shadows of salem 01 - shadow born by rebecca hamilton Read Free Book Online Page B

Randall said that he’d gotten a phone call with new information that put Vox in the clear, and one of the other detectives was already looking into the new suspect and nabbed him. Kind of sucks that we didn’t get the collar, but what can you do?”
    “What can you do,” I echoed, my mind spinning back to the conversation I’d had with Tremaine. He’d stepped away and had a conversation with one of his guards after I’d mentioned Vox was my suspect, and the guard had said he would ‘take care of it.’ Was that what had happened? Had they somehow put Captain Randall onto a different suspect? Anger tightened my chest at the idea.
    “You okay, Chandler?” Baxter asked, concern in his voice. “You seem kind of down.”
    I let out a breath. “I’m fine, Detective Baxter. It’s just been a long day.”
    “Yeah, no kidding. Why don’t you go home and take a load off? I’ll see you in the morning.”
    “Sounds good.” I clicked off, then took one last look around the room before exiting through the back alley and making my way toward home.
    But not to relax.
    No, after tonight there was no way I could put up my feet and chill. I didn’t know who the hell this Tremaine guy thought he was, but I fully intended to tear apart this town until I found him.

CHAPTER 6
    B y the time I got home, I’d worked myself up into a righteous fury. Somehow I’d gone from chasing down a drug dealer to being tied up and nearly killed by a pompous supernatural club owner with a stick up his ass.
    It irked me to no end that I didn’t know who or what Lord Tremaine was, so instead of eating the Chinese takeout I’d picked up on the way home, I snatched up my laptop, plopped down onto the couch, and settled in to do some serious Googling.
    Since the only lead I had was the building, I started there. I’d noted the address before I left, so I plugged it in now, then did a search through county records to find out who owned it.
    Turned out that it belonged to one Maddock Tremaine, purchased over five years ago. A little more digging revealed that he’d intended to turn it into a club, but due to unknown reasons, the building continued to sit empty.
    Well, they’re wrong about that.
    I scoffed, saving the article to a bookmark folder before I closed it. Maddock Tremaine certainly had built a club inside the building. He’d just done it in such a way that he could make it vanish from the naked eye at will.
    Just how powerful did someone have to be in order to do that?
    A little shiver crawled along my spine at the thought of being face-to-face with a supernatural that potent. I was surprised he hadn’t killed me himself—surely if he could make an entire club disappear, he had enough power in his pinky finger to end me. But he’d had his guards take me out back so a little bald man could do it instead.
    What if he wasn’t trying to kill you?
    The thought popped into my head so suddenly that my fingers froze on the keyboard. I cast my thoughts back to that moment in the alley, searching for any context clues that indicated they were planning something else. Although they’d liberally flung around the phrase “take care of her,” nobody had actually specified what that was supposed to mean. And in the end, all Mr. Trash Can had managed to do was wiggle his fingers and send a couple of sparks my way.
    I mean, really, if they’d wanted to kill me, the guard that had hauled me out there could have done that easily enough. He could have snapped my neck between his thumb and forefinger, and there wouldn’t have been a damn thing I could do about it. There was no need for that hocus pocus…unless they were trying to put some kind of spell on me instead.
    Maybe they just wanted to make me forget what I saw, I mused. That theory certainly made sense. Take the human out back, wiggle your fingers at her until she sees stars in her eyes, then send her on her way with a slight case of amnesia. Easy enough.
    The only problem was, I