Rising Fury (Hexing House Book 1) by Jen Rasmussen Page B

it’s just a possible lead. I called in a couple of favors to get a human private investigator to check it out. I’ll let you know if it comes to anything.”
    “And that’s it? Montana is the best you’ve got?”
    “Staffing is tight right now. Everyone is overworked. And this is not an approved project. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to be patient.”
    Thea stalked back to her residence, but by the time she was halfway there, she knew it wasn’t Graves she was angry with.
    She’d seen into that old fury’s mind. Focused, willed herself to do it, and then simply saw . Yet night after night, sitting with The Book of Flower Friends , she couldn’t see Flannery, someone she’d been connected to since girlhood. Why was that, exactly?
    It wasn’t the book that was betraying her, she suspected, but her own subconscious. She’d given up everything, up to and including her humanity, and taken a huge risk to find Flannery. But maybe some small part of her didn’t really want to succeed. Because of old resentments; because she wanted to stay at Hexing House and keep getting stronger; because she was still afraid of closing her eyes and finding herself trapped with a headless girl carrying a red balloon.
    She needed to do better.
    That night at dinner, Thea steered the conversation around to Nero’s coworkers, and to Hester in particular. It was easy enough. Nero had proved to be a relentless gossip, and it seemed Hester was the source of several rumors.
    “She’s gotten really flaky lately,” he said. “Making all kinds of mistakes in the lab, and mistakes in that lab can be dangerous.”
    “Even with your amulets?” Thea asked. “You can’t be hexed with them, right?”
    “We can be hexed,” Nero corrected. “They block magical intrusion to a degree, so you can’t see our vices and virtues. But if a hex is powerful enough, especially if it targets something we’ve got pretty high up in the deck, it’ll hit us.”
    “So has Hester gotten into trouble?” Cora asked.
    “That’s what I was about to ask you,” said Nero with a grin. “She got pulled into Mag’s office today. They were in there for maybe half an hour, and then Hester left. Middle of the day. Didn’t clean out her desk or anything, so she wasn’t fired, but she did not look happy. She looked really out of it, actually. I was going to ask you to have a peek at her file, see if she was drunk or something.”
    Cora gave her brother a dirty look. “You just live to get me into trouble, don’t you?”
    Thea jumped at this new chance. “How much trouble? Is it a really big deal for you to look something up? A personnel file like that, or, say, a case file?”
    “Depends,” said Cora.
    “On what?”
    “Why do you ask?”
    Bolstered by her resolution to do better, Thea didn’t hesitate. At some point, she would have to trust someone, at least a little bit. “Did I tell you how Graves found me in the first place?”
    “No,” said Cora and Nero at once. They both leaned forward. With a human recruit being such a rare and novel thing, Thea had no doubt that Nero would love to gossip about it.
    “He hexed my cousin,” she said. “Then she disappeared. I came to help my aunt, who was going nuts with worry, and I ran across Graves.”
    “And what, he just happened to notice your aptitude?” Cora asked.
    “That’s exactly it,” said Thea. “I think he may have already known about it, or suspected it. Maybe it runs in families. I think he may have been targeting my family specifically.”
    “Targeting you for what?” Cora asked.
    “I have no idea, but he sure seemed interested in getting me here.”
    “Sure. A human recruit gives him a certain notoriety.” Cora smiled. “And Graves has always loved attention. Hence the dapper suits.”
    Thea shook her head. “There’s something off about Flannery disappearing like that.”
    “What hex was it?” asked Nero.
    “Sacrifice.”
    He nodded. “It’s not an uncommon