We were crammed into her tiny office, having driven straight to Magic Beans from Wyoming. I didn’t love being in a space this small, but I sat near the door and kept an eye on the little window that looked out on the large event room. “Not much, really,” Quinn replied. “He kept saying ‘we’ didn’t want to, and then he’d run at the fence. Toward the south.”
“I think he was trying to say they didn’t want to invade Colorado, but they didn’t have a choice,” I added. “Something is forcing them. Witches can’t use magic on werewolves, so maybe it’s their alpha?” I thought of the demented wannabe alpha who’d killed my sister. What was forcing one werewolf to run into a fence, compared to that?
“If it were just one pack, just one attack, that might be it,” Maven mused. “But I still can’t see the Wyoming werewolves and the eastern Utah pack working together. It goes against their basic territorial instinct.”
“I don’t know, then,” Quinn said, and if I hadn’t been looking, I would have missed the frustration on his face.
“Neither do I.” Maven’s voice was contemplative. Her eyes unfocused for a moment as she dug through her memory, but then shook her head, not catching it. I wondered what it was like, trying to remember things that had happened tens or even hundreds of years ago. I barely remembered high school.
There was a knock on Maven’s office door, and a heavyset young man poked his head in, pushing trendy thick-rimmed glasses up on his nose. “Hey, Maven. Oh hi, Lex, Quinn.” I lifted one hand in a wave, and Quinn gave the kid a stony nod. We’d both met Maven’s most recent hire, a twenty-five-year-old human named Ryan. He was the daytime manager of the coffee shop, and Maven’s all-around errand boy, who had to give the occasional unwitting blood donation. That was my suspicion, anyway—the kid was always pale—but he seemed content enough, and it was none of my business.
“Maven, I’m gonna take off now, if that’s all right,” he said. “I think the rush is pretty much over. Adrian can handle it from here.”
“Awesome, thanks, Ryan,” she chirped, using her teenage hippie accent. It sounded so strange coming from the same voice that had often frightened the crap out of me. They exchanged a couple of words about the next day’s schedule, and as soon as the door closed behind Ryan, Maven’s eyes came to rest on me. “I’ll need to get out there in a moment, so let’s move on, for now. Lex, tell me more about this hairball business.”
I went through the whole story about the phone call from Elise and driving Simon to the police station, and told her his theory about the creature that’d left the gastric pellet. Maven didn’t jump up and say “Ah ha, I know exactly what that is,” like I’d kind of been hoping, but when I was done, she leaned forward and pointed at me. “I want you to stay on that. Keep in touch with Simon, assist him however you can, and let me know everything he learns about the pellet.”
A rock formed in my stomach, tumbling around unhappily. I had known in theory that I would need to report on the witches to Maven, but that didn’t mean I liked it. Then again, as long as they didn’t know about werewolves in Colorado, the witches technically worked for Maven too. So I could probably at least be upfront with Simon about the fact that I would report back to Maven. I just couldn’t be upfront with him about the werewolf attack.
I resisted the urge to thunk my head into Maven’s desk, but just barely.
“Do you think they’re connected?” I asked her instead. “The werewolf attack and the pellet?”
“I think we need to proceed as if they are,” she said somberly. “As if they’re two parts of a threat to Colorado.”
“What do you want to do about the werewolves?” Quinn asked.
“We need more information. Specifically about the history of magic in this state.” Maven stood up and began to pace the short width of her cramped office. I’d never seen her do that before. Quinn and I sat in silence as five long minutes ticked by on the wall clock. Finally, Maven turned back to us. “When I came to this state twelve years ago, to break up the war,” she said at last, “it wasn’t my first trip to Colorado.”
Quinn and I exchanged a look, and he gave me a little shrug. Neither of us had been expecting a lesson in Maven’s personal history. “I was here in 1892, newly arrived from Europe to explore the burgeoning businesses of mining and prostitution. Both professions were particularly lucrative for vampires, for different reasons.” I felt a little flutter of fear, just based on her tone. “At any rate, I spent some time with one of Colorado’s madams in Denver, Nellie Evans, who just happened to be a witch. She was very close to the native peoples, and became something of an expert on the natural magic in this lovely state. I could swear she used the phrase ‘moon lines’ before. ”
I was hoping Maven would say something like “And she taught me everything she knew,” but instead she paused and studied her fingernails. It was a surprisingly human gesture. “Unfortunately, Nellie and I experienced something of a falling out, over money. She killed me . . . or at least she thought she did.” Her smile was cold and barbaric. “As I am a vampire, and not a helpless soiled dove, I killed her right back.”
There was a pause, as both Quinn and I struggled for something to say.
“That’s . . . quite a falling out,” I remarked finally.