“Yeah. It wasn’t easy, let me tell you. We had two hundred people looking for it–” Bob cut himself off, looking slightly sick. I made a note on my phone. We didn’t have close to two hundred people in these cells. The meeting tonight was clearly just for Cassie’s inner circle. We needed to crack all of their electronics and find the rest of the members.

“So you located the auction. How’d you get in?”

“Cassie got in touch with a witch friend who spelled her long enough to make her appear seelie to the wards and the paranormals. The amulet came up and she bid on it. But she got outbid by the goblin.”

His dismissive tone made my hand twitch with the need to punch him in the face again. “What happened when Merrill won the amulet?”

“Cassie told James to go talk to him. We’d managed to get our hands on more funding and James offered him a hundred grand more than he’d paid for it. The goblin told him to fuck off. Said he had a buyer lined up who’d pay double what he’d bought it for.”

“So you killed him.”

He winced. “That wasn’t me, I swear. It was James. And he wasn’t supposed to kill him— just find the amulet.”

“Where is he now?”

“Uh…”

“Where?”

Bob hunched his shoulders and focused on the metal table between us. “We had to kill him, okay?”

“Why?”

“Once he saw how strong the belt could make him, he became obsessed with it. When you started poking around, he got convinced you were going to find us and steal it back. He attacked you where anyone coulda seen him.” Bob snorted. “Shooting up the place was a fucking idiot move. If the Mage Council had caught him, he woulda squealed and told them everything about us. He was unstable.”

Yeah, no shit. “And my car?”

The blood drained from his face. I wagged my finger at him. “That was you, wasn’t it, Bob?”

“I didn’t plan it. Cassie ordered us to do it, I swear.”

“Uh-huh. So James killed Merrill. And Cassie realized she had a loose cannon on her hands. She gave you the belt, and you tracked the amulet to Gary’s.”

He shrugged. Behind me, the door opened. Samael walked in, and Bob began trembling.

I shot Samael a look. This was my rodeo. He simply smiled at me and leaned against the wall as if he was bored.

“How did you track the amulet?”

“Werewolf eyes.”

“I got that. How did you spell them?”

“Cassie’s witch friend. She’s batshit crazy if you ask me. I never saw her, but Cassie told me a few stories that made me never want to go near her, if you know what I mean. Apparently, she cursed her ex-boyfriend pretty bad. He ended up killing himself.”

“Name.”