Free Heart Strings (Black Magic Outlaw Book 3) by Domino Finn

picking at the calluses on her bare feet. Despite that, I tried to capture the serenity by staring into the sea. But it was gone already. My elusive white whale, sunken in the depths of my burgeoning investigation.
    The Covey. The remaining living members were in a holding pattern. Hiding from me. Except for Emily. She was in plain sight but, in many ways, the most difficult to deal with.
    Em. The love of my other life. After going off and dying, I couldn't really blame her for marrying my best friend, but to find out she was part of the Covey? To discover the only reason she ever introduced herself was to manipulate a naive shadow witch into finding the Horn of Subjugation and then steal it for herself? That hit me hard.
    Like I sap, I reached for the picture in my back pocket. I was happy to find I'd left it in the pickup. But that didn't stop my thoughts.
    In some ways, Emily was a complete stranger now. For all I knew, she was an animist herself. But there were still some acts I couldn't reconcile, some facts that made me believe Emily wasn't all bad. She'd apologized about my parents, claiming not to have a hand in that. She'd named our daughter after me and given her the doll I gifted. These were strange actions for a heartless conspirator.
    Maybe I was just another sucker who wanted to believe, allowing remnants of my love for her to cloud my judgment. But it was what it was. Emily still had a hold on me, still tugged my heartstrings. She sat at home everyday, out in the open, but how could I harm the mother of my child?
    Women, am I right?
    Her half sister was a different matter. Kita Mariko, the offspring of an Australian real estate tycoon and a Japanese mistress. Em never told me about her half sister, but I connected the dots. Really, the dots were connected for me. Shoved into my face by the poltergeist of their dead father. The cover story presented his death as an accident, but Kita and Emily had conspired in his death to take over his land holdings in the Caribbean. How Kita had forced her sister into that situation was beyond me.
    The man was another victim of my undead hand. Another drop of guilt in my bucket. Thinking over the connection of their well-traveled father convinced me that coming out here was all the more necessary. But I had to be careful.
    Kita Mariko is Commissioner Alvarez's chief of staff, but she's much more than a bureaucrat. She's an animist. A paper mage. Interesting magic and the reason I now always carry flammable shells on hand. After our confrontation at the commissioner's house, I suspected Kita was the brains of the operation. Maybe she'd brainwashed Emily somehow.
    There I went again. Looking for excuses.
    But the Horn, killing me, killing their father—they were all just plays at something larger. Something that entailed buying a politician and the soon-to-be mayor of Miami. As the man's chief of staff, Kita was invaluable. Without her around, the Covey's influence was neutralized.
    That only left Tyson Roderick, the ousted head of security for the commissioner. The real mystery behind the man was why a volcanic elemental was engaged in Earthly politics.
    Elementals are strange creatures. I'd butted heads with Tyson. Killed him even. But that just banished him to his plane temporarily. Nothing stopped him from coming back again. Only so far, he hadn't come back. And if he didn't come to me I could hardly go to him. Not where he lives.
    Opposed to the Nether, elementals are from the Aether. It's a steppe above ours. A place of primal beings. Jinns, dragons, and elementals. The Aether is made of fire and air, and it's a place humans cannot tread.
    I sulked as I watched the water and the deep. The Nether is the polar opposite of the Aether. The Nether is made of earth and water, a land of silvans, giants, and fiends. Much more familiar to our kind. Much more tangible and material.
    I considered my empty palm, scarred with blackened lines making up arcane shapes. The wound had