whiskey witches 02 - blood moon magick by s m blooding

then I saw that. Sulfur.”
    Paige raised her chin.
    “We’re talking demons, aren’t we?”
    What was she supposed to do? Deny it? That hadn’t worked on Ethel, which was the reason Paige had finally had to come clean with the tech. But could she trust Barn? She smashed her lips together and bowed her head.
    Barn set his latte down, clapped his hands together, and shot to his feet. “Oh my dog, this is so exciting!”
    He always said, “Oh my dog,” because he didn’t want to offend anyone by being disrespectful to their god.
    Paige had to make a decision. Lie—which had failed miserably with Ethel—or tell the truth—which could also turn out just as horribly. Civilians and magick didn’t always mix.
    He led the way into the operating theater. “I found things and did some research, but I still have questions.”
    “Okay,” she ground out. It felt wrong. Like there was something inside her forcing her to shut up, to shut him down. But he was already so close.
    “Besides the sulfur—in her blood, by the way, which is very interesting. Does that mean she was possessed?”
    Oddly, no. Ethel had proven that sulfur did not show up in the blood after possession, so this was something different altogether.
    Barn waved her off. “We’ll get to that later. There was also this.” He held up a glass cup with a plastic top.
    Paige stepped forward and took it from him, tipping it one way, then another to get a better look at whatever was inside. “What am I seeing?”
    “A chip. A tracking device. Of sorts.” He walked around the table of a sheet-covered corpse. “It doesn’t ‘track,’ as much as it sends electronic impulses into the brain.”
    “What?” Paige asked, aghast. She set the glass down a little harder than she intended, but the thing didn’t shatter against the metal table.
    Barn tipped his head with a tight, excited smile. “Yeah. That’s what I said.”
    “The murder only happened last night.”
    “And this is my third latte.”
    She needed to—what?
    Listen.
    She gestured to Barn to continue.
    “Okay, so Matt’s a buddy of mine. He’s an inventor and can write code like it’s butter and he’s the knife. Anyway, I just had an idea because of what I saw on the x-ray and asked him to come over.”
    “X-ray. Explain.”
    He waved her off. “Standard procedure. Found something metal between C1 & C2.”
    “What?” She wasn’t a doctor. For a reason.
    “Right. Base of the skull.”
    “Oh.”
    “So, I gave it to Matt. He ran a few tests, and was immediately intrigued, but he couldn’t do anything else.”
    Oh no. “Tell me you didn’t let him leave with evidence.”
    “I’d never tell you that. Just like I won’t ever tell the chief that your partner is sending bodies—as in plural—to Nederland without being properly processed.”
    She bit off her curse and gripped the cold table behind her. “Okay. What did he find?”
    “You need to see how it showed up on the X-ray first.” He walked over to the light board and flipped the switch next to it, turning it on. “Do you see this?”
    She didn’t know what she was looking at. Skull. Spine.
    Bones.
    “See that speck there?”
    What speck? There were specks all over the place.
    He pointed to the brightest speck on the X-Ray.
    “Sure.” Thin lines curled out of it. She’d originally thought it was part of the spinal cord, but then remembered that the spinal cord couldn’t be seen on an X-ray. It wasn’t dense enough? Or something. There were reasons she wasn’t a doctor. “What is that?”
    “Alien tech?” He shrugged. “Whatever it is, it’s advanced. Anyway, Matt discovered it has a tracking program, but that it also has a control function.”
    Paige narrowed her eyes. “What kind of control function?”
    “He doesn’t know. He had leave before you arrived, so he wasn’t able to finish running his tests.”
    She wanted to tell him to bring Matt in. To finish running those tests.
    Civilians.
    Shit.
    “But