“What is it?”

  “I think it’s… blood.”

  I jolted, heart slamming. “Blood?”

  “Like I said, I smelled it when we first walked in, but this is a house full of vampires, so I figured it was supposed to smell like that—maybe they were keeping bags of blood somewhere?” It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility—many vampires did keep their own supply of blood. Lorcan didn’t because he thought it was ‘the height of vulgarity’ and opted, instead, to visit the Half-Moon or Wanda’s neck.

  “Besides,” Roy continued. “I was too damn distracted by someone else to worry about it much.” He squeezed my hips lightly, as if I might be confused as to just who he’d been distracted by. Then he seemed to remember himself and breathed in deeply again, shaking his head. “Now that my brain is working on all cylinders again,” he started and spared me a little smile. “I can smell it and it’s pretty strong. Even for a vampire’s house, I don’t think it’s a normal amount of blood.”

  Roy let go of me long enough to take two strides towards one of the windows in the room, and yanked the heavy black-out curtain covering it aside. Silver moonlight flooded the room like a searchlight, so bright after the near complete darkness that I had to shield my eyes against it.

  As soon as my eyes accustomed themselves to the brightness, a scream choked off in my throat, and I slapped my hands over my mouth as shock warred straight through me. Wide-eyed and horrified at what I’d just witnessed across the room, I felt like I was going to suddenly vomit.

  Roy cursed and I managed to keep the contents of my stomach to myself, all the while trying to talk the sporadic beating of my heart down so I wouldn’t pass out right there.

  At the far side of the room, in a tangled pile of wood and rope, Viviana, the daughter of Marius and Mihaela, was sprawled out like a discarded doll. It looked as though someone had tied the vampire loosely to an old, rickety chair that had finally collapsed under her weight—which was the sound we’d witnessed earlier.

  Her dark eyes were wide and staring, skin waxy in the moonlight. Someone had driven a wooden stake through her heart, and stuffed something pale and oddly shaped into her mouth. As Roy walked over to her, he pulled the thing out and we both realized what it was—a garlic bulb. I didn’t even stop to think that he’d just tampered with a crime scene. And I didn’t imagine he was thinking about as much either, even as he placed the garlic bulb on Viviana’s torn and stained dress.

  “It’s the daughter of my clients,” I said, my voice sounding hollow, shocked and disbelieving. “How long… do you think she’s been in here?”

  Roy shook his head and reached out to me as I collapsed in his arms. “Seems like something that just happened, if I had to guess. The scent of the blood… it’s recent.” He turned to face me then. “Her family didn’t say anything about her going missing?”

  I gulped hard. “No, they never mentioned anything like that to me and I saw them just a few days ago.”

  “I’m thinking this most likely happened tonight.”

  I couldn’t even process it—that while Roy and I had been standing in line, waiting to get in, Viviana had been killed. Or maybe the murder had taken place before that?

  All I did know was that she now looked so young, so small. I knew she wasn’t really a teenager, but the thought of her sitting alone here, in her own family’s house, while so many people were walking through the house, having fun, laughing and enjoying themselves… I shook my head at the absolute injustice of it all, over and over again, a lump of tears thick in my throat, choking me.

  Roy tucked me against his chest and folded his arms around me. “Breathe, Fifi.”

  With his big hand rubbing my back, I finally managed to suck in a breath that came out as a sob.

  “I’ll talk to her family,” he said, voice tight with something too sad to be fury. “I need you to call Chief Morgan and tell her what’s going on. We need to find out who did this.”

  “Okay.” I wiped my eyes, doing everything in my power to pull myself together. I couldn’t help Viviana anymore, but I could keep it together to make sure the person who did this didn’t get away with it.

  As grateful as I was not to have to be the one to tell the family that their daughter and sister was dead, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to having that conversation with Taliyah Morgan. It was yet another supernatural murder in the hollow, and to say Chief Morgan wouldn’t be pleased was an understatement of laughable proportions. With each supernatural crime, Taliyah got more and more angry about being kept firmly on the outside of things. She thought our excluding her was because she was human. But the truth was actually the opposite.

  Magical people were supposed to be safe here. It was our Haven. But the Hollow was beginning to feel less like the Haven it was intended to be with each passing month.

  I gave my eyes one last swipe and took a deep breath.

  There was work to do.

  ***

  I huddled down in the uncomfortable office chair and watched Taliyah Morgan pace furiously across her office, muttering a string of obscenities.

  I might have been a succubus, a demon, but right at that moment, I felt a bit like a bunny hiding in long grass and hoping the wolf wasn’t too hungry.

  It was late enough that all the mundane deputies had gone home for the night. Usually, there wasn’t much call for them in Haven Hollow at all, never mind in the middle of the night. Usually there wasn’t much that went on in Haven Hollow—with the mundanes anyway. Usually, the town was pretty safe. Until it wasn’t.

  Chief Morgan had been just about to clock out herself when I’d arrived. I’d been lucky to catch her. I didn’t particularly feel lucky right then though. Mostly, I felt like throwing up. And probably more than once, at that.

  Through the door to Chief Morgan’s office, I could hear Marius and Mihaela going to pieces. The ragged sound of Mihaela’s grief made me squeeze my eyes closed for a second so I wouldn’t burst into tears along with her. Not even a month into them moving to Haven Hollow, a place meant to be a sanctuary for supernaturals, and just like that, one of their children was dead.

  I couldn’t think about it or I was going to break down crying again, and I needed to stay strong so I could help as best I could. I tried to distract myself, find something else to focus on, and my gaze landed on Chief Morgan’s hair. It was almost completely silver by this point, with only a few strands of the sandy blonde she’d had when she arrived in Haven Hollow.

  Somehow, in the course of her furious pacing, Taliyah noticed my attention and scowled. “I stopped dyeing it,” she barked.

  “Oh, I,” I started but then didn’t really know what to say.

  She frowned at me. “You can hardly judge. Your hair’s been white since I met you.”

  My hair was silver, actually. It had been since the day I was born. It wasn’t anything strange. Incubi and Succubi are just sometimes born with unusual hair colors and I wasn’t any different.

  Of course, I wasn’t about to tell her any of that, so I just nodded. “It’s a nice color.”

  I also wasn’t going to point out that all the little lines and wrinkles that had once rested at the corners of Taliyah’s eyes, or bracketed her mouth, had smoothed out into nothing. The closer we got to December, the more beautiful and ethereal she would become. Taliyah was a High Sidhe, the next in line to be the Queen of the Winter Court of the Fae, and she was going to be beautiful and ageless until the day she died.

  But none of that was my place to tell her. So, why didn’t she already know?

  Taliyah had been hidden away by her family, wrapped in glamour and stripped of her memories while she was raised as a human with her adopted Null family. One day soon, the bindings would finally break, and the new Queen of Winter would rise to take her place. Part of me felt a little bad for Taliyah. All that was coming for her, and she had no idea what was happening. It must have been upsetting, maybe even frightening to be changing in ways you didn’t understand. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

  Taliyah sighed, and raked a hand back through the hair in question. “Okay, go over it all one more time and I probably don’t need to tell you how completely stupid it was that Roy removed the garlic bulb from her mouth.” She turned to look at me and frowned. “That was—”

  “Tampering with evidence at a crime scene, I know,” I finished for her because she’d mentioned as much at least five times now. “Neither of us were thinking,” I explained again. “And I’m sure Roy wanted to try to give Viviana back some of the respect she’d clearly been denied.”

  “Moving on,” Taliyah said, with another frown.

  I did as she asked, recounting the slightly altered story that Roy had told me to share. Most of it was true. We’d been on a date and decided to go and see the new attraction. But instead of sneaking off for a quicky, I told her I’d been too scared to finish walking through the rest of the house, so rather than waste the price of admission, I’d decided to show Roy all the secret passages of the old Colonial.

  It was pretty obvious that Taliyah didn’t buy parts of my story, from the way she rather pointedly arched her eyebrow at me.

  “You decided to take him on a tour of the house?” she asked, frowning at me.

  “Um, yeah.”

  “A house that didn’t belong to you and a house that was basically all blocked off, owing to the fact that it was acting as a Halloween attraction?”

  “Well, it wasn’t a Halloween attraction since it’s July.”

  “It was an attraction,” she corrected herself and seemed annoyed about it.

  “Um, right.”

  “Hmm.” Owing to the skeptical expression on her face, I was fairly sure she knew what the real truth was. “I have a feeling it might be more along the lines to say that you and Roy were each other’s main attraction.”

  And that cemented it. “Well, ha,” I started, giving her an embarrassed laugh as I dropped my eyes and started fidgeting.

  “Whatever you were or weren’t doing doesn’t really matter,” Taliyah continued. “All that does matter is how and when you found Viviana. The rest of that nonsense about a house tour? I’m choosing to let it go.”

  “Okay.”

  “Probably best to keep the grieving parents from knowing their real estate agent isn’t as professional as she looks,” she added and gave me another look. I just swallowed hard, even though I was pretty pathetically grateful to her for offering not to say anything.

  “Go back to the part where you went through the crawlspace,” she said, her icy blue eyes focused on me. “Did either of you smell anything? Hear anything unusual? Was there any indication that someone else might have been in there with you?”

  “No,” I said in a small voice, wanting to curl in on myself like a salted slug. Shame burned through me, hot enough that I was almost positive Taliyah could see it. I couldn’t believe I’d dragged Roy off to have sex in a hidden closet in someone else’s house like a horny teenager.

  And speaking of Roy, he was sitting in the next room over, waiting to give Taliyah his own perspective of what had happened. I wished I could be a fly on the wall to see how he reacted when she told him she knew the truth about what we’d been doing. For some reason, though, I didn’t imagine he’d be embarrassed.

  I couldn’t help but think if Roy and I had been paying attention to anything other than each other, maybe we would have heard the murderer running away. Or maybe we could have stopped the murder entirely. I had to close my eyes and breathe for a second around the lump of failure sitting in my chest like a huge chunk of lead. Because that’s what it was—a total and complete failure. I’d failed my clients in nearly every way conceivable.

  We went over the story again, and again, and then one more time and Taliyah stuck to her promise not to ask me what we were doing beforehand. She was only interested in what happened when we realized we weren’t alone in the room. Eventually, Taliyah decided the interrogation was over and slumped down into her chair looking exhausted.

  Chapter Nine

  After Taliyah left me on my own in her office for about an hour while she took Roy’s statement, she walked back in and collapsed in her chair behind her desk.

  Then she sighed deeply and shook her head as if all of this was just too much to deal with at the moment. For my own part, I was surprised I was still here—especially because she’d released Roy, who had walked past her office and knocked on the window to tell me he’d call me later. I’d nodded and watched him stroll out, all the while wondering what I was still doing here.

  I hesitated, biting my lip as I looked at Taliyah, and my concern for her slipped out. “Are you okay?”

  Chief Morgan looked surprised by the question for an instant, like no one had ever asked her that before, but then she waved me off. “I’m just tired.”

  “Oh,” I answered as she nodded, but I had the feeling it was more than that. And that ‘more than that’ was probably the reason I was still sitting here. I figured she needed company, a friend, but didn’t want to admit as much. “You sure?”

  She nodded again and then sighed and that was when I realized my suspicions had been spot on—she was definitely going through something. “My boys are at ‘that age’. They’re becoming a bit of a handful,” she added. Then sighed again. “Annnnd my ex has been trying to stir up some legal trouble for me.” She laughed, but it was an angry sound, not one with any humor. Then she shook her head and I could tell there was more that was lying just under the surface.

  “Legal trouble?”

  She looked at me and frowned. “Not that he has any case at all, but I guess he wants to try to make me as miserable as possible.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  She nodded. “He really hated me by the end of everything.” She slumped back a little in her chair, looking up at the ceiling then. “He’s a lawyer, so this is his way of doing what he does so well—sticking it to people. Only now, I’m on the receiving end.”

  “That sounds really unfair.”

  She breathed in deeply. “I don’t understand him going to all this effort. I mean… he’s the one who cheated on me!”

  “He did?” I asked, leaning forward because it seemed the story was taking a turn for the gossipy angle and though I was a good person on a whole, I did enjoy gossip now and then. Not only that, but Taliyah usually wasn’t this candid with anyone, as far as I knew. She certainly never had been with me, anyway.

  “Yeah, with a barely legal barista from the campus coffee shop. Well,” she amended. “He actually cheated on me with a lot more women than that, the co-ed was just the last straw in the dispenser.”

  “You poor thing,” I offered as I shook my head.

  “Nah, he did me a favor in the end. I just wish it hadn’t taken me so long to pull my head out of my ass, you know?”

  I knew more than she could ever know. My head had been firmly planted up my ass with pretty much every relationship I’d ever had, minus Roy. “I sure do.”

  Taliyah rubbed her eyes, looking worn out. “Jonathon, that’s my ex... He comes from old money, and he was pretty well regarded in Portland, so he had connections and then some. Not to mention reserves that a cop just couldn’t match.”

  “And he’s been using all that money against you?”

  She nodded again. “Yeah… he pretty much got everything he wanted in the divorce; some of my money, the blonde barista with the boob job, the nice house back in Portland. And look at me.” She let her hands fall back into her lap like it was too much effort to hold them up anymore. “I got to take over as Chief of police in a town full of literal monsters, after my brother got murdered by said monsters.”

  “The demon who killed him was hardly one of us, Taliyah,” I corrected her.

  She nodded. “I know. Believe it or not, I actually am starting to like it here. And I think it really helps that Cain is still sort of here too, he’s just sharing the body of an ex-ghost flapper turned medium.” She huffed out a breath and shook her head, still staring up at the ceiling as a laugh bubbled out of her lips. “I swear, I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.”

  “Yeah, that’s generally how it goes in Haven Hollow.” I smiled at her and then reached over to pat her hand. “I’m just glad to know you’re starting to like it here. We are very happy and grateful to have you here.”

  She gave me a smile in return. “Thanks, Fifi.” Then she breathed out another pent-up breath, and I was surprised to know there was more. “I just can’t help but second guess my decision in coming here though.”

  “Why is that?”

  She shrugged. “Everything here is just so… so messed up. Things in this town are getting more dangerous by the minute it seems. For such a small town, there seems to be a different problem every week.”

  Guilt was gnawing at my guts like a venomous snake. I was almost writhing in place with it. The spell on Taliyah, the one that was keeping her Fae nature under wraps, wasn’t set to break for another five months, when true winter began, but the thought of her being blindsided by even one more thing when she’d already been through so much, was killing me. Someone should have told her, warned her of what was still coming, given her a chance to brace for it.

  And maybe that person should have been me. And yet, we had all been sworn to secrecy because Taliyah was meant to find out on her own. It was all part of the prophecy.

  Taliyah was strong, even as a human. But she looked worn and brittle, not like someone who should have yet another life altering event heaped on her head with no support. Not to mention one that could seriously impact her kids and their lives.

  “I’m sorry,” is all I managed to say, but at least it was true. At least I could give her that much.

  Taliyah waved me off, pulling herself back up straight in her chair. Watching her rebuild her icy shell of professionalism piece by piece was like watching a knight put on his armor.