Southwest Days (Semiautomatic Sorceress Book 2) by Kal Aaron (best book recommendations TXT) 📕

poof, his regalia appears when I get close to earning enough favors to check for myself.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “That’s very coincidental, don’t you think?”

Samuel shook his head, pity in his eyes. That look pissed her off almost as much as what he was saying. She would have preferred irritation to pity since the pity fueled her lingering fears that Chris was no longer alive and the reappearing regalia proved what everyone had said.

“Just because there are conspiracies, it doesn’t mean everything’s a grand conspiracy. Sometimes there are unpleasant confluences of events.” Samuel motioned toward her. “You need to find actual proof before you accuse people of serious crimes. Don’t invent proof to fit your accusations, or even worse, invent proof to fit your desires. It’s unbecoming in an adult and a Torch of the Illuminated Society.”

“I can’t get proof if you won’t help me get to Last Remnant. And I am potentially willing to accept he’s dead, but I’m going to need to see the regalia with my own eyes.” Lyssa threw up her hands. “And to do that, I need to go to the island. The only way I can do that is to get permission, and we both know the only way I’m going to get that is by working jobs. And you need me to work jobs anyway.” Her voice grew louder. “I’m a Torch. I’m not supposed to spend my days watching TV and eating ice cream. I’m supposed to burn all that’s impure from the world and protect the Illuminated Society.”

She sucked in a breath, trying to calm her pounding heart. The monster hunt had let her push Chris out of her mind for a short while, but now all the concerns, doubts, and twisted hopes crisscrossed in her mind.

Samuel nodded. “Yes, you’re right. You are a Torch, and you did do good work. So perhaps we should spend less time talking about the future and focus on the aforementioned jobs, specifically your current assignment and the reason I came here today. If you want to travel to Last Remnant so badly, you’ll need to convince people other than me that you deserve it. I won’t be able to advocate for you without more recent success.”

Verbal sparring would get her nowhere. Her instincts told her Samuel was an ally she should cultivate, not someone she should push away for petty personal reasons. For all her complaining, he had given her the job. He also wasn’t saying no about Last Remnant. Innocent people’s lives might still be on the line.

She sighed. “You’re right. Sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” Samuel replied, only a mild amount of smugness in his tone.

“I’m assuming you came up with something about the mine?” Lyssa asked. “The scale of the operation points to an active rogue. If we don’t find the Sorcerer responsible, it’s only a matter of time before he digs another hole of doom and starts over. This time we only had one death, but if he gets smarter about how he sets things up, we’re screwed. I think whoever he is, he’s been setting up things for a while. Weeks, maybe months. I’m not a life Sorceress, but I have a hard time thinking that queen could have popped out that many little ones in so short a time.”

Samuel frowned and waved a hand. “Let’s not get hasty and jump to conclusions. We need to be cautious about acting on assumptions rather than definitive facts.”

“That was a recent setup.” Lyssa punctuated her sentence with her downward-pointed finger. “I’m sure of it. Nothing makes sense otherwise. Yes, it might have been there for months, but not years or decades, let alone an ancient holdover from thousands of years ago.”

“I understand recent rogue activity is the most likely scenario, but we should be cautious about spreading rumors about the Illuminated and monsters,” Samuel replied. “This is already a sensitive matter because of the explicit link between sorcery and the creation of the threat. Rapid closure on the incident will be helpful, but in the meantime, we need to keep the implied threat contained from the media.”

“You’re the one who told me the best PR for us when it comes to rogues is to prove to the Shadows that we’ll quickly and brutally handle them.” Lyssa narrowed her eyes. “So let me do that. I was worried about an Eclipse being sent, but after what you said, I thought to myself, ‘Yeah, the Tribunal will do that about the time I turn sixty. By then, the rogue will be screwing with people living in a moon colony.’”

Samuel scoffed. “Eclipses are used when necessary. Fortunately, our kind is mostly sensible. If we needed them more often, the Society would fall apart.”

“I think it’s more about it being hard to get away with crap when there’s only a small group of people who need to be investigated,” Lyssa said. “But if you’ve got anything about the mine that’ll help, please give it to me. The quicker I solve this, the better it is for me, for you, everybody in Cochise County, and the Society. A quadruple win. Those are rare. The only people losing here are the monsters and the possible rogue, and the monsters aren’t people.”

Samuel stood silently, a thoughtful expression on his face as he stroked his beard. “There’s no relevant Society history or information suggesting that location was ever used for creature experiments in any historical period.”

“That’s not a big surprise, considering they are mostly illegal.”

Samuel shook his head. “It goes beyond that. There is no information about any rogues operating in this general region who specialize in the kind of sorcery necessary for the creation of such creatures. Shards could explain some of it if their numbers were more limited.”

Lyssa stared at Samuel. He rarely lied, but he did love to leave things out and hope she didn’t notice. Her killing skills might be better than her observation and interrogation skills, but she’d picked up a trick or two