The Deadly Diadem: A Paranormal Artifacts Cozy Mystery (Paranormal Artifacts Cozy Mysteries Book 2) by Tegan Maher (paper ebook reader txt) 📗

“I agree with him,” a deep, familiar voice said, sending an unwanted thrill of guilty pleasure through me. “But I don’t agree that you should get closer to the cop. That’s a hard no if I get a vote.”

Speak of the Devil and he shall appear. I closed my eyes for a second to gather my scattered nerves, then turned to find Luther Von Drake, the hot mystery guy Eli had been talking about earlier, approaching our booth.

He slid onto the bench on my side, giving me the option of scooting over or remaining thigh-to-thigh with him. I slid over, not because that was my first inclination, but because he was an unknown quantity, and I knew myself well enough to not trust my impulse. Bad boys were, by definition, bad. The problem was that I wasn’t even sure if he was a bad boy because I didn’t know anything about him at all.

“Luther,” I said, smirking at him. I may have been a little rattled to come face to face with him again, but my go-to defense was snark, and that gift never let me down. “Please, join us.”

“Thanks,” he said, giving me a smile that made my insides warm. “I will.”

He reached across me and snagged a hushpuppy out of the boat. “Put a pin in the cop thing for now. He’s involved and we need him, but for what it’s worth, I agree with you that it’s better to keep things professional. Now, since we’re talking about the lost items, have you heard anything else?”

I shook my head. “No, and it’s making me crazy. I know they’re out there, but there’s not jack I can do about it. I’ve put out fliers both on our website and on all the local corkboards offering to buy them back for four times what they sold for, but nada. It doesn’t help that we don’t have real pictures.”

“Okay,” he said, squeezing some cocktail sauce onto the hushpuppy, “then let’s move to the next topic of conversation: telling the mayor or the council.”

“I think we should,” Eli said. “They’re gonna find out anyway, and it’ll be better coming from us than somebody else. We need to get in front of it and control the narrative. Plus, am I the only one here that sees the value in having the entire council looking for them rather than trying to go it alone? As you just pointed out, Sage, we’re not having much luck finding them on our own.”

Though I knew he was right, I didn’t want to tarnish my family’s reputation. We were high on the food chain in the magical world, and my mom and dad, along with several generations of my ancestors, had worked hard to get us there. Falls from grace were easy, and I didn’t want to be the one to put a black asterisk next to our name.

I pulled in a deep breath and blew it out through my cheeks.

“Now, back to the cop thing. I definitely don’t think you should work closely with him. Keep him at arm’s length and use him when you need to. Keep him on a need-to-know basis.” Luther’s smoldering green gaze drilling into my own. “He’s human. He has no place in this.”

“Except he does,” Eli said, inserting himself into the conversation with a glare at Luther. “We don’t have access to the information or resources he does, and we’re gonna need help with damage control.”

Luther lifted a shoulder. “Maybe we do, maybe we don’t. Sybil has connections in some very high places, and she’s placed herself at your disposal. Your family isn’t without connections, either. I suppose he could be an asset at the local human level, though he doesn’t need to be right there every step of the way.”

Maris came, casting a curious glance at Luther. “Can I get you something, sugar?”

He smiled at her, letting just a hint of that ... whatever it was that made him so appealing ... slip into it. “I’ll have a tea and whatever she’s having.”

She preened a little and I resisted the urge to elbow him for being so ... him. “Sure thing, sweetie. Comin’ right up.”

Okay, so if he was eating food, he wasn’t a vampire, not that I’d suspected that anyway. So far, I’d only seen him shift from an old man to his current form, but there was more to it than that. I wasn’t exactly one to swoon over a pretty face, yet he still had that effect on me. Maybe Eli was right and it was just the element of intrigue.

“So which is the real you?” Eli asked, posing the question I’d wanted to ask but had been afraid to.

“What do you mean? Luther the old butler, or this form?” he asked, being intentionally obtuse.

“Yeah,” he responded. “Or the blond-guy form you used when we were tracking down the pendant. Don’ think I didn’t notice that wasn’t a glamour. Are any of them who you really are?”

Luther lifted a broad shoulder as he filched another hushpuppy. “They’re all who I am.”

That cleared everything up. Not. I wanted to ask, but I was torn because he was obviously making a game of letting us wonder. It made me mad, so I decided to suck the oxygen from the fire by not playing.

“It sounds to me like you don’t know who you are,” I replied, keeping my tone light as I grabbed the last hushpuppy before he could.

His full lips turned up in a lazy smile. “I know exactly who—and what—I am. That doesn’t change just because I choose not to make it public.”

“And what are you doing here again?” I asked, a spike of irritation shooting through me.

“I happened to be going to the hardware store when I saw you two pulling in here. I haven’t had lunch yet, so I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone and see what’s going on with your situation.”

My phone rang, cutting off whatever retort