“You should hear her out,” he said, holstering his gun. “She looks like she’s seen a ghost.”
“Why, cause her hair is white?” I chuckled, but he didn’t laugh, so I turned back around to face the woman. “Fine. Ingrid, tell me why I should help you. Especially after everything you’ve done to me in the past.”
“Because Nadia is dead, and I’m going to be next,” she said.
Jackson’s body tensed in surprise. “What makes you think that?”
“I didn’t realize you knew her,” I said.
The witch community was tightly knit, but psychics like Nadia usually kept to Algiers and the bigger cities up north. They didn’t hang out with people like Ingrid. Her sort were voodoo experts and herbalists.
Ingrid started to rock on her heels. “We were friends.”
“Friends, really? Okay. Well, then maybe you can explain why she was following me.”
“Wha—you know?” she gulped. She couldn’t stop fidgeting. Every few seconds she twisted her hair around her fingers, shifted the bag around on her shoulders. She kept tugging at her purple blouse and green vest. She oozed energy, and I was utterly exhausted.
“We found Nadia’s computer and her photos,” Jackson explained. “Why was she following Rebekah?”
“I…Uh… Well, Nadia was a special woman. She was… she had—”
“Just spit it out!” I snapped.
She glared at me. “Nadia was a victim of Cassandra’s Curse, and she learned from a young age that her visions rarely got a pleasant response from people. No one ever believed her, no matter how hard she tried to convince them. Some even reacted violently. The stalking was her… way around that. She followed you to get a sense of how you’d react to her gift.”
“Okay, then how are you involved?” I asked, rubbing my eyes. Exhaustion radiated through my arms and legs, begging me to go upstairs and sleep.
“She saw something that freaked her out and asked me to help her track you.”
“What?” Jackson and I asked in unison.
Ingrid’s hands shook, and her bracelets clinked. “She was out watching you one day, and then there were two of you. One watching the other. She got a picture of it, but I’m guessing you already knew that, since you have her computer.”
“I haven’t gone through all the photos yet,” I said, thinking back to the ones Jackson had wanted to show me. I looked at him, “Did you see what she’s referring to?”
He shook his head and took a few steps towards us.
“Whatever,” Ingrid growled. “The point is she asked me to help. We each took one of the Rebekahs and I ended up following the fake one.”
It was getting hard to keep my temper in check. “I’m tired of pulling teeth. What did you see, Ingrid? Why would this fake Rebekah want you dead?”
The witch opened her mouth and then closed it again. I could practically hear the gears turning in her mind. She didn’t trust me any more than I trusted her. Had our roles been reversed, I would have struggled to keep my secrets, too.
Pacing back and forth in front of the door, she tugged at her shirt. “It took me all of twenty minutes before I realized that I’d gotten stuck with the wrong Rebekah. But I followed her anyway. I was curious. I wanted to be sure that it really wasn’t you, and if it was—”
“I get it. You wanted leverage,” I grumbled. “Now, why would you be in danger?”
“Hello! Nadia is dead,” she shrieked. “Isn’t it obvious? I mean com—”
My hand snapped up, crackling with energy, and I hissed,“Silenzio.”
Jackson jumped. “Rebekah, what are you doing? She was about to crack.”
“I’m too tired for this,” I said, grabbing Ingrid by the hand. I’d taken my gloves off when I got home, and the witch was too distracted by my spell to pull away.
My fingers wrapped around her wrist and a shock of energy shot up my arm. The world in front of me fell away, and I found myself standing in a dark room. The only light emanated from a thin window high on the wall, and the walls themselves were covered in ripped white fabric. Beneath my feet were wet broken tiles.I almost didn’t notice Ingrid curled in the corner. She was so still.
Crouching in front of her, I could see she had goose flesh along her bare arms and scrapes across her legs. I instinctively reached out to touch her, but before my fingers passed through her frame, Ingrid’s head lifted and the door opened behind me.