LITMIR.BIZ

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the time of year, she might have assumed this was some practical joke from a neighborhood kid, maybe someone who knew she was a high priestess in the Craft. A setup, in poor taste, for a Halloween trick of which Ione was the punch line.

      But it was no mystery who was behind this. This was a message from her ex. Carter Hanson Hamilton was up to his old tricks.

      With the crow carefully deposited into the paper bag, she carried it around the side of the house to the outdoor altar—which did double duty as a brick-enclosed barbecue pit—and performed the Dispersal of Energy ritual to nullify whatever magical influence Carter might have in mind with these little gifts. The smell of smoke from the small blaze in the pit wouldn’t be completely out of season. Though the air was sharp and crisp this morning, it hadn’t quite gotten cool enough for a fire, but it was only a little late for a barbecue.

      “Go in peace,” Ione murmured as she finished the ritual. She wasn’t sure if birds had spirits, but it couldn’t hurt to commend this one’s to a better rest.

      The “Gladys Kravitz” of the Village of Oak Creek was watching her through the blinds of the house across the street as Ione came back around to the front. Ione gave her an exaggerated wave from the porch in her bathrobe and slippers. The blinds snapped shut. Maybe Ione had watched too much Bewitched on TV Land, but that woman was a dead ringer for Samantha Stevens’s nosy neighbor.

      The phone was ringing when Ione stepped inside and she managed to catch it before it rolled over to the answering machine. Her younger sister Phoebe gave her endless amounts of crap about that machine, as if Ione were the last person in the world to still have a landline.

      “Ione? Sorry to bother you at home. Um, oh—it’s Cal. Sorry. This is Calvin.” The tentative, apologetic tone was typical of Calvin Yee. The elderly Asian gentleman had been Covent kin for years, far longer than Ione had even been a member of the Sedona coven, but he still treated her as if she were his boss or a school professor.

      Ione smiled into the phone. “Not a problem, Cal. What’s up?”

      “Uh...the others thought I should let you know—we should let you know. I, uh, volunteered to be the one to let you know.”

      Ione’s heart dropped into her stomach. It was finally happening. The coven had voted to boot her out on her butt. After weeks of walking around on eggshells, they’d finally decided they couldn’t work with a high priestess who’d been stupid enough to fall for a psychotic necromancer like Carter Hamilton.

      With a deep breath, she gathered her courage. “To let me know what, Cal?”

      “We’ve received a summons. All of us. Each of us.”

      “A summons?” She let out the held breath cautiously. “From the Superior Court?” She’d thought this business with Carter was done. He’d confessed and was sitting in prison awaiting sentencing.

      “No, somebody from the Covent leadership. We’ve been ordered to appear at the temple tomorrow morning at ten.”

      “I see.” Crap. Maybe she was being ousted, just not by her personal coven members.

      Calvin cleared his throat a few times with a couple of false starts before he continued. “You didn’t get one, I take it.”

      “No, I didn’t. Thanks, Cal. I really appreciate you letting me know.”

      Ione tried not to speculate about the possible intentions of the Covent’s pending action, but it was hard not to see a summons of her coven members that excluded her as anything but a kick in the teeth. She’d worked hard to be accepted into the Covent on her own skill and merit, and even harder to prove herself worthy of leadership. At twenty-nine, she’d become the youngest high priestess in the history of the Sedona Coventry. But at thirty, thanks to being dumb enough to fall for Carter, everything was falling apart.

      One thing was for certain, there was no way she was going to sit at home and wait for someone else to decide her fate. She would be at the temple in the morning, whether the Covent leadership wanted her there or not.

      In the meantime she had work to do. Carter might be safely behind bars but the creeps who’d patronized his little sideline business—paying for a shade possession called a “ride-along” for the ultimate in nonconsensual sexual thrills—were still out there. One of the call girls who’d participated as a living host before dying under suspicious circumstances and ending up on the other side of the equation had implicated cops, businessmen, even lawyers and judges. And none of them had been held accountable. After Carter’s arrest, they’d scurried away like roaches into their cracks and crevices of respectability. Ione was determined to find out where they’d gone into hiding and bring them out into the light.

      Sedona’s nightlife was hardly that, but Ione had followed the rumor mill to a dive bar near Oak Creek Canyon that was unusually lively and catered to the kind of clientele Carter’s side business had thrived on. The mixture of college students and favorite sons plus a steady, inevitable stream of tourists provided a wealth of potential clients—as well as plenty of unwary young women to exploit. It wasn’t really the sort of place Ione Carlisle looked at home in. But she wasn’t Ione Carlisle tonight.

      Magic, she’d learned, was merely a matter of perception. Change the perception of a thing and you might change the thing itself. With a simple spell that amounted to little more than magical cosmetics and dressing the part, Ione had remade her image into the one she wished to project. She still had her favorite clothes from her aborted year at college before becoming insta-mom to a teenager and twin ten-year-olds after the death of her parents. With a pair of leather pants and a black tank, a red, zip-up leather jacket and a slick of bright cherry lipstick that pulled the look together, Ione had invoked a shadow glamour.

      The pert-nosed, blue-eyed blonde with loose waves around her shoulders—nothing like Ione’s gray-green eyes and straight midnight-brown and bronze ombré mane that hung down her back—was attractive in a generic way and utterly forgettable. It was a spell she’d perfected as a teenager when she’d needed an alter ego to channel the impulses of youth she hadn’t known how to deal with. Even in adulthood, however, it had its uses.

      The bartenders at Bitters knew her as Kylie when she came in with this face—she’d been on the prowl enough that the bartenders knew her by name. And knew her drink, Balcones, which arrived almost as soon as she sat at the bar.

      Ione set her motorcycle helmet on the stool beside her. It kept guys from hitting on her unless she wanted them to. Sitting at the end of the bar took care of the other side. She could have used a repelling spell, but too much magic in one night made her feel even worse than drinking too much.

      “Is that your Nighthawk outside?” The cultured, Hugh Grant–esque British accent sent a tingling vibration through her that completely missed her spine and went straight for the genitals. God, was she really this hard up that a fancy accent was all it took?

      Maintaining cool disinterest in the man standing beside her helmet’s stool, Ione took a sip of her drink before turning her head slightly in his direction. Giving him the once-over out of the corner of her eye did nothing to dispel the disconcerting vibration. A pair of golden-brown eyes to match her glass of Balcones looked back at her, pieces of tiger’s-eye quartz rimmed in dark lashes against the warm teakwood hue of his skin. Thick black hair, impeccably styled, with a charming streak of gray at the temples, completed the picture. And the expensive suit said business tourist—but the kind of business that didn’t require sitting behind a desk in an office.

      She was a sucker for a sharp-dressed man. And a posh accent, apparently. But ogling hot guys in expensive suits wasn’t what she was here for. She tried to assess whether he could be part of the network of what one of Phoebe’s clients in the Public Defender’s Office had referred to as “a bunch of power-tripping dicks.”

      Ione realized he was waiting for her answer. “Maybe.”

      “Sorry, that wasn’t a line.” He leaned against the bar as if he had no intention of moving on and gave her a crooked smile that made the tiger’s eyes shimmer. “I just

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