Then he was pulling me close, and holding me a little too tightly. I could tell Lorcan was trying to be gentle, but he was clutching a little too hard, and I was going to have bruises in the shapes of his fingers if he didn’t ease up. He buried his face in my hair, pulling in a deep breath, like he was trying to memorize my scent.

  “I would never do that to you, sweetling,” he breathed against the side of my head. “Never.”

  I closed my eyes and leaned into his touch, letting myself believe him.

  After a short, but comfortable silence, he spoke again.

  “And not just because you’d hex my bollocks off.”

  That made me snort, and I jammed a finger into his ribs. “Damn right I would.”

  But I couldn’t keep the smile off my face.

  Chapter Fourteen

  After Lorcan spent the last couple hours before sunrise making things up to me, I lay awake in bed for a long time afterwards.

  He’d arranged himself on his back, so once he fell asleep, I could stay half-curled around him, with my head on his chest. I traced invisible patterns against his skin with one finger while I thought.

  If Lorcan had been awake, he might have smiled and told me that it tickled, or even tugged my hand to his mouth to kiss my fingertips. But that wasn’t what I was thinking about—instead, I was still turning our conversation from earlier over and over again in my head. I’d been so relieved that my worst fears hadn’t come true, that Lorcan was just in it for the chase and now that he’d ‘won’ he was ready to move on to the next hunt, that I hadn’t fully taken in what Lorcan had been telling me.

  I didn’t like it that the vampires were sniffing around again. With everything we’d gone through with Rupert, I’d hoped that it would buy us a little peace, at least a decade or so. But whoever this new vampire in charge was, he or she was clearly suspicious. Who knew what that meant for our little group way out in the Hollow. Especially with tensions between witches and vampires coming to a slow boil.

  Not that the witches were thrilled about my Blood Witch status, either. I didn’t think anyone would come out to try and kill me over it if my secret came out, but I also wouldn’t have been surprised.

  After not coming to an easy answer, I told myself we’d take what steps we had to, and we’d go from there. No use obsessing over it. I still couldn’t quite bring myself to sleep, though. After the day I’d had, with the highs and far more lows, I felt restless, and a little on edge. It didn’t help that talking to Brooke had been a bust. Jackson certainly seemed to have had an inflated sense of his own appeal. Who wouldn’t have wanted to marry him? Ugh.

  Bryony was still missing though, and while I didn’t think Taliyah would go out of her way to share information with me about a police matter, which was, frankly, rude after all the effort I’d put in and the help I’d already given her. But I doubted she was having much luck figuring out where our missing werewolf had disappeared to.

  I started replaying the evening over in my head, re-examining the conversations I’d had, thinking of them like a mirror that if I just turned it the right way, it would light up and I’d be able to see everything I’d previously missed.

  And... I was going to have to call Poppy, wasn’t I? She was probably all beside herself, just marinating in unnecessary guilt. I didn’t like to think about everyone’s faces when I’d left, the sympathy was hard to stomach. At least it hadn’t been deserved.

  And then, lying there, I had the most unfortunate, unsettling, downright disturbing realization.

  Darla had been right.

  Not about Lorcan, thank spell, but about something else. We’d been focusing on the people who might have wanted Bryony to disappear: her uninterested groom, his jealous ex, her father’s rival. But we hadn’t spent as much time looking at Bryony’s side of things. Everyone had just been so obviously grief struck, that I hadn’t been suspicious of her side of things. But hadn’t they all been a little too quick to throw accusations and guilt my way? Especially the mousy mother...

  Still, looking into Bryony’s family didn’t feel right. Weirdly, it might have if I’d still thought she was dead. People getting rid of unwanted children was, sadly, not something I was unfamiliar with. My own mother kicked me out of the coven when I was blooded, and she fed my two brothers to vampires to destroy their magic, so she didn’t have to live with the ‘shame’ of having birthed warlocks.

  But Bryony wasn’t dead, she was missing, and I didn’t think her family would banish her, especially when she was doing what they wanted by getting married. It was clear that they were more invested in her ‘settling down and having cubs’ than she was. So then, why?

  Had they changed their mind on Jackson’s suitability, and decided their daughter ‘dying’ was better than calling the whole thing off? I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling, thinking. We’d talked to Jackson, and his former paramour, because they seemed the most likely suspects. But Darla was right, we’d been focusing on Jackson’s ex, and hadn’t really thought to ask if Bryony had one. What if the ‘other woman’ in this situation was in fact an ‘other man’? Or I supposed the ‘other’ could also be another woman, if Bryony leaned that way.

  So, then the following question was: did this jilted lover make off with Bryony, leaving a ‘body’ so that no one would look for her?

  Or…

  Hmm.

  I needed some answers, and I had only a few places to get them that wouldn’t end up with me getting bitten. As much as I hated it, I didn’t have a choice.

  But if Lorcan was right, and the vampires were sniffing around, then I’d have to stay put until the sun finally set. And with any luck, I’d actually manage to get some sleep before then.

  ***

  Thanks to my girl on the inside, I managed to find the strange playground that ‘all the kids have started hanging out at’, pretty easily. I wasn’t sure what was so appealing about lurking around a slide in the dark, but I supposed I wasn’t today’s youth, so I didn’t need to get the appeal.

  True to Sybil’s word, there were quite a few teens and preteens slouching around, standing in small groups while also very obviously not using any of the playground equipment.

  Including the two I was looking for.

  I felt even weirder about approaching children in the playground as I had in the candy store (and at night, no less), but unfortunately, going to talk to them at home wasn’t really an option.

  Sneaking up on a werewolf, much less two of them, was actually pretty hard. I didn’t have a lot of patience at the best of times, so a few muttered words and a flexing of my power had the shadows pulling closer, hugging tight, until I was close enough to speak to them.

  Marianne winced, her gaze dropping to the sand under her feet. Casey Reid’s face twisted into a ferocious scowl, which would have probably been really intimidating if she wasn’t on a swing with her pink little sneakers kicking in the air.

  “You again?” There was a little growl to her voice, her eyes glinting in the dark. “We don’t want to talk to you.”

  Well. Backtalk. Maybe there was hope for this one.

  “Yes, and I’ll be sure to write about that in my diary and then cry myself to sleep tonight.” I wrinkled my nose at the faux turf underneath the playground equipment. I’d worn closed toe shoes, but the grit was going to absolutely ruin the leather if I wasn’t careful. “But I need to talk to you about Bryony.”

  Marianna winced and blinked, like she was trying not to cry. “Can you please just leave us alone?”

  Okay, well, that made me feel like a bully. Which, I probably was being, but no one else was giving me a straight answer or any answers at all, so here we were.

  I’d try to keep it short. “I just need to know if Bryony was seeing someone. Did she have a boyfriend?”

  “Yeah. Jackson,” Casey said, aggressive in her defensiveness.

  “Jackson was her fiancé, but don’t try to kid me. She was neutral about him, at best. I’ve had a stronger reaction about what kind of wine I’m drinking than she did about getting married.” I turned back to Marianne, who still wouldn’t look at me.

  She fidgeted, tugging at the sleeves of her shirt, pulling them over her fingers. “She did have a boyfriend,” she said quietly, like a confession. “A Summer fae from town. He was a faun. But when she got engaged, she broke it off, and he left town.”

  Casey, for once, wasn’t butting in. In fact, she was oddly quiet, her hands clenched into fists.

  A faun, hmm? They tended to be a little wild, I could see one going out with a werewolf girl. With their goat legs and horns, they were pretty close to nature. They were also pretty good at glamours, so it would be easy for one to say, turn a pile of leaves and bracken into a corpse long enough to fool the family.

  It sure would have been good information to know, say, a few days ago.

  I tried not to sigh. Or curse. They were children, after all. “Look, can you tell me anything else about him? How did he handle the breakup? Did they see each other again? Where did he go? Was he angry with her?”

  Casey set her jaw at a mulish angle. “Why do you care?”

  Don’t yell at children, Wanda, I told myself, using it like a mantra to beat back my temper. “Do you think I’d be asking if it wasn’t important?”

  She looked away and heaved a sigh, like I was the biggest trial she’d ever endured in all her years. I was almost impressed.

  “They didn’t break up. Not even after Alder moved to Portland. They snuck around, and they were really freaking out about the wedding. Bryony told him that she was trying to get out of it, and she was. And then one day, she just… stopped trying. She did what they wanted, and she stopped seeing Alder.”

  Marianne looked shocked. “Why didn’t I know about it?”

  Casey snorted. “Cause Bry knew you’d tell mom and dad if they asked you.”

  Marianne glared. “That’s not true! I didn’t tell them I saw him at the wedding, did I?”

  “Wait, what?” I made a ‘stop’ gesture with my hand. “Back that up. Alder was at the wedding?”

  Casey looked mutinous, and Marianne vaguely ashamed again.

  “Y-yeah,” the older girl admitted. “He was there with the catering staff. I figured he was trying to convince her to run away with him again or something. But then, Bryony was gone, and it all seemed really stupid.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose, telling myself that I could not shake a child. Especially not a werewolf child. But, oh, Goddess, the urge was there. “And you didn’t think to mention any of this last time?”

  Marianne sniffed, tears brimming in her eyes. “You asked who’d want to hurt Bryony. Alder wouldn’t hurt her, he loved her. And besides, she’s gone, what does it even matter? Your questions are stupid and it’s too late.”

  Well, I had absolutely no patience for any of this. There was a reason they never asked me to teach young witches; they’d all end up as newts. Astrid was the one exception, but even so, I’d pawned off half of her lessons onto Poppy.

  Well, there was one thing I owed them, even if I had no idea how they were going to take it. “Bryony is alive.”

  Marianne froze, before rolling her eyes up towards me. The little mouse was gone, it was the wolf in those golden eyes now. A low, threatening growl trickled from between barred fangs as she glared at me.

  Maybe that had been a mistake after all.

  She snarled, flashing her teeth. “You’re a liar. How dare you?”

  I was a witch, wielder of fantastic magical powers. I was also blooded by a vampire, which made me just a little bit faster, a little bit stronger, a little bit more than most people. But I did still have a sense of self preservation, no matter how atrophied, and I knew I had to be very, very careful for the next few seconds.

  I met her eyes and didn’t look away. “I’m not lying, Marianne. She’s alive. And Casey knows it. Don’t you, Casey?”

  It was only when Marianne looked towards her sister that I let myself do the same.

  Because, yes, there it was, in the younger sister’s face. She was trying to hide it, but she was still young. She hadn’t perfected her resting bitch face that most teenagers developed.

  The lack of reaction had been what tipped me off. Casey had been the more aggressive of the sisters, ready to throw down with a witch to keep her sister from getting upset. But when Marianne had showed me her teeth, there had been nothing from Casey. Silence.

  The girl wouldn’t meet either of our eyes, looking away for the first time like she was guilty.

  Marianne was wide-eyed, shaking slightly. The wolf was gone, all that was left was the girl. “Casey?”

  Casey’s shoulders hunched up around her ears, and her chin ducked towards her chest as her sister stared her down. It was like the two of them had suddenly swapped their personalities.

  “Casey!”

  The girl jumped.

  Marianne stared at her. “Then it’s true? And you knew. Bryony is alive, and you knew?”

  At that point, I guess Casey decided that it was a little late to protest, so she very hesitantly nodded.

  A low, ripping snarl tore its way out of Marianne’s throat. Her eyes were all wolf then, teeth too long and too white in her mouth. “I’m going to kick your butt!”

  And just like that, they were gone. Casey didn’t try to negotiate, didn’t try to talk her sister down. She just bolted like a champion at track and field, with Marianne half a step behind her.

  Their sudden departure created a couple ripples through the other people in the park, but most immediately drifted back to whatever they were doing.

  I shook my head. Kids.

  It was fine. I’d gotten what I wanted.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The drive to Portland meant I was going to have to test my hypothesis and get out quick if I wanted to beat the sunrise home.

  I was all for keeping up appearances, but not if it meant spending the day trying to sleep and not suffocate in my car trunk, even if I was driving one of Lorcan’s more roomy cars. Hard pass.

  I had to retrace my steps a bit from that long ago fabric shopping spree, and as I thought about it, Lorcan really owed me another one for the stunt he’d pulled. I couldn’t even remember the name of the place, only the food I’d had there, which had actually been pretty good. There weren’t a ton of places that could do a really good wrap without it getting soggy.

  Sadly, the restaurant wasn’t my main goal of the evening, though from the sounds coming from inside, Thursday night was a popular one for students. The place was packed. I probably wouldn’t have even been able to get a table.

  My chicken wrap dreams dashed, I took a glimpse in the windows, trying to spot a familiar face.

  I must have gotten too close to the door, because a frazzled server doubling as a hostess gave me a wary look. “It’s going to be about a forty-five-minute wait for a table.”

  She looked like she wasn’t in the mood for small talk, so instead of beating around the bush, I decided to go for it and hope for the best. “Actually, I was just looking for Alder. He told me to meet him here.”

  She shoved her hair back off her face, barely looking at me. “He’s probably in his apartment out back. Check there.”

  Goddess bless young people who didn’t value other people’s privacy. I slapped a smile on my face. “Yeah, good point. Okay, thanks.”

  And then I turned and wandered around the building before she gathered up enough energy to ask me any questions like: who are you, and why are you looking for Alder? Very inconvenient, those.

  There was a set of metal stairs around the back of the pub leading up to a door, probably an apartment if the bronze numbers hanging on it were any indication. I had to knock twice before there was shuffling inside, and the door cracked open.

  I looked into the very side eye that stared out at me, and slapped a hand to the door so it couldn’t be slammed in my face. “Hello, Bryony.”

  That stunned the girl enough that I managed to nudge the door open and step inside.

  The place wasn’t terribly large, but it seemed cozy and it was cleaner than I probably would have managed on my own. The kitchen and living room were all one, and a hall disappeared towards the front of the pub, probably the bedroom.

  Bryony was paler than the white paint on the walls, her eyes blown wide as she stared at me, her arms wrapped around her midsection. I gave her a once over, but she looked to be in good health, glossy hair, a pretty pink and white sundress, no kinds of visible bruises. Though she did look like she was one hopscotch round away from a panic attack.

  “Nice place.” I turned towards her, one hand on my hip. “And you’re looking well. Much better than I anticipated, what with you being dead and all.”

  Bryony swallowed hard.

  The young man I’d last seen her with outside the pub came down the hallway then, toweling off his dark hair. In their apartment, he apparently didn’t bother with the glamour, since there was a set of curling ram’s horns on either side of his head, though his legs and feet below the towel wrapped around his waist looked human enough. That explained the glamour he’d been wearing at the wedding. It had been him I’d seen there, putting down a tray and hurrying off.

  “Did you say something, Bry?” He caught sight of me in the entrance way, and stumbled to a stop. “Oh. Oh, crap.”

  I fixed them with one of my better witchy glares. “Busted.”

  Bryony hurried over to Alder and slid her arms around his waist. He straightened up, as tall as he could, but it was really hard to look intimidating with a towel wrapped around your hips, no matter how impressive the horns were.

  Up until that moment, a part of me had wondered if I was way off base. Maybe Bryony really was dead, but something had been done to get rid of the evidence, i.e., her body. Maybe I was grasping at straws. They were all things I had to consider. But here she was, alive and well, and I wanted to choke her with her own hair.

  I braced my hands on my hips, glaring them down. All the fury and frustration I’d been dealing with for days was simmering in my stomach, until I felt like I could have spit fire given half the chance. “What in spell were you two thinking? Were you even thinking? Do you have any idea the kind of problems you’ve caused? And for what? Because you can’t tell your parents that you don’t want to marry some guy you don’t know?”