I shrugged. “I’ve heard about mediums who briefly passed on, but were resuscitated, and when they came back, they had stronger abilities.”

  “Hmm,” she answered and then wheeled around, narrowing her eyes as she looked around. She held her hands out in front of her. “I can feel him. I can feel that stiff’s corpse like it was right here in front of me.”

  Corpse.

  There was a freaking body in the backyard of my new house. Goddess, why, why, why was this happening to me? Couldn’t things be simple, just once?

  “Are you sure?”

  Darla nodded. “Can’t you feel him?”

  I didn’t want to feel him, but almost involuntarily my magic quested outward, seeking confirmation. The seeking tendrils of power encountered something solid, cold, and dead, at once. Darla was right—there was a body buried in the ground and from the feeling I was getting, it wanted to be discovered.

  Darla glanced from side to side before she gripped the chain-link fence and simply climbed over it, landing on the other side as if she did this on the regular.

  “What are you doing?” I seethed.

  “We gotta get him out of there,” she answered as she dropped down to her haunches above the mound of dirt and cocked her head towards it, as if she were listening to someone talking to her. “Yeah, he’s definitely in there.”

  “Well, that’s not our business!” I said angrily. “We have packages to deliver and I don’t have time for this!” But Darla didn’t pay me any attention. “Besides, we have no way of digging him out!”

  Then she looked at me. “There’s a shed behind the house and there’s a shovel in it.”

  I just stood there, bewildered, irritated and curiosity slightly piqued.

  “Oh, for Hecuba’s sake,” I said as I set my packages down beside those already on the ground and turning around, headed for this so-called shed.

  It took me a few minutes to locate the shed and the shovel within it. When I returned to the scene, I found Darla exactly where I’d left her.

  “This was your idea, so you get to dig,” I told her as I handed her the shovel. Yes, I could have attempted to use magic to remove the dirt from the grave, but I was too nervous about raising yet another dead body in the process. So, we were going to have to do this the old fashioned way.

  Darla accepted the shovel with no arguments and immediately went to work. I could only wonder if she had the same strength Libby did because she didn’t seem to tire. It was maybe ten minutes later that the shovel struck something hard. I peered into the hole and saw the top of what looked like a trunk. It was maybe three feet underground and not the customary six feet. That meant whoever had buried this guy had been in a hurry. Darla continued to dig around the edges of the trunk until she’d unearthed the top. Then she reached down and pulled on the lid, but it wouldn’t budge. Glancing over at me, she gave me a yearning expression to which I grumbled something incoherent and reached down beside her, helping to tug the top up.

  And, there he was.

  “Goddess,” I breathed.

  The body was lying on its side, in the fetal position, knees drawn into its chest so it would fit into the trunk. The skin was brown and shrunken and its mouth was open, as if stuck in a panic scream. Hair still clung to its head, and if I had to guess, I didn’t imagine the man had been dead that long. It was then that I noticed the corpse’s hands—they weren’t hands at all. Instead, the fingers were incredibly long and bent, with claws two inches long coming from each finger.

  I took in a deep, shocked breath. “He was a werewolf, in the middle of changing shape.”

  Liquid had congealed at the bottom of the trunk, and a nauseating smell wafted up on a light breeze. I pinched my nostrils shut and dared another look inside, and that was when it hit me—a feeling of familiarity that suddenly took control of my entire body and shook me with the essence of who this man had been in life.

  “Waylan,” I started as Darla turned to face me.

  “Rutledge,” she finished.

  We both just stood facing each other, our mouths open. She’d picked up on the same cue, the same understanding. And that meant… there was no doubt about it. This had to be Louisa’s husband.

  So, he hadn’t run off after all. He’d been murdered.

  Just ducky.

  Chapter Twelve

  “What the bloody hell are we supposed to do with him?” Lorcan demanded, gesturing broadly at the steamer trunk which he’d pulled from the grave. It was now sitting on the ground, the two of us standing around it. Darla was at the far end of the backyard, busying herself with what? I didn’t know or care.

  Instead, I found I couldn’t pull my attention away from Lorcan. His hair was a flyaway mess of golden waves. Sometime since he’d arrived, it had come half out of the tail at the base of his neck. The urge to touch it was nearly irresistible. I hadn’t planned to see him again until the duplex had been remodeled, and doing so now just made the memory of our last encounter surge to the fore. I clenched my hands into fists, squeezing until my knuckles turned white, just to keep myself from reaching for him. He was a vampire, for Goddess’ sake. I shouldn’t want to touch him. It was wrong, and probably just another symptom of this blasted connection we shared.

  “If I knew what the spell to do with him, do you think I would’ve called you?” I shot back, and I couldn’t keep a note of exasperation from my voice. “This is technically your house, and we found the body here, so, naturally, I thought you should be the first person I called!” I took a deep breath as he cocked his head to the side as if my response was a good one. The penis. “Why did it take you so damn long to get here, anyway?”

  “I was at the duplex, talking to a contractor about the damage.”

  “And? What did he say?”

  Lorcan shrugged. “He said it was the strangest mold infestation he’s ever seen.”

  “Great.” Then something occurred to me. “Did you happen to… notice anything weird about the mold?”

  “Beyond the fact that it’s overtaken the entire building?”

  “I mean… did it sound like it was… talking?”

  He looked at me and his eyebrows reached for the sky. “Talking?”

  “Nevermind.”

  “You are in luck, as regards one piece of this nightmarish puzzle,” he said and smiled at me. The expression was incredibly handsome and made my stomach drop. Oh, how I hated him!

  “How’s that?”

  “It seems anything already bespelled within the house was immune to the spores. Thus, your clothing and furniture are fine. The duplex, however, is going to need to be torn down to the studs and then rebuilt.”

  “What?” I demanded, my eyes going wide.

  “What part of that did you not understand?”

  “You’re going to have to tear down the duplex?”

  He nodded. “Quite so. The entire thing, too, as apparently the spores spread to both sides, yours and Fifi’s.”

  Well, that was just great. “So, now what do I do?”

  “Well, luckily for you, you are standing on the grounds of your new home,” he answered as he clapped his hands together and motioned to the house behind us.

  “No way.”

  “No way?”

  “There was a murder here, Lorcan!”

  “And?”

  “And that’s just bad juju.”

  I glanced askance at the steamer trunk. Night had fallen in earnest, and now I could barely make out more than a general shape in the moonlight. Waylan’s body was almost entirely swallowed by the shadowy interior of the trunk.

  I unclenched stiff fingers and brought them up to rub at my temples, eyes fluttering closed. The sudden stress left my neck stiff and the tension was slowly creeping up my skull, throbbing dully at my temples. I’d have killed (ha-ha no pun intended) to have an appointment with a talented masseuse.

  “You are a witch, might I remind you and now you possess death magic, thus a murder on the house grounds should be of little consequence to you,” Lorcan responded. “And, besides, we don’t even know whether the murder took place on the grounds or if, perhaps, the body was moved here at a later time.”

  “Well, we have to do something about it. We can’t just let Waylan rot away.”

  “Of course we can’t. Imagine what that would do to my property value, were it to get out!”

  “Um, Lorcan, it is going to get out because we have to notify someone.”

  He frowned at me. “And why is that? We could very easily bury him somewhere else, cremate the body, or just dump the trunk somewhere far away from Haven Hollow.”

  I fixed him with a gimlet glare. “What? No, we can’t!”

  “Yes, we can, sweetling,” he began, voice low and soothing as if he were speaking to an exceptionally slow child. “I believe the council would even approve, in this case. Mr. Rutledge died in a half-wolf form. Exactly how will we explain that to mortal authorities if they’re called in?” He shook his head. “No, we should just allow the family to deal with it, as is the council’s custom.”

  I glanced back at the body and then down to his hands again, all the while ignoring Lorcan’s comment about allowing the family to deal with it—that just sounded like an excuse Ophelia would make not to dirty her hands with the exact responsibilities she owed to the supernatural of Haven Hollow.

  “The only way we’d be able to obfuscate the obvious fact that he is a werewolf would be to take his hands off before calling the body in,” Lorcan continued, like he was talking about the weather. “And of course that will be extremely obvious. Furthermore, any competent forensics team will know the hands were removed post-mortem, and probably by us. Which will lead to more questions. Why would we feel the need to desecrate the corpse? What exactly do we have to hide?”

  “That’s a good question,” I said as I turned to face him. “What do you have to hide?”

  He paused for a moment, as if he wasn’t sure what I was getting at. Then he started chuckling. “Are you insinuating I killed this unfortunate creature?”

  “Well, he’s on your property and you’re in the process of trying to convince me we need to dispose of the body without anyone else finding out.”

  “Hmm, when you put it like that…”

  “You’re tootin’ the wrong ringer,” Darla piped up as she approached us. “Mr. Rowe ain’t our perp.”

  “Then who is?” I asked.

  She shook her head and shrugged. “I ain’t rightly sure.” She cocked her head to the side and breathed in deeply. “Every time he tries to get to that part, he just fizzles out.”

  “Could you not attempt a spell that might reveal the particulars about poor Mr. Rutledge’s last moments?” Lorcan asked as he faced me.

  “I’m too nervous to try my magic. Not after what happened with the mold and then Darla. It’s just too… unstable and unpredictable.”

  He nodded. “Fair point.”

  I tasted bile in the back of my throat. It wasn’t just the smell of putrefaction saturating the air that was making my stomach creep into my throat, (though it didn’t help.) It was just that… Louisa and her kids had been living just down the road from Waylan’s corpse all this time. And all this time Louisa believed he’d run off, leaving them to fend for themselves. I didn’t generally believe in moral absolutes, but this was just... wrong.

  “We can’t leave him here,” I said, voice tight with an emotion I didn’t want to name. My eyes burned weakly. “Louisa and her kids need closure. More than that, they deserve justice. If we take this to Ophelia, she’ll just sweep it under the proverbial rug and I don’t want that for Louisa.” I faced Lorcan and took a deep breath, my expression steely. “We need to find out who did this, Lorcan. And whoever it was, he or she needs to be brought to justice.”

  “What if it was Louisa?” he asked.

  “No,” Darla said, shaking her head. “I woulda picked up on that, now that I got these snooper abilities.”

  I faced Lorcan. “There’s your answer.” I held my chin up in the air and gave him my best ‘don’t argue with me’ expression. “We need to take this to Taliyah Morgan at the precinct.”

  We would have had to take it to Cain Morgan, Taliyah’s brother, but he was currently out on leave, owing to the last fiasco in which he’d involved himself and was now recovering from faerie-induced memory loss, hand delivered by Fox Aspen.

  Lorcan threaded his hands through his hair and cast one longing glance back at the house. His shoulders drooped and he nodded.

  “Ophelia won’t be happy when she learns mundanes are involved.”

  I winced.

  The head of Haven Hollow’s supernatural council, Ophelia Ponsobby, was a walking fashion disaster and an old-fashioned, human-hating hag. Literally a night hag. She was a terror you couldn’t escape, even in dreams.

  Lorcan was right. If we turned this over to mortal authorities, there was a good chance we could end up stuffed into trunks, as well. Ophelia took monster security very seriously.

  I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to covertly rub at the gooseflesh that sprouted along my skin.

  “And what about his claws?” Lorcan asked.

  I nodded because this was one point we couldn’t get past if we were really going to take this to the mundane authorities. We couldn’t do that if Waylan was in semi-wolf form. And, Lorcan was right—we couldn’t remove his hands either. “I could try to magic him back to his human state.”

  “Is that even possible?” Darla asked.

  “Yes,” I answered as I felt my heartbeat start to increase.

  “But, your magic is unpredictable,” Lorcan said.

  I looked up at him. “Right.” I looked back at Waylan’s body. “But, I don’t see that we have another choice. Louisa deserves to know who did this to her husband and you know as well as I do that she’ll never find out the truth if we turn this over to Ophelia.”

  “Since when did you decide to follow the path of the righteous and good?” Lorcan asked me, grinning.

  “Oh, stick a stake in it.”

  ***

  I focused on Waylan’s curved and grotesque fingers as I held my hands up in front of me and called on the powers of the natural world. I was standing on the ground, my shoes and socks removed so my skin could soak up the energy of the earth. My eyes were closed and I was focused on my intention, even as my heart continued to pound in my chest.

  Yes, I was fully aware this could go drastically wrong and I didn’t want to face the consequences of what might happen if I raised Waylan as another zombie. How in the world would I explain that to Louisa? Forcing the thoughts aside, I did my best to channel my magic, to force it into the narrow confines of my expectations. And those expectations had everything to do with returning Waylan’s werewolf claws into proper, human hands.

  This wasn’t a spell that required words. Instead, it took all my focus and all my intention. As I funneled that attention and focus, I imagined Waylan’s claws retreating into his body and human fingers taking their place.

  I could feel the energy of my determination pulling from the energy of the ground beneath me, swirling up through my feet, my legs and traveling through my torso and finally down the line of my arms until it emptied from my extended fingertips to travel to Waylan’s body.

  I breathed out as the energy left me and when I opened my eyes, I glanced down at the body to find the fingers now human. I kept my eyes planted on Waylan for another few seconds as I worried he might suddenly start to stir and sit up, animated with my death magic. But, no such thing happened. It appeared in this case, I’d been lucky. Or so, I hoped.

  “You did it, dollface!” Darla called out and then threw her arms around me as I hesitantly hugged her back.

  “Well done, sweetling,” Lorcan added.

  Yes, it was done and as far as I could tell, nothing else had accompanied it. But, that didn’t mean we were out of the woods. I turned to face Lorcan.

  “How do we explain how we found the body? I don’t think the nice officers of Haven Hollow PD are going to believe the ol’ ‘someone who was once a ghost led me to him’ excuse.” Which brought me to another blindingly obvious problem. I groaned aloud. “And how do we explain Darla?”

  “What is there to explain?” Lorcan asked.

  “Lorcan, she basically popped into existence, which means she doesn’t have any current documents. If they discover she’s involved in this… situation, they’re going to want to know who she is and where she came from.”

  “The broad’s gotta good point,” Darla said, nodding.

  Lorcan waved impatiently as he faced me. “Don’t worry about Darla.”

  “How can I not worry about her?!”

  “Because, my dear, I’ve set things in motion. In fact, the moment Poppy called to tell me what you’d done to her ex-ghost, I put in a rush order with the man who forges my documents. Thus, Darla shall have a new identity within the next forty-eight hours.”

  “I’m gonna have a new identity?” she asked as she squealed with happiness, like she’d just gotten the best of presents.

  Lorcan turned to face her. “You are, my dear. From hence forward, you will be known as Darla Rowe.”

  “What? You’re going to marry her?” I blurted out, completely shocked and… irritated.

  “Oh, Mister Rowe!” Darla said and pretended to blush behind her hand. “I always thought you were a real cake-eater, but never did I for one lil second think you intended to get dizzy with this dame!” she finished, pointing to herself with a huge smile.

  “No, no,” Lorcan said with a laugh, shaking his head. “I shall claim Darla as a cousin.”

  I stared at Lorcan’s profile, washed to a silvery luminescence by the wavering moonlight. He was as sober as I’d ever seen him, but it didn’t detract from the sculpted magnificence of his face. If anything, it highlighted the strength of his jaw, the deep, smoldering color of his eyes. I wanted to kiss him again!

  Balls! What had gotten into me?

  With a corpse not even a yard away, I wanted to kiss this man! Again! I was certifiable. I grasped for something, anything to distract me from the pathetic yearning his kindness had instilled within me. My eyes landed, once more, on the open steamer trunk, and a sigh bubbled out of my lips.