Free Mojo Queen by Sonya Clark Page B

that. Did her offer of tutoring services count as a clue? Probably not, but as I thought about it I realized it was time to tell Daniel what I’d been hiding. Or show him. I stood, made my way to a pantry that was bigger than my entire kitchen, and found the shelf where he kept spare candles. I brought a fat pillar candle I’d made to the table and set it in front of him. He looked at me, eyebrows raised. I pointed at the candle as I sat, not sure if I’d be able to do this. After several seconds of concentration a nice little flame popped out of the wick.
    Daniel crossed his arms, still staring at the candle. He jerked his chin to point at the candle. “Well, ain’t that cute.”
    His low-key reaction was not what I expected. “I’ve seen auras since I was a kid, been lighting candles since I was a teenager. I always knew whatever let me do those things helped me with the root work and all that, but I’ve never really taken it out for a test drive before.”
    “Can you control it?”
    “Yeah.”
    He looked at me. “Yeah, you know for a fact you can control it, or yeah, it hasn’t gotten out of control yet?”
    “Er.”
    He let out a nice big sigh to let me know of all his suffering. “Can you do anything else?”
    I shrugged. “Not that I know of.”
    “We get this mess with these kids dealt with, I’m going to start reaching out to some contacts. See if we can get you some help.”
    Something about that rubbed me the wrong way, as if I were contagious or something in me wasn’t normal, and needed fixing. I’d had about enough of that growing up. “I don’t have some kind of condition.”
    “No, what you’ve got is power.”
    I started to protest again but he talked over me.
    “Would you carry around a gun without knowing how to use it?”
    I gave him a skeptical look. “What, now I’m dangerous? I’m being lectured by a vampire about being dangerous? For real?”
    Daniel’s face warred between amusement and frustration before settling on neutral. “I’m just saying, I think you should talk to someone about this. That’s all I’m saying.” He rose, walked to the counter where he’d left his cellphone and a notebook, bringing the notebook back to the table with him. “How about we just deal with our demon problem right now?”
    It took me all of half a second to agree, but I made him wait for a full three seconds. “You go first.”
    “Okay. This guy named his little posse the Brimstone Club. I’m guessing I don’t need to give you a rundown on the old Hellfire Clubs?”
    I shook my head. The Hellfire Clubs of two, three hundred years ago in London and Dublin were basically groups of rich men hanging out and partying. Booze, hookers, plenty of mockery of the church to reinforce the image of themselves as naughty, naughty boys, but probably no real devil worship going on despite all the rumors.
    Daniel continued. “I ran a trace on the address. The utilities are registered to a Blake Harvill. Here’s the picture on his driver’s license. We need to show it to Seth, make sure this is our guy.”
    He handed me a color printout: black hair, dark eyes under heavy black eyebrows, a full mouth, fair skin. Blake Harvill looked like he could blend in with the wallpaper and slip by unnoticed, or burn the memory of himself into your dreams. Or nightmares. I stared for a long moment before something occurred to me. I looked at Daniel and gave the paper a shake. “How’d you get this? You know somebody at the DMV?”
    A faint pink blush crept across Daniel’s cheeks, something vampires rarely did. “I hacked into their computer network.” He said this in the same tone of voice someone else would have said they’d checked the TV listings to see what reality show was on tonight. It wasn’t nonchalant enough to make me ignore the blush.
    I craned my head to make a show of examining the color on his cheeks. “Did you also hack into the utility company’s computers?” Dancing With the Stars or