My mouth worked silently as I tried to scrape together some words. “I was just… I mean—”

  Taliyah slashed her hand through the air, a flurry of snowflakes suddenly spanning out from her palm, and my mouth clicked shut, biting off my own words.

  “This isn’t your business, Fifi. And he,” she jabbed a finger at Fox. “Needs to go. Now.”

  Fox made an odd sound at the back of his throat. “I’d hardly call myself a civilian.”

  Those frozen lake eyes turned back to him, and I was a little pathetically grateful to have Taliyah’s attention off me for a second. She’d always been kind of intense, but that force of personality had taken a leap up and was now floating somewhere in the stratosphere.

  “I don’t care who or what you are. Get out of my crime scene before I arrest you for obstruction of justice.”

  Fox was braver than I was, because he actually took a half a step forward, one hand coming up to press to his chest over his heart. “Dearest, that’s a bit harsh, don’t you think? I’m here to help, after all.”

  Taliyah didn’t relent, didn’t unbend even an inch. “I don’t need your help. I don’t want it. And don’t call me dearest. I’m not your dearest. I’m your Chief of Police.”

  Yikes.

  Another half step and I was starting to fear for Fox’s safety. “Perhaps you didn’t ask for my help, but it’s yours all the same.”

  I couldn’t see Fox’s face, but the tone of his voice told me he was smiling, if only slightly, and I braced myself because I had a pretty good idea of how well that was going to go over.

  Taliyah’s lips peeled back off her teeth, but only an absolute idiot would have mistaken the expression for a smile. It was the kind of savage look wolves wore right before they brought their prey down to the ground and spattered hot blood over the snow.

  “Keep leering at me,” she said in a voice as cold and dark as a river in deepest winter. “And I’ll arrest you just for fun.”

  Fox drew in a breath, and I had no idea what he was going to say, but it was probably going to get us both into a lot of trouble, so I stumbled down the last couple of stairs and fake coughed as loudly as I could, clearing my throat obnoxiously.

  “Hi, Taliyah, Chief Morgan, um, this is Fox Aspen.” I wasn’t sure if Taliyah actually knew who Fox was and figured this was my cue—I didn’t want her to think I’d brought some random person with me, after all. So, I plastered my best realtor smile onto my face and hoped it didn’t look as fake as it felt. “He’s an associate of the Hunter’s Guild of America, as well as the Autumn Court of Faerie. I think you both might have met in passing during that investigation a little ways back, involving the murder of the Grimm and his Fae intermediary?”

  Taliyah just stared at Fox, who stared back at her. The tension in the room ratcheted a little higher, and a nervous giggle slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it.

  “Anyway, Fox has access to a morgue that specializes in supernatural matters, and he’s giving us access to use it, at my request.”

  “A favor, dearest,” Fox said to Taliyah. “I’m doing you both a favor.”

  Of course, there was that little bit about the tithe, but I decided now probably wasn’t the time to bring it up.

  “Stop calling me ‘dearest’,” Taliyah demanded, through gritted teeth.

  “Anyway,” I said as I speared Fox an expression that told him he needed to be walking on eggshells. “Fox is pretty sure this is the work of a human, not an experienced hunter.”

  A soft, watery little inhale off to the side of the room jerked my head around. Standing further back in the main basement room, where I hadn’t been able to see them, Marius held Mihaela clutched to his chest. Stefan stood wide eyed, his hand on his adoptive mother’s back.

  My breath withered to ashes in my throat. I hadn’t realized they were here. But then I had to reprimand myself inwardly because of course, they were here. Where else would they be in broad daylight?

  Great job, Fifi. Very sensitive to their loss.

  I wanted to curl up like a dead leaf, all dry and crispy. Mihaela’s face was a mask of pain, it hurt my heart to look at her.

  “A hunter?” Marius pushed Mihaela to the side so his body was angled in front of her. She reached out to drag Stefan with her, her pale fingers looking like claws.

  “Vhat is he doing here?” she demanded, her accent seemingly even more pronounced with her obvious anger.

  Marius shook his head, clutching at his remaining family. “Get out! I don’t want you here!” he yelled at Fox as he then turned to me. “How dare you bring a hunter here!”

  Fox raised his hands up, palms out, trying to look harmless. “That’s quite the reasonable request given my line of work and your line of… well, being.” Marius frowned at him as if he didn’t understand where Fox was going. “I don’t want to intrude on you,” Fox continued. “I just want to do a small investigation to see if my hunch is correct.”

  “And why should we allow you to involve yourself in this case, you… our enemy?” Marius’s face was drawn in lines of pain and fury, fangs flashing as he spoke. “For all we know, a hunter did this.”

  “There are no hunters in Haven Hollow,” Fox explained, gently.

  Stefan shot him a look. “Other than you, you mean?”

  Fox didn’t flinch in the face of their pain and anger. His voice was still calm, almost gentle, when he said, “I am a hunter, yes, but I am also a prince of the Autumn Fae Court, and thus, one of your own kind. I came only to help.”

  Mihaela wiped her face, smearing tears and make-up across her pale cheeks. “Vhat is this hunch zat you vish to check?” Hmm, it seemed that little part about Fox being the prince of the Autumn court had helped his cause because all three of them loosened up a bit.

  Fox lowered his hands, but kept them a little away from his sides, his body language relaxed. “I believe your daughter was staked by a… hmm, how to put this… a lover.”

  Mihaela was shaking her head almost before Fox got the last word out. “No. Viviana vas not dating. Ve had only moved here a monz ago. She had no lover.”

  “Actually,” Stefan said, looking awkward. “She was seeing someone.”

  “What?” Marius’s brow wrinkled up with distress. “Why wouldn’t she tell us?”

  Stefan’s incredulous expression would have been perfectly at home on the face of an actual teenager, saying clearer than words just how silly he found the question.

  Mihaela looked even more upset. “Vhere vould she have met zomeone?”

  “Who was she seeing?” Fox cut in, facing Stefan, before the family could start arguing, bringing their attention back to the matter at hand.

  Stefan shrugged, looking even more awkward. His shoulders remained up near his ears. “She’d been going to some of the local football games while we were getting the house set up. She fell for one of the young men in the, ah,” he made a hand gesture and walked in place for a couple steps, his knees lifting exaggeratingly high as he struggled to find the words. “Marching band, I think it’s called? Anyway, they’d been together for a few weeks before...” He couldn’t finish the sentence and I didn’t blame him.

  Taliyah drew in a breath and let it out through her teeth slowly. “I’m going to need to pay this boy a visit. Do you have a name?”

  Stefan shrugged again, looking helpless. “I’d know him if I saw him, but if Viviana told me his name, I’ve forgotten it.” His expression crumbled around the edges. “I should have paid more attention. It was just… who wants to hear about his sister’s crush?”

  The memory of a colorful poster plastered across Stomper’s Creamery flashed through my head. “The last football game of the season is tonight.” I glanced at the time on my phone. The sun had set while we were arguing in the basement. And that meant kick-off time was close. “We’ll have to hurry if we want to make it in time.”

  ***

  We all came pouring out of the Colonial, and I headed for Fox’s car, reaching for the passenger side door handle. We still had time to make it to the game before the kickoff—but only if we hurried.

  “Fifi,” Taliyah said before I could open the car door. “You’re riding with me.”

  I didn’t flinch, but it was close.

  I knew we were in a hurry, and had a potential murderer to catch, but I couldn’t help but drag my feet a little on my way over to the squad car. From the way Taliyah had spoken, I was half expecting her to stuff me into the back of the car with the bars and the doors that locked from the outside.

  Fox paused beside the driver’s door, watching Taliyah with something that was close to longing. I’d have traded spots with him in a heartbeat.

  Taliyah didn’t pay him any attention but slid into the driver’s seat and, since she hadn’t stuffed me in the back, or read me my rights, I assumed that meant I got to ride up front.

  “Well?” she demanded, looking at me impatiently as I lingered outside. “Are you coming or what?”

  “Oh, right,” I answered as I opened the door and, still a little hesitant, slid into my seat, expecting her to glare or snap at me at any second, but she just stared ahead, out the windshield, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. The silence pressed in around us, until it felt like my ears should have popped with the pressure.

  She didn’t move when I shut the door. She didn’t speak as I buckled my seat belt. I was a demon, but I still didn’t want to get launched through a window in the case of an accident or high-speed chase.

  Other than the soft patter of her fingers against the wheel, Taliyah didn’t move until Fox’s car, with Stefan, Mihaela, and Marius inside it (which was strange, given their introduction to one another), pulled out of the long, winding driveway.

  When she finally spoke, it startled me so badly, I flinched.

  “I keep hoping,” Taliyah said, her voice thick with the edge of tears. “That this will all just be a bad dream. That I’ll wake up, and I won’t see a stranger in my mirror anymore. That my frustration won’t fill my house with frost and snow. That I won’t have to avoid my kids so they don’t freak out at the sight of me.”

  She started up the squad car and put it into reverse as she laughed, a wet, broken sound that shredded my heart.

  “But seeing him? Now I know it’s real. Even though I don’t remember him at all, I know him. I can feel it. It’s like this weird sense of sureness inside me.” Taliyah’s fingers clenched down on the steering wheel, and a delicate tracery of frost spread across it, little whorls and fractals stretching out. “I know he’s Prince Reynard of the Autumn Court, and he’s supposed to be my betrothed.”

  Putting the car into drive, she started down the long and winding driveway of the Colonial, catching up to Fox’s car at the bottom, as he took a left and headed into Haven Hollow and, more pointedly, the high school.

  As to Taliyah and Fox, I wasn’t really sure what to say, so I didn’t say anything at all. Sometimes it’s better just to listen.

  The frost was spreading, down the steering wheel column, across the dashboard and onto the inside of the windshield. My breath fogged like mist in the air, but Taliyah didn’t seem to notice. Whatever she was glaring at, it wasn’t what was in front of her.

  Yeah, bringing Fox had definitely been a mistake.

  “Here’s the problem though,” Taliyah said, still staring forward. “I don’t want a betrothed. I’ve been married already—got the t-shirt and all that crap they say.” She breathed in deeply and shook her head. “Yeah, already had one bastard break my heart, and I’m not interested in a repeat performance.” She looked over at me. “Did you forget how to speak?”

  I cleared my throat. “No, no, I didn’t. I’m just not sure what to say.”

  She nodded. “There’s nothing to say, I guess.” Then she breathed out another deep breath and faced forward as blurbs of color raced past my window. “So, what, now? I’m just supposed to jump into a loveless marriage with a man I don’t even know? Because some freaking Faeries decided it was the best idea?” She laughed, and it was pretty obvious she didn’t agree with them.

  “Well,” I started, figuring she wanted me to respond, but I still wasn’t sure what to say.

  “I can’t do that. I can’t and I won’t.” She shook her head. “And what about my boys? Where are they supposed to fit in to all this ridiculousness?”

  Taliyah went quiet again, but the frost stayed put. I waited, watching a snowflake spiral down from the roof to land on Taliyah’s slacks, but she didn’t speak again.

  The thing was, I got it.

  I’d been let down so, so many times in the past. And each time made it harder and harder to open myself up to try again. Once bitten, twice shy and all that. Taliyah was strong, and I didn’t mean in a Winter magic kind of way, but she’d been lied to and betrayed. Willingly sticking your hand back in that fire, trusting you won’t be burned again, that took a lot of courage. And I understood thinking that maybe it just wasn’t worth the risk.

  Even with Roy, the best man I’d ever met, I still found myself waiting for the rug to get yanked out from under my feet. I was waiting for him to let me down, to break my heart. Maybe it wasn’t fair. Maybe it was the reason I overthought everything, the reason I looked at things too hard.

  And then there was the flipside. The happy flush that came to my cheeks when I remembered how Roy had held my face and promised he was serious about me, about us. The way he’d sworn he wasn’t going anywhere. Even though I hadn’t seen him in the past few days, what with everything happening, I was so glad we’d talked. And I held his words to my chest like a little spark against the chill.

  But, don’t forget, he’s still keeping something from you, I reminded myself as I thought about the fact that he’d alluded to some truth he still had to tell me. Whatever that truth was, though, I was fairly sure I could handle it. The most important thing was that he’d admitted he wanted the same thing I did—a relationship, a long term commitment.

  I licked my lips and suddenly wanted to give Taliyah the same hope I had—wanted her to be able to see the silver lining even though she was currently stuck in the dark. “You could talk to Fox,” I offered. “I’m sure if you explained how you felt, he’d understand. He seems… well, he seems nice, Taliyah.”

  “Do you know him?” she asked, turning to face me.

  I swallowed hard. “Well, no, not exactly.”

  “Right. It doesn’t seem anyone knows him.”

  “Well, maybe you could… I don’t know, get to know each other? The marriage doesn’t have to be a loveless one.”

  Taliyah slapped her hand against the dashboard, sending a little burst of snowflakes spiraling through the air. “The prophecy,” she sneered the word like it tasted awful on her tongue. “Says that I’ll get married on the winter solstice when the spell was originally due to break. That doesn’t sound to me like there’ll be a lot of time for us to get to know each other. Honestly? I want to run. Just, pack everything up and head somewhere that’s sunny all year. Maybe California.”

  She sat back in her seat and sighed. Her breath didn’t cloud white in the chilly interior of the squad car. “But I can’t do that to the boys. They’re just finally getting settled here and they seem to like it. I can’t just uproot them again. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  The guilt that crashed over me was almost suffocating. None of it was fair. Taliyah wasn’t the touchy-feely type, and I was positive she wouldn’t appreciate the hug I wanted to give her so I wrapped my arms around myself, pulling the seat belt tight across my chest. “I’m sorry.”

  Taliyah turned her head to actually look at me. Her eyebrows pulled together over her nose, but her forehead didn’t wrinkle with the gesture anymore.

  “I never meant for any of this to happen.” I wasn’t sure what help an apology would be, but it still needed to be said. “I just thought you needed to know the truth. Because everyone was kind of talking around your life and I just… I didn’t think it was right. I wanted you to be prepared for what was coming and how it was going to change everything you thought you knew. I had no idea… well, I had no idea I would screw things up as badly as I did.”

  A few tears had squeezed from the corner of Taliyah’s eyes and froze to her cheek. She wiped them away with impatient fingers and shook her head. “I’m mad at the situation,” she said in a surprisingly gentle voice I’d never heard her use before. “Not you, Fifi. At least now…” She swallowed, hard enough that I could see her throat bob with the motion. “At least I have a little bit of time to prepare myself.”

  She took in a deep breath, and I watched with something a lot like awe and a little bit like regret as Taliyah pulled herself back together, piece by piece. She was soon wearing her ‘cop face’ when she turned to give me a steely look from those frost pale eyes.

  “I’m not about to give up my job. Whatever else I become, I was this first. They can call me ‘Princess’ all they want, but ‘Chief of Police’ is the only title I care about.”

  A grin stretched across my face. A little bit of the guilt eased in my heart. Taliyah had been knocked back, but she wasn’t down for the count, not by a long shot.

  “Understood, Chief Morgan.” I glanced around at the interior of the squad car, and up at the windshield that was a near solid mass of frost and ice. “Um… maybe you should put on the defrost?”

  Taliyah blinked and seemed to notice the state of the car for the first time. The white windows, the snow starting to stick to the floor mats, the flakes lazily drifting on the air. She flicked the fan onto high.

  “Oh, yeah,” she sighed. “This is going to get old, fast.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Hallowed Homes was my baby.

  I’d put so much effort into building the business up from nothing: long nights, working weekends, striving for those little touches in all the properties I represented that convinced people a house could be a home. Their home, in particular. It had taken a lot of that elbow grease to transform the sagging old ruin the realty office had been under Ophelia’s reign, into a business that turned a profit. And a decent one, at that.