from his hands resting on the table. “You’ve already implicated us, saying that we’re corrupt. The press isn’t going to forget that.”

My heart pounded and my stomach seemed to unknot. It was all I could do to not jump up and scream, “Yes!” I had them. At least I think I had them. “Got it covered,” I said.

From across the table, Trent exhaled, tired. “Why am I not surprised?”

I glanced at him, then turned my good mood on Oliver. “We’re going to tell the press that this was a double-blind test of Trent’s security system.”

Trent cleared his throat, and my attention shifted to him. “Knowing witches were the biggest security threat, you went to the coven and asked them to send a witch to try to break into your vault and steal a fake statue. If your witch failed, he’d know he was secure, but if your witch succeeded, Trent would give the coven … a million dollars.”

The last bit was a sudden inspiration on my part as I tried to find a way to get Oliver interested. As expected, the man’s eyebrows rose, whereas Trent just frowned at Oliver’s greed. A million dollars was nothing to Trent.

“You, being smart,” I said to Oliver, fluffing his ego, “knew that black witches were the bigger threat. Going all out, you decided to drum up a false charge and get me shunned in order to encourage me to use the strongest means available to see if I could break in. Black magic. And now that I’ve proved I can, you can rescind the shunning.”