To be fair (and by rule I didn’t like being fair), it wasn’t exactly radio silence. It wasn’t like the last time when I’d thought he was sneaking around because he was busy ushering a geriatric vampire snoop around town and avoiding me. No, Lorcan had been sending me regular texts, even pictures of himself at the office, and one short video where he waved with a very confused but friendly dental hygienist whom he’d obviously roped into waving at the camera too.

  So, I knew he was exactly where he said he was, but I just didn’t know why.

  And honestly, while I would never admit it out loud, I missed hearing Lorcan’s voice—missed that faint hint of a brogue that got thicker when strong emotions came into play. Just thinking about him whispering against the shell of my ear had shivers racing up and down my spine.

  The store was quiet after Maverick had left, and I’d finished everything that needed finishing. Now there was nothing to distract me but a pile of silk scraps that I still wasn’t sure what to do with, and my mood was getting darker and darker to the point where I was half surprised a little storm cloud hadn’t sprung to life over my head.

  I did poke at the silk scraps a little. They were delicate, fragile with age and crumbling around the edges. Yet, I still couldn’t bring myself to just get rid of them. For one thing, they were my evidence, and I had every intention of giving that auction house a piece of my mind. For another thing, Goddess, that had been a lot of money. It had also been so sweet of Lorcan to shell out that kind of cash for something just because I liked it, and to see it all crumpled apart now left me very frustrated and unhappy.

  So, the choice was I could either wander around my shop like a sad, aimless ghost, mourning a ruined dress, or I could go and actually do something about what was bothering me.

  I’d never been a hand-wringing kind of woman. And, frankly, ghosts were so yesterday.

  ***

  If I’d had any doubts of my suspicion that something was up where Lorcan was concerned, it shriveled and died the second I walked through the doors of Lorcan’s dental office and the receptionist, a middle-aged lady with graying blond hair, went pale. Her smile fell away for a telling second before coming back a little too brightly.

  “Good evening, Ms. Depraysie.” The woman’s (whose name I believed was Yvonne) eyes darted around, like she was checking the exits or searching frantically for something that might call her away from the front desk. “I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight.”

  My smile was more of a snarl, a quick flash of teeth to make it clear that I knew what she was doing and didn’t appreciate it. “I’d like to talk to Lorcan, thank you.”

  The smile didn’t falter, Yvonne was made of sterner stuff than that, but my fancy new and improved vision meant I knew that the shine on her forehead was from nervous sweat. “I’m afraid Doctor Rowe is with a patient right now, but I will go and let him know you’re waiting for him when he’s done.”

  My eyes narrowed, but what could I say to that? This was Lorcan’s office, and I didn’t want to interfere. Besides, the idea of being in the same room as a stranger with their mouth open and possibly plaque flying around, that was a hard pass for me. I wouldn’t even curse my worst enemy with that fate.

  What else could I do? I sat in one of the surprisingly comfortable waiting room chairs and prepared to wait. Yvonne returned after a minute with a faint smile in my direction and slunk reluctantly back into her seat. All her attention was on her computer screen, like she was worried she’d turn to stone if she met my gaze directly.

  I’d never been the most patient person in the world, but I sat there as the minutes ticked by on the obnoxiously loud clock. Legs crossed, I bobbed my right foot, trying to burn off some of my annoyance, but every third bounce or so had Yvonne flinching in her chair and hunching a little lower behind her monitor.

  The tension in the room built, piano wires yanked tight to the snapping point. How long did it take to finish off a patient? As far as I was concerned, it was taking forever, even if the clock said it had been less than ten minutes. Would it really have been so difficult for Lorcan to pop his head out to check in with me?

  Another minute, and my temper snapped. I stood up, smoothed my coat and cashmere sweater out, and stormed past Yvonne and the reception desk towards the back rooms.

  “Ms. Depraysie,” Yvonne yelped, half rising from her chair. “You can’t go back there.”

  I shot her a look that dared her to try me, and she sank back into her chair, just as she should have. My temper definitely wasn’t pretty. My heels clacks angrily against the tile floors as I stormed down the hall. My worry and annoyance surged higher with every empty examination room I passed, right up until I reached Lorcan’s office, yanked open the door, and found it empty too.

  There was no one in the building but me and Yvonne. The only other way out of the building was the emergency exit at the end of the hall, and the larger window in the bathroom, and I didn’t know which I found funnier or more rage inducing for Lorcan to have chosen as his exit strategy. If he chose the window, hopefully he got stuck. Or nailed his balls—it would have served him right.

  When I very calmly, collectively, stepped back into the waiting room, Yvonne shrank down into her chair with the aura of a woman who knew that she’d messed up. Still, she made a show of checking her phone.

  “Where. Is. Lorcan?”

  “Oh my gosh, Ms. Depraysie, I’m so sorry. Doctor Rowe stepped out to take his lunch. But I’ll make sure to let him know you dropped by.”

  She wilted as I stared at her, but she didn’t crack or back down. What the spell was going on? Lorcan didn’t even eat lunch. He didn’t eat, unless you counted the bagged blood at home in the fridge. So, this meant one thing: Lorcan was avoiding me. Not only was he avoiding me, but he was recruiting his staff to help him do it? Whatever the reasoning, it was clear that I wasn’t going to get any information from Yvonne, not without resorting to magic, and since she was a normal human who didn’t even know about her boss’s nocturnal proclivities, that seemed like a step too far. Especially against a mother of two who was just trying to do her job, even if she was pissing me off in the process.

  My smile was frosty. “Thank you, Yvonne. Please do.”

  I couldn’t have sworn to it, but I was pretty sure Yvonne held her breath until I was out the door.

  I should have known that she’d tattle on me, because by the time I reached the car, there was already a text coming through from Lorcan.

  Hello, Sweetling. I’m so sorry wires got crossed. I had to pop out to take care of an errand and forgot to tell Yvonne. I’m taking care of it now. I’ll see you later.

  There were a lot of things I could have said in response, but really, what was the point? For some reason, Lorcan was going to fairly extreme lengths to avoid me, and he wasn’t volunteering why. But he was also doing his best to keep me updated as to where he was, like he was proving he wasn’t up to anything. When he clearly was.

  As much as it grated, as much as I wanted to track him down and demand to know what was going on, or to just shake him until answers fell out, I had to let him handle whatever this was. Why? Because at the end of the day, I trusted Lorcan. I knew he would never do anything to destroy our relationship, and I knew he loved me more than he loved anyone else on the planet. He would do what he needed to.

  It was just… I missed him. I missed waking up with him, missed talking about our nights. It had only been a couple of days, but I was already feeling that sense of loneliness. And I didn’t do well with emotion in general. Truly, feelings were intolerable. Haven Hollow had ruined me. I’d never gone around missing people before. Especially a vampire. It was all really quite ridiculously stupid.

  I’d also never angrily buckled my seatbelt before, but it was a day of firsts for me.

  There are some things that just shouldn’t be done while upset and frustrated. Talking to customers is one of them. Sewing delicate things is another. So, I decided not to return to work. The store had been quiet anyway, when I’d closed up to go to Lorcan’s office, so I didn’t see much reason to go back and reopen for only another hour or so.

  At least at home, I had wine and a couch to curl up on. I might as well be comfortable, while I was drafting my complaint to the Emerald city auction house. At least I might get to vent some of the rotten feelings roiling around in my gut.

  Haven Hollow wasn’t the kind of town that closed shop the second the sun set, but there were still only a few cars on the road at this time, especially once I left the downtown area. City center made way to suburbs, and patches of woods. Everything was quiet, just me, the purr of my car’s engine, and the pale circle of my headlights against the road.

  It was almost meditative. Right up until that golden glow of headlights spilled over the body lying in the middle of the road.

  Chapter Seven

  I slammed on the brakes so hard that I was surprised I didn’t leave an inch thick streak of rubber from my tires.

  My car rocked to a stop, and I sat there for a second, my heart slamming up in my throat and my hands shaking, as I realized just how close I’d come to running a person over.

  What the spell were they doing—was this some sort of prank? Were they even still alive? And if they were still alive, why in the Goddess’s name would someone lie down like that in the road, in the middle of a subdivision? Maybe she was hurt?

  I stepped out of the car and walked over to the woman who was lying on her back, arms at her side. Her eyes were open, but that didn’t mean anything. Conscious or not, she was staring blankly at the sky, totally oblivious to the car still idling a few feet away.

  Was she hurt? Sick? Had she just collapsed here? It was a strange way to fall—that much was sure. It was more like she’d been left like this—arranged for someone to find her. A horrible thought then slithered through my mind. I couldn’t shake the memory of Maverick describing the victim he’d been investigating, the one who’d just fallen down… dead. Was this woman also deceased? But she didn’t look like it—dead bodies most times looked like discarded marionettes, all splayed limbs and mussed hair—not like they were waiting for someone to come along and tuck them in for the night.

  Well, I needed to check for a pulse. And I was going to. Right after my legs stopped feeling like badly set jelly. This was so stupid. I’d been in fights before. I’d been in wars. I’d defended the town from truly vicious creatures, demons and vindictive faeries. But that had all been deliberate. I’d planned it out and followed through. The idea that I could have hurt someone by accident? The thought left my limbs trembling and my chest so tight that it was difficult to breathe. I only barely managed to get it together enough to walk back to my car to hit the button for my hazard lights. The last thing I needed was my car to get rear ended in the dark.

  I then grabbed my phone out of my purse. If this was another victim of whatever might have killed the first two people, then there might have been some sign on them that Maverick missed, and I was way better at protecting myself from magic than a half-trained Taliyah would be.

  So, yeah, that was my plan: check that everything was safe, or if there were any clues, and then call Taliyah to come and… deal with the situation. Oh, yeah, and the pulse.

  I swallowed, then squared my shoulders and forced myself to walk forward.

  I’d been bracing myself for a corpse. So, to say I was surprised when the woman who was lying unmoving in the middle of the road glanced at me and then away like she was totally disinterested with what was going on… well, it would have been an almost criminal understatement.

  “You’re awake,” I blurted out. The last word had almost come out as ‘alive’ but I’d managed to change it at the last second.

  The woman gave me another reluctant look, like she couldn’t be bothered with the situation. Concern and irritation were a combination bubbling up within me that, while I was very, very used to both, still didn’t sit well in my chest. What in the world was going on? Why would anyone do something like this?

  I figured I might as well ask the only person who might actually be able to tell me a reason.

  “What in the world are you doing?” I crossed my arms over my chest, cellphone dangling from my hand as I glared at her. “Are you trying to get run over, because you know there are much easier ways to off yourself than involving unsuspecting and innocent bystanders?”

  It was dark, and while there were houses nearby, the streetlights didn’t do much to light the situation. The woman just kept lying there, totally limp against the pavement. Every once in a while, she would shift slightly, like the normal fidgeting of a person lying on what had to be a very uncomfortable surface. So that ruled out my worry that she actually couldn’t move. She just seemed like she didn’t want to get up.

  The woman wasn’t very old, maybe a few years older than my cousin, Astrid. Her hair was brown, but in the low lights, bits of it were auburn. There weren’t any visible wounds on her either, nothing out of the ordinary that I could see anyway, but I also didn’t want to start and in-depth magical assessment while the person, who was human to all my senses, was awake and watching me. I had enough going on without having to get into complex memory charms.

  I took a look around, but no, there was still no one else in sight. Just me, my car, and an unresponsive awake person, lying in the road. What the spell was I supposed to do about this?

  “Hey.” Still no reaction. “You need to get up. Move off the road. Seriously, it’s only dumb luck that I saw you in time not to drive over you.”

  Nothing.

  I strangled back my mounting annoyance and tried to coax a little bit of the empathy that Poppy had infected me with to the surface.

  “Are you okay?”

  It came out a little grudgingly, granted, but it was still the thought that counted, or so Poppy always said.

  The young woman still didn’t say anything. Her blank expression didn’t change, and she didn’t move a muscle other than to tip her face a little away from me. But, as I watched, tears welled up in her eyes and spilled down over her temples to patter against the pavement like little rain drops.

  “Oh, spell.”

  Curses I could deal with. Demons I could deal with. Hexes and charms? Child’s play. Other people’s emotions, though? I was out of my depth. I’d been thinking that it was all a magical situation, but what if it was a mental health situation instead? I was very much out of my depth here.

  I could still have called Taliyah. The police had to have some kind of resource for this type of situation. I wasn’t sure that was the best thing to do, though. If there was danger, sure. If some creature was swooping down out of the night to eat someone, you’d better believe that Taliyah would be my first call (or maybe Lorcan would be). But I wasn’t sure an officer was what this woman needed.

  I could have called an ambulance, but she didn’t appear to be injured, and she hadn’t indicated otherwise. She just seemed like she’d given up. Like she’d laid down without even a care about whether she was in danger or not, and that didn’t seem like something a police intervention could help with. Or an ambulance.

  I stood there for a long, annoyingly indecisive moment, bouncing my cell phone in my hand. What was the best option? I didn’t have a spell that could fix this. But standing in the road wasn’t safe, even in a quiet subdivision. Yes, I could have tried to move the woman but I was fairly sure paramedics frowned on that sort of thing. So, finally, I shook my head and made a call.

  It wasn’t a fighting situation, or a magic situation. It looked like an emotion situation, so I called the only person I knew that was good with feelings. Poppy answered on the second ring, her voice a little muffled, like she was eating something.

  “Hello?”

  “I need your help with a… well, your kind of situation.”

  There was a rustle on the line, and when Poppy came back on, her voice was clearer. “Is it a potion situation?”

  “No.” I hesitated, not sure how to articulate what I was asking for without sounding like an idiot. Finally, I just rolled my eyes and embraced it. “It’s a person kind of problem.”

  There was a long pause. “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “Because it’s not exactly easy to explain,” I almost barked back.

  “Where are you?”

  I gave Poppy the address of the closest house I could see. “I’m in the road. My car is blocking things, so keep an eye out for that.”

  “In the road?” Poppy took a deep breath, audibly calming herself. “Wanda, that doesn’t sound safe…”

  “I’m fine. I’m a witch—er vampire,” I corrected myself, glancing around to make sure no one had heard me. Well, the woman in the street had, so it looked like I would have to do a memory altering charm on her, after all. “I’m fine.”

  “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  It was closer to seven minutes when Poppy’s white jeep pulled up across from me, blocking the other direction of the road, just in case we got traffic. Her headlights sent a stab of pain through my eyes, and I had to squint and turn away, but I didn’t complain. The less chance of being run over, the better.

  “What happened?” Poppy didn’t even bother closing her car door, already hurrying forward. “Is she okay? Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know, and no idea but I’m fine.” I gestured to the woman laying sprawled out on the road, completely listless and oblivious or ambivalent about the amount of danger she was in. “She was like this when I found her, but she won’t answer questions.”

  “Can she talk?”

  “Don’t know.” I yawned.

  “Is she hurt?”

  I shrugged. “I can’t see any blood or anything on her, but there are ways to be hurt without bleeding.”

  The situation was still bad, but I actually felt a little better with Poppy there.

  She crouched down next to our mystery woman, who at least had stopped crying, thank the Goddess. Poppy looked her over, double checking that there were no visible injuries, and I saw the moment she noticed that the woman’s eyes flicked towards her before turning back to the sky.