This week had been unrelenting, and here was the mummified cherry on top of the damned sundae. I never thought I’d think it, but I could do with less drama in my life.

  “Then I guess the only thing left to do is phone this into the station,” I said as I looked at Lorcan and found him already studying me. His expression was one I couldn’t read. “What?”

  “Unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless you raised him.”

  I frowned. “What? Raise him?”

  “Raise him as a zombie,” Lorcan answered, with a shrug. “That would solve most of our problems, you know. Waylan would have to be nursed back to full human-like status, just like Elizabeth, but he’d be alive... well, in a manner of speaking. He could go back to his family, and no one but the pair of us would know he’d passed on. We could search for the murderer at our leisure and leave the human police out of it.”

  I stared at him for a moment, waiting for the punchline. This had to be a joke, right? But his expression didn’t waver, and I realized, with a sickening jolt, that he was serious.

  “I can’t raise him as a zombie!” Well, I wasn’t exactly sure that was true, but I went with it. “My powers are unstable, remember?”

  “You just managed to return his hands to their proper state,” he answered.

  “Yeah, and the whole time I was scared to death I was going to bring Waylan back or do something equally dreadful! We were lucky nothing else happened and I’m not about to test that luck again. I’d probably end up raising an army of undead, or leveling Haven Hollow with a freak tornado or something worse! And even if I could raise him as a zombie without unintended side effects, I still wouldn’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s wrong!”

  “Why is it so wrong?”

  “Because necromancy is considered a black art by most religions for a reason. When people cross the threshold from life into death, it’s supposed to be a one-way street. No exceptions, no take-backs. But the undead break that rule, and doing so always has consequences.”

  Lorcan raised an eyebrow at me and appeared nonplussed as he crossed his muscular arms against his chest. “I’m undead and I haven’t suffered consequences.”

  “For vampires, you’re essentially straddling the threshold. Your body is dead, but your soul is locked in what amounts to cryogenic stasis. That comes at a cost. It’s why you crave blood.”

  Lorcan lapsed into a pensive silence. His brow furrowed with thought, but he didn’t immediately argue, which was promising.

  “What about Elizabeth? What does it cost her to be on this side of the grave?” he asked. “I haven’t seen her tearing the flesh off any obnoxious supermarket employees, so I suppose Romero got that part wrong? Other than the early recovery process, I don’t see much drawback to zombie-life. Or... unlife, I suppose.”

  “Libby’s got no animating spark of her own. She’s entirely dependent on me to have a life at all. It makes her... clingy.” I took a breath. “Regardless, even if I could raise Waylan, I wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be fair to Louisa and her kids to see him like that.”

  “Like what?”

  I watched Darla as she walked away from us, her hips moving from side to side as she sang a song I didn’t recognize. She started twirling around and dancing and I figured she was lost to her own imagination. I faced the irritating vampire again and shook my head. “Lorcan, I don’t know for sure that everyone comes back from death… intact. What if Waylan was just a rotting vegetable? What if he couldn’t talk or think?”

  Lorcan swore under his breath and scrubbed at his eyes. He was still as handsome as ever, eternally trapped as a man in his prime. There were no new lines on his face, but something about his posture and expression hinted that he’d aged fifty years in just a few seconds.

  “Not to mention what would happen if anyone ever found out I’d brought Waylan back,” I continued.

  “What’s the worst that could happen?” Lorcan asked.

  “Put it this way, when Mother discovers what I’ve done to Darla, half the coven will pile into their Porches and BMWs and race to the Hollow to capture me. The other half will pile a couple of U-hauls full of gasoline and kindling first. What happened with Darla isn’t just unnatural, it’s meant to be impossible.”

  “I believe you should be proud of yourself.”

  “Proud of myself?”

  He shrugged. “Sure. This sounds like Guinness Book of World Records sort of stuff.”

  “Ha ha… so not funny.”

  Lorcan reached out to gently touch my elbow. I flinched away from his cool touch on reflex, and he sighed before letting his hand drop. His eyes were shadowed green pools, but I thought I saw concern glittering on their surface.

  “I won’t let anything happen to you, sweetling,” he said in a soft voice.

  “You won’t be able to stop it.”

  Lorcan took a step closer, his hands shooting up to cup either side of my face. I tried to jerk away, but this time he held firm, the cool pressure of his fingers comforting somehow. The frigid temperature did help snap me back into focus. I stared into his eyes from only a few inches away, watched his mouth move, and allowed the hint of brogue in his voice to lull me.

  “There are always choices, Wanda. I’m not going to let those fusty old fecks condemn you to death. I’ve already told you I’m going to claim Darla as my blood, which covers her under vampire law. And as far as things go for your coven, we’re going to pretend Darla is a garden variety zombie.”

  It was difficult to speak around the firm cold of his fingers, but I managed. My voice came out small, thin, and utterly unlike myself. A hard knot of shame formed in my gut. Why was I so damn emotional, and in front of this blasted vampire, no less?

  “Mother’s not a fool. She’ll see through any lie, eventually. Assuming Hellcat hasn’t already broken loose and called her.”

  Lorcan’s grip tightened, until there was an edge of pain in the way he held me. He must have spotted the expression on my face, because his hand fell away a moment later. He smiled, though it didn’t reach his eyes. He looked a little sad.

  “Then we’ll leave.”

  “Leave?”

  He nodded. “We’ll run. We’ll have new IDs made. You, Darla, Elizabeth, and I will pose as a family. We’ll fly somewhere remote and hide until you have a good idea how to reverse the vampire’s kiss.”

  “Lorcan…”

  He shook his head. “You’re as intelligent as you are beautiful, sweetling. I know you’ll find a way.”

  I laughed again, though this time there was only a cynical edge to the sound. His sincerity had sucked the wind out of my sails, left me floundering in an open sea. I liked smarmy Lorcan better. I knew how to take that bastard down a peg or two. This Lorcan was harder to deal with.

  I stepped closer to him and pressed a hand over the left side of his chest, just above his unbeating heart. He’d been a man once, and now he was this... thing, through no fault of his own. He’d died during a rebellion in Wicklow in 1798, drained by an English vampire he’d managed to piss off. There was no telling who or what Lorcan would have become if not for the sadism of one man.

  I wanted to feel a heartbeat beneath my hand. If he were a living, breathing creature, I wouldn’t question the impulse to kiss him. Desire was natural, but he was not.

  I glanced down at my hands, at the blue map of veins beneath the ivory skin, and pondered the blood that flowed there.

  Mine and his.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Taliyah Morgan, the newest addition to Haven Hollow’s finest, glanced up from her notebook, eyebrow cocked, incredulity loaded. When I’d first spied her stalking around town weeks ago, she’d been generically pretty. Sandy brown hair, artfully streaked with silver, and eyes the color of a bleak winter sky. The lines around her eyes were gentle, like creases on a flower petal. That should have leant to an impression of soft femininity, but it didn’t. Nothing about Taliyah Morgan was soft or gentle.

  With every passing day, the silver in her hair was edging out the brown, and her skin grew a little firmer, those icy blues a degree colder. Unbeknownst to her family, or even herself, Taliyah was a faerie princess in stasis, her identity concealed with glamor and a complex memory spell that wasn’t due to break until she came fully into her power. And she’d be coming into that power soon—the spell would shatter within the year.

  Taliyah crossed her legs, pursed her lips, and glanced between the pair of us.

  “You mean to tell me you just randomly found the body of a missing man in your backyard, Mr. Rowe?” Clearly, she didn’t believe our story. “You had no idea he was there at the time you purchased the property?”

  Lorcan’s bland expression didn’t falter under the intense scrutiny. The only outward indication he gave that Officer Morgan’s questions annoyed him was a slight increase in the pressure of his hand around mine. He’d taken my hand almost on reflex when we’d sat opposite the solitary desk in the police precinct. I fought the instinct to tell him where he could shove said hand and, instead, allowed him to pet the back of my palm with his thumb.

  Why had I allowed him this small tribute? Because there was a keen edge to the look he gave me that told me it would be unwise to leave him without an anchor. We were coming up on two and a half weeks without a date. My absence, compounded with a taste of my blood, and the recent, stressful discovery of a murder on one of his properties was wearing at what remained of his sanity.

  “That’s so,” he answered, giving her a broad smile. “And, to answer your first question,” Lorcan continued, “Yes, we randomly found the corpse. As you will note, the body was not buried very deeply beneath the ground and I believe a few stray dogs must have smelled it and thus began digging. We simply finished the job for them.”

  “You started digging a hole for no reason?” Officer Morgan asked.

  “Well, no, not for no reason,” Lorcan responded. “I noticed a suspicious mound in the middle of nowhere and wanted to discover just what it was doing there.”

  If Lorcan expected the officer to blush prettily and drop her gaze to the notebook in her hands, he was to be sorely disappointed. Her eyes narrowed to slits, and she leaned in, bracing long-fingered hands on either side of a manila folder.

  “And you failed to notice this so-called ‘mound’ when you purchased the property?”

  “Correct. I am not given to studying every nook and cranny of a yard before purchasing a property, Officer Morgan, I am far more interested in the house sitting on the property.” He leaned back and gave her a smile that was downright flirty. “Now, where were we?”

  What in the bloody spell did he think he was doing? If the nice officer thought Lorcan was trying to flirt his way out of trouble, she’d probably arrest him. I wasn’t certain if she could do that without a warrant, but in a sleepy little town like Haven Hollow, one could push boundaries. The council wasn’t as inconspicuous as it liked to think, and there were already theories floating around about the ‘Haven Hollow Cult.’ Taliyah’s adoptive brother, Cain Morgan (and Marty’s cousin) already suspected Lorcan as being part of said cult, and it wouldn’t take a huge deductive leap to connect a murdered man with an alleged cult member.

  Officer Morgan swiveled in her chair to face me, cool blue eyes assessing, before she turned back to Lorcan. “How long have you owned the property, Mr. Rowe?”

  He cocked his head to the side. “Perhaps four months.”

  “And this is the first time you noticed the mound, even though you’ve lived there for four months?”

  “Lorcan wasn’t living there,” I supplied.

  Officer Morgan turned her narrowed eyes to me. “Then you were?”

  Her constant accusations were starting to wear thin. I was beginning to regret bringing this case to the authorities and I was more than sure her scrutiny of Lorcan had everything to do with her brother believing Lorcan was a member of the so-called Haven Hollow Cult. “No. Lorcan bought several properties in the area with the intent of renting them out,” I said, ignoring the way her eyes darted from my face to Lorcan’s and my joined hands. “He rented one-half of a duplex to me.”

  “And are you still in residence there?”

  “Well, no,” I started.

  “And why not?”

  “Because there was some… unforeseen structural damage to the building, so Lorcan very generously offered me the ability to rent another property he happened to own… the house on Winsley Lane. While we were touring the property, we discovered the grave.”

  There. That was a nicely sanitized version of the truth.

  “It seems strange that a tour of the premises would include a tour of the far end of the backyard, beyond the fence and into the forest,” she said.

  “Then I guess you’ll have to consider it strange,” I answered with a clipped nod.

  Officer Morgan’s eyes flicked once again to our joined hands and her lips pressed into a thin, white line. “And when did you both become an item, Ms. Depraysie?”

  My hand flexed around Lorcan’s, nails biting into the underside of his palm. His posture stiffened, he shot me a poisonous look, and very deliberately tried to draw his hand away. I didn’t release him. Instead, I smiled pleasantly, but the expression never reached my eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Officer Morgan. I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

  Oh, I knew perfectly well what she was getting at, but I wanted her to say it to my face. I was itching to lay into someone, and the nice officer was just begging for a verbal smackdown.

  A more timid woman would hear the note of warning in my voice and backpedal quickly. I’d found that most human women had been socialized not to ruffle feathers. But Taliyah Morgan was neither timid nor human.

  A tiny smirk curled her lips, sending more soft lines fanning over her face. She was beautiful, in a very austere fashion. Her type of beauty reminded me of the witches back home in Portland, and that thought was reassuring because I’d lived with backbiting witches for centuries and I knew how to navigate a hostile playing field.

  “Don’t you?” she asked. “Usually when one sees a pair holding hands, one assumes something more intimate than friendship is going on between them. If I’m wrong though, do correct me.”

  She volleyed the ball back into my court smoothly, that smile never dropping from her petal lips. It was masterfully done, leaving me very little with which to plausibly be offended. The problem was, I wasn’t sure how to answer the question. Even a blind man could parse out the fact that there was something between Lorcan and me. Something crackled in the air when we were near each other, ready to burst into violent action. And that something had everything to do with the blood bond between us. At moments like these, when Lorcan’s need vibrated off his skin like summer heat, it was impossible to claim we were simply acquaintances.

  I assumed Taliyah took my brief silence as an admission of guilt, because her smirk grew as she leaned back into her swivel chair.

  “I believe my… association with Mr. Rowe is a personal matter and, therefore, doesn’t concern you,” I finally answered.

  Her smile deepened. “It concerns me if it means you could be covering for him.”

  “Ms. Depraysie and I are lovers,” Lorcan said finally, making me turn to face him with wide eyes as I bit my fingernails into his palm as hard as I could. What in the world was he thinking?

  “And, given our obvious good looks, are you really so surprised?” he continued, chuckling.

  The good officer laughed but the sound was like a blade on steel. “Well, at least one of you doesn’t beat around the bush.”

  “We are not lovers,” I said, my tone sharp as I turned to glare at him. Goddess but he was infuriating!

  “A trifling matter, my love,” Lorcan responded as he looked over at me with a knowing grin. “It’s just a matter of time.”

  “No, it’s not just a matter of time.”

  “Regardless, there’s something going on between the two of you,” Taliyah said, eyebrows reaching for the ceiling. “And that’s blatantly obvious.”

  “Whatever is going on between us, it’s not nepotism, I can assure you.”

  Taliyah made a sound in the back of her throat that was caught somewhere between a pleased purr and an amused chuckle. Magic pulsed to the ends of my fingertips, eager to avenge my wounded ego. I clenched my free hand into a fist, quickly dousing the furious little sparks. Casting in anger had already cost me, and lobbing undefined, rage-fueled magic at a burgeoning Queen of Faerie was an idea steeped in stupidity.

  In all probability, the protections laid on Officer Morgan would reflect any attack back on me. I was sure Mother would find such a returned attack an amusing and fitting end for her recalcitrant disgrace of a daughter. Turned to a cinder by a blast of my own poorly aimed power. I could see the epitaph now. ‘She died as she lived... doing something inadvisable’.

  Lorcan cleared his throat, drawing my attention back to his infuriatingly handsome profile. The dismal fluorescent lighting in the crummy little precinct didn’t do anyone any favors, but he was struggling magnificently under the weight of the disadvantage. His sharp-toothed smile was impish, completely at odds with our current predicament. The orangey glow of the overhead light glistened off his tapered incisors, and I could only hope Officer Morgan didn’t notice how… pointed they were. My heart skittered wildly.

  Out of fear.

  And nothing else.

  Well, maybe anger too because he was one cocky bastard.

  “You have no idea how long the body was there?” she asked, apparently deciding to leave the subject of our personal affiliation aside for the moment.

  Lorcan shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Officer Morgan, as I’m just a dentist and part-time property developer, not a forensic anthropologist. Thus, I cannot say how long the body was there nor how it got there nor what its favorite food was.”

  “Cute,” Taliyah answered with a clipped laugh that said she thought his comment was anything but. “So, why don’t I believe you?”