For Liberty's Sake

Chapter 3

As he pulled into his driveway, Oliver glanced over at the coffee cup wrapped in paper towels in the passenger seat, hoping it would be enough for Liberty to cast a locator spell. He had sneaked into Bobby’s office and snagged it without being caught. He knew he needed to get his work done, but something just didn’t feel right about Bobby not being there that morning. There was no way he could focus until he knew the other man was all right.

“Liberty, are you here?” He almost slammed the door behind him in his haste to get inside and out of sight. While he didn’t think anyone followed him—after all, why would they? They didn’t know he was suspicious—he was still nervous about what he was doing. He only hoped this was enough to end Liberty’s insistence on their involvement.

“In the office,” he heard his wife call back to him from upstairs “What are you doing here so early? Everything all right?”

He hadn’t wanted to risk calling her to tell her he was on his way home, either. Paranoia perhaps, but he couldn’t help himself. He had avoided anything to do with the paranormal world for the past couple of years; there was no way he would risk getting wrapped in it again. At least, not after he convinced Liberty to cast this one spell.

“I don’t know, to be honest,” he said as he climbed the stairs to her office. She was just coming out of the room when he reached the top of the stairs. “I need your help.” He held the wrapped coffee cup out to her. “This belongs to Bobby. I need you to do one of those locating spells you do.” He then told her about how he couldn’t find the other man, how his wife said he had been called in early to work, and how Darius said they had sent him out on an assignment, which would cause him to be gone for a few days. He also told her about Gary’s phone call and the reaming he received for Bobby even talking to him. “Why didn’t his wife know he was out of town? She would have told me that if she had known.” He shook his head. “I have an uneasy feeling about this. Something’s off.”

She stared at him for a moment, studying him, he knew. He had wanted nothing to do with magic, wanting them simply to live an ordinary life without drawing attention to themselves. Yet, here he was, asking her to perform a spell for him. He was quite aware of the contradiction.

After another moment, she nodded and took the cup from his hand. “All right, let’s see what we can do.” She then turned and moved back into her office, moving over to the north wall where she had her altar set up. While she knew he didn’t care about the entanglements that went with being involved in a coven, he never denied her the private practice of her magic.

He slid his hands into his pockets to hide their nervous trembling, and stood behind her, watching as she reached for a map out of her top desk drawer. Spreading it out on top of her altar, she set the cup in the middle and then reached her palm out to the four tall white candles at each corner of her desk. With a twist of her fingers, each wick burst into flame, the light flickering small shadows against the back wall.

Liberty took a small knife and stabbed the tip of her finger, dripping the blood into the cup, which she then set on its side. Closing her eyes, she held her arms out to her sides, palms up as she chanted her spell, the words a soft muttering Oliver could barely hear.

Oliver dropped his gaze to the coffee cup, the dried remnants of coffee on the rim. He hoped this would work, so he could simply return to work and put all of this behind him and get back to a normal life. That’s all he wanted. A normal life for Liberty and him. He had seen what happened when people thought you weren’t normal.

He continued to stare, but nothing happened to the blood in the cup. Pulling his hand out of his pockets, he ran them up and down his arms, bouncing from one foot to the other as he urged the spell to work. Still, nothing happened.

After a few more minutes, Liberty dropped her arms to her sides and sighed. “This is odd.” She shook her head.

“You mean it’s not working?” He turned his gaze up to her as she looked over at him.

“No, it’s working,” she told him. “At least, I think it’s working. It just hasn’t found him.”

“How is that possible?”

She turned back to stare at the map, placing her hands on her hips. “Well, he could be somewhere that’s shielded from magic.” She turned to him, and by the look on her face, he knew that scenario was unlikely. “Or, as much as I hate to say it, he’s dead.”

He turned and stared at the map with wide eyes. “Dead? You mean, they killed him simply for coming to me about what he found?”

“You don’t know that,” she told him. “He could have been in an accident. Perhaps a mugging gone wrong. Heart attack. Anything could have happened to him. The timing could just be coincidence, that’s all.”

He continued to stare at the map. He didn’t believe in coincidences, especially when the paranormal world was somehow involved. No, they killed Bobby. He just didn’t know who they were.

“There was a name on the bottom of the paperwork,” he said, his gaze still fixed on the coffee cup. “Whoever wrote the report only mentioned it once. A Trayton Prescott from Draven Falls, the same surname as Bobby’s manager. Apparently, he works for a company called the Order of Wardens.” He turned and looked at her, narrowing his eyes in thought. “Didn’t you mention Draven Falls as being the town that founded that city where your mother now lives? It’s a paranormal town, right? Why would they have anything to do with a chemical that would kill paranormals?”

She was silent for a moment, sliding her arms up to cross her chest. Finally, she said, “But it doesn’t kill all paranormals. Only shifters.” She turned toward him, and he could see the wheels turning behind her eyes. “And I’m sure there are plenty of people there, just like everywhere else, who don’t care for shifters, humans, vampires, and witches alike. What if a faction, or even two factions, got together and concocted this scheme? What if this is a test run to do away with shifters everywhere? How else would a human know how to kill them?” Her eyes went wider. “A witch has to be involved. That would explain everything.”

“But why? Why would a witch want to kill all shifters?” He ran a hand through his hair as he turned and moved to the other side of the room, trying his best to figure it all out.

“Personal vendetta. Revenge. For giggles. Who knows? But we need to know where they plan on setting off those rockets. We can’t let them get away with this.”

“We don’t even know who they are,” he reminded her. “How do we stop them?”

“Well, we at least know two people involved, Gary and Darius. I mean, they’re both calling you and warning you off. Why would they do that if they didn’t know something? And we can find out more about this Trayton person. Plus, it can’t be a coincidence that he has the same last name as one of the men involved. The witch I met in Bull Creek, Adira, was from Draven Falls. I could reach out to my mother, have Adira call me, ask her some more questions. There are several people living there that were originally from Draven Falls. Someone has to know this guy.”

He nodded, pacing back and forth, his arms over his chest. “All right. As much as I don’t want to hear from your mother, I don’t think we have any other choice. We need to find out where they plan to do this. It’ll be a test first, a dry run, so to speak, to make sure it works before launching a bigger attack.” His mind churned over the possibilities of carrying out such an intrusion. He glanced up at Liberty, his eyes narrowed. “The target doesn’t have to be overly large, but it would need to be big enough to prove their chemicals worked. How many cities do you think there are like that?”

She scoffed as she turned toward her desk and snatched up her cell phone. “More than you think, to be honest.”

He watched as she scrolled through her contacts for her mother’s name, wishing there was another way to get the answers he needed without calling Maureen. There was no love lost between them, and his mother-in-law had made it perfectly clear she thought he was beneath her daughter. Most paranormals thought that way about the human world. It was something he had grown to tolerate, even though it churned his stomach.

“Mom, hey, I need a favor,” Liberty said, moving over to her desk chair and sitting down.

Oliver moved over to a recliner off to the side, plopping down and leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, hands clasped together as he stared across the desk at his wife.

“I need to ask Adira a question about Draven Falls.” A few seconds of silence and then Liberty rolled her eyes. “No, I’m not running off on Oliver. Can you please just give her my phone number?” She glanced over at Oliver, giving him an apologetic grimace. Then she sat up straighter in her chair. “Oh, she’s there with you? Yes, please. Thanks.” She covered the microphone. “She’s handing the phone to Adira now. They’re apparently at Magickal Moonbeams together.”

He simply nodded, dry-washing his hands as his nerves twirled in his stomach.

As she leaned back in her chair, his cell phone went off. Pulling it out of his back pocket, he glanced down and saw Gary’s name across the screen. He bit back a groan as he closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, he motioned to Liberty that he had to take the call and stood to leave the room. He didn’t need Gary overhearing Liberty’s conversation, especially since it was about someone in the contract.

“Gary, what’s up?” he asked as he slid out of Liberty’s office.

“Where the hell are you?”

“I had to come home for a moment. Why? What’s the matter?”

“I thought I told you to stop talking to Bobby Pearson.”

Oliver felt his brows pinch together as confusion filled him. “I haven’t talked to Bobby since yesterday.”

“You called his house this morning looking for him,” Gary snarled. “I hadn’t realized you two were such friends.”

“We’re not, really.” Oliver ran a hand through his hair, trying to figure out how in the world Gary even knew he had called Bobby’s wife that morning. “I had called him before you told me to stop reaching out to him, just curious where he was. His wife said he had been called in early today by Darius, but when Darius called me, he said he sent Bobby away on assignment.”

“So? It still doesn’t concern you. Stop trying to locate him and get back to your desk and get me those specs.”

At the word locate, Oliver jerked his attention back to Liberty’s altar and the map. Did Gary know she had used a locator spell in an attempt to find Bobby? How in the world would he know that? “Yes, sir. I’ll be right back. I just need to finish something here. And as I said, I haven’t reached out to Bobby since this morning.”

Gary sighed into the phone. “Look, I get it; it’s all a jumbled mess. I don’t even know most of it. But I do know you don’t want to be on the wrong end of this. Just keep your nose clean and do your work. Kelvin has some outsiders working with him on this, and they give me the willies.”

Was Gary scared? “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“Of course there is. There’s a lot I’m not telling you, but there’s even more I simply don’t know. I don’t like the way this is playing out, so do as I said and keep out of it.”

“Did Bobby really go on an assignment? His wife knew nothing about it?”

“No one does,” Gary told him, and Oliver could hear the man’s frustration. “There are a lot of things not on the books. I have no frickin’ idea what’s going on. And that scares me, and should scare you even more. Now get your a*s back to your desk before someone gets suspicious about your absence.”

The line went dead, and Oliver pulled the phone back and stared at it. What the hell is going on?

He turned and walked back into the office just as Liberty slid her phone onto her desk. “What did you find out?”

She collapsed back in her chair, her brows knitted with concern. “The Prescotts are a troublesome family back in Draven Falls, but they’ve also caused some chaos in Bull Creek. Apparently, they tried to drive the shifters out last year, burned down one of the bear shifter’s cabins and destroyed the bar down there. Dimitri’s father worked with them and a witch when he wanted to keep his son from his destined mate.”

Oliver felt a brow rise. “A witch?” He tilted his head to this side. “I think Gary somehow knew you performed that locator spell. That was him on the phone, telling me to stop looking for Bobby. The man’s scared.”

“It’s possible a witch would know about the spell, depending on what wards they have around Bobby, if he’s still alive.” She clasped her hands together and rested them across her stomach. “And the Order of Wardens isn’t a business; it’s more like a secret society of evil, and the Prescotts are deeply involved in it, Its sole purpose is to exterminate all paranormal beings in the world.”

“Why would a witch work with them?”

She shrugged. “We don’t know one is. However, it could be that the witch wants to use the Order to get rid of the shifters and then plans on dealing with the Order. It wouldn’t be the first time a witch tried to do away with a faction. The problem is, we don’t know enough.”

“I need to get back to work,” he told her as he shoved his phone into his back pocket. “I’ll do some digging and see what I can find out.”

“Watch your back, Ollie.” Worry for him creased her face. “We don’t know what’s going on.”

He nodded, promising her he would. As he turned to leave, the contradiction of his situation twisted in his gut. He wanted nothing to do with the paranormal world, and yet, here he was trying to find out who wanted to destroy it. I should have moved us to the Bahamas.