The Deadly Diadem: A Paranormal Artifacts Cozy Mystery (Paranormal Artifacts Cozy Mysteries Book 2), Tegan Maher [read this if .txt] 📗

She ripped out a few pages and handed them to me, and I glanced through them. Between the list and the pictures, we surely had every item that Jaime had come in contact with in the moments preceding her death. Now all we had to do was figure out which one it was.

Chapter 6

Once we were back in the car, we compared notes. Though they’d gotten mostly the same information I had, Alison had been the only one to provide insight into who Jaime actually was and what made her tick. Throughout the ride, my phone vibrated non-stop with text notifications. Once I realized it was the pictures coming in, I stopped checking.

“So now what?” James asked as we neared Parker’s.

“Now we have to go through the book and compare the list and pictures to see if we have a match. Then we’ll know what we’re looking for.” That would be the best-case scenario, and I hoped that’s how it shook out. “If not, cross your fingers there’s an item with matching symptoms. Since so many of the curses have specific triggers, maybe we can at least narrow it down to a few possibilities based on that if we don’t find the specific item.”

“What am I supposed to do, then?” James asked. “Maybe I should go through this book you’re talking about and comb through the pictures with you.”

“Absolutely not. That’s our job. Do the same thing you’d do with any death,” Luther replied. “Do the paperwork, wait for the official cause-of-death report, then button it up.”

James glowered at him in the rearview mirror. “You don’t think people are going to be a little suspicious about the whole green thing?”

Luther lifted a shoulder. “They’ll be curious, but they’ll probably write it off to a weird medication interaction or an allergy, or something she ate. They have no obvious answer, and the human body is still a mystery sometimes. They’ll shrug it off after a few days, and it’ll turn into nothing but a weird story.”

“Sounds like you’re a real pro at covering human deaths,” James replied.

“Okay, both of you, just stop it.” I’d had enough of their bickering and was getting a headache. “I’ve had enough. We’re probably going to be working together quite a bit, and I’m not gonna deal with macho men with attitudes every time we do. I don’t know why you don’t get along, and I don’t care, but suck it up.”

This is why I preferred not to hang out with any guys—or girls, for that matter—other than Eli and Jake. People were freakin’ exhausting.

Luther huffed a disdainful breath through his nose. “You really don’t know why he doesn’t like me?”

“No,” I replied, glaring out the window. “I don’t. But it’s annoying. From both directions.”

“He doesn’t like me because he sees me as competition,” Luther said, his expression smug.

I whipped my head toward him and was irked when my face got warm. “He does not.” Then, realizing that all James saw was a hot guy a few years older than us, I wondered if Luther was right. I turned to James. “Do you?”

Now James was blushing, too. Without making eye contact, he said, “Maybe. What is it with you two, anyway? You and I met for coffee and talked about things, Sage, then you stopped taking my calls. Now it seems like every time I see you, you’re with him. Are you two a thing? Is that why you don’t want to talk to me about our relationship? If so, just say so. You don’t have to dodge me.”

I paused for a second, hoping that fate would be kind and just suck me through the floorboards and into a hole, but that didn’t happen.

“No, Luther and I are not a thing,” I said but realized those words didn’t feel totally truthful. We weren’t, but did I want to be? Of course not. I was an idiot who, like most crazy people, was attracted to an enigma.

Luther’s mouth turned up into a smile, but James didn’t seem comforted at all. I wondered if he’d detected that tiny fragment of a lie the same as I had.

“What she meant,” Luther said, “is that we’re not involved in something so trivial as some human fling.”

I shot daggers at him with my gaze, and if I could have without freaking James out, I might have turned him into a hammer. It would have served him right for being such an arrogant tool. “No, what I meant is that we’re not involved at all. The only relationship we have is the one that pertains to finding the artifacts.”

He lifted a shoulder and waved a breezy hand, that small smile still curving his lips. “Whatever she says, then.”

I had no idea how the insufferable man had lived as long as he had. “What I say is that I’d like to turn you into a pillar of salt, then set you out into a hurricane.”

Though that didn’t garner anything other than a delighted grin from Luther, James cast an uncomfortable glance in my direction. “Can you do that?”

I sighed. I didn’t want to scare him, but I didn’t want to lie to him, either.

“Without doing much more than lifting a finger,” Luther replied before I had a chance to formulate an answer. The blood drained from James’s face.

Fortunately, we were at the rear entrance to the shop, and I was saved from having to reply or deal with either of them for another second. I did feel bad for James, but that wasn’t anything I was going to be able to fix with Luther around. For that matter, I didn’t know how much I even wanted to fix them. The less he knew, the better it would be for all of us, but I also didn’t want him to be uncomfortable every time we were together.

“I’ll call you, okay?” I said to him as I opened the door.

“Please do. I