Heath heaved an impatient sigh. “Damn it all, just play one game, will ye? You’ll be outta town before they even catch wind that the kids snuck out. They just want conversation with you if they win. If they lose, we earn a fifty. You know what the exchange rate for fifty American dollars is here?”

  Loch sighed, and the smell of whiskey nearly bowled me over. He shrugged before passing me a cup with five dice inside. Oleander hovered at my elbow, almost buzzing with anxiety.

  Loch placed a cup, bottom up on the table in the center. I did my best to play dumb. The truth was that I’d watched my cousins and Darla play this particular game all summer. I knew the tricks, the bluffs, what worked and what didn’t. I listened to Loch’s rules, making it a point to ask lots of questions. Heath’s exultant smile let me know I’d succeeded in convincing them I was a total idiot.

  “Not so silly a game now, is it?” Loch asked smugly.

  “I think I get it,” I told him. “But remember, you’re agreeing to help us if I win.”

  “And what sorta questions could a good little schoolgirl like you have for a man like me?”

  I pressed a finger to my lips and mimed twisting a key. Loch chuckled when I threw the imaginary key over my shoulder.

  “Can you live with being in the dark, or do I need to find another man to play dice with?”

  “We already got us a deal. Now let’s roll those dice, shall we?”

  We went around the table and placed our bets. I had three fours, a good hand, so I bid high. Loch matched me. I raised while his brother passed. Loch and I revealed our hands, and he only had two threes. The center pot had a four, so I won.

  Loch raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Now where did a young Academy lady like you get so good at gamblin’ games?”

  “That would be telling,” I said, winking again.

  Loch leaned back in his seat, seeming unbothered by his loss. I was betting he’d have been irate about the deception if we’d been playing for money, not secrets.

  “So, who is it you’re wantin’ to know about?”

  “Vampires. There have been more of them than usual running through town, right?”

  Loch’s eyes darted around the bar, fingers going white around the handle of his tankard. “Ah, so you wanna know about that business?”

  “I do.”

  He nodded. “Fine. We need to get outta here though—go somewhere with less ears.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Loch paid the bartender, and all but sprinted out of The Blind Horseman.

  I followed behind him, gathering power in case he decided to make a break for it. I’d won answers fair and square, and there was no way I was going to let him run out on them, damn it.

  “Vampires have been coming through town,” I prompted when we were out of earshot of the tavern. “I want to know where they are. Oleander is sure you’d know where to look.”

  Loch’s eyes flicked around the street. He shifted his weight as if he were preparing to run. “Why you need to find them? Two faerie students like you shouldn’t be gettin’ mixed up in vampire business. Let the bloodsuckers an’ witches fight it out amongst themselves. This don’t have anythin’ to do with us. It never did.”

  “But if the vampires and witches start fighting, who suffers?” I asked, tone flat. “In the end, it’s you, and everyone like you. They won’t think twice about stomping the entire town out if you’re in the way.” We were quiet for a few seconds and I could tell my point had sunk in. “Now, can you tell us where to look?”

  Loch sighed. “A bet is a bet an’ I always pay my debts. Don’t blame me if things don’t turn out the way you expect.”

  “Let us worry about that,” Oleander said.

  Loch sighed again before looking around. “Fine, but it’s your necks, not mine. Follow me.”

  ***

  “The last time I saw them, they were gathering here,” Loch said.

  He pointed toward the last building in the row. It was small, with a thatched roof like all the others in the small town. Its wide shop windows were full of clocks. Small, dainty pocket watches nestled on shelves, crystal wristwatches, and cuckoo clocks stacked to the ceiling. Grandfather clocks lined the walls further in. The fire inside the mantle had dwindled down to embers, giving the light an eerie, flickering quality.

  “A clock shop? That seems... odd, don’t you think?” I asked Oleander.

  “Not if you’re looking to disguise the sound of something suspicious,” Loch said grimly. “Just set the alarms to chime any time you want to have a meetin’. No one comes near the place. Too bloody annoyin’. I only know it’s a vampire hideout because the mail never gets taken in until after dark.”

  I shivered. Mother had a grandfather clock in her room, and the chime was enough to drown even one voice. That many clocks could blot out the screams of a dozen screaming faeries if need be.

  “This is as far as I take you. The deal was I’d tell you where to find the vampires, not wander in an’ make myself a meal.”

  “Fair enough,” I muttered. “We’ve got it from here.”

  I dug into my pocket and brought out the fifty Wanda had given me for emergency purchases at the start of term. Loch had earned it, in my opinion. And if this went badly... well, it wasn’t like I’d need it, anyway.

  Loch snatched it from my fingers and then started speed walking away from us like he thought we’d change our minds and want our money back. I wished I could blame him for the reaction, but I didn’t want to go waltzing into the vampire den either. But if Oleander and I waited for backup, the vampires could pack up their prisoners and retreat to Location A, which was presumably in the next town over. That meant we needed to go in and take a look around. If Shasta was still alive, we’d free her, and I’d leapfrog us all back to my room in the castle.

  “Shall we?” Oleander asked, sounding as grim as I felt.

  “No time like the present.”

  Oleander and I moved into the shadows beside the building, walking slowly to avoid notice. For the first time in my life, I found myself wishing for the inky dark hair every other witch sported. The flame brightness of my hair was like an eye-catching flare in the darkness. Thankfully, no one moved to the window to track our progress. The sounds of drunken men wandering the streets were a distant, echoing thing. The ticking clocks inside the shop scraped along my frayed nerves, making me jerk at every metronomic sound. I was surprised I could hear anything over the thud of my heart and the roar of blood in my ears.

  The back door was locked, but when Oleander and I tried the cellar doors, they creaked open, revealing a set of stone steps that led down into the darkness. I pulled a small, handheld flashlight from the pocket of Oleander’s coat as we descended them, shining the beam around the interior. It came to a quivering halt when it landed on a huddled shape on the floor.

  Shasta was even smaller than her picture led me to believe. She had curly blonde hair and green skin like Oleander. Her eyes were almost comically large, and her pink, bow-shaped lips were pinched tight with pain as she strained her chains. The simple white dress she wore was soaked in blood. In fact, blood was everywhere. It was on her hands, smeared across her face, on the walls, and pooling beneath a body not far from where she lay.

  She cringed away from the light when it swept over her, raising a shackled wrist to shield her eyes, baring her sharp fangs at us with a hiss. The other shape didn’t move. Judging by the smell and the mottled skin, the person was dead, most likely at Shasta’s hands.

  “Hexes and hoarfrost,” Oleander moaned. “Those crazy bastards actually managed it. They turned her.”

  “Quiet,” I snapped, clamping a hand over his mouth as we moved slowly back up the stairs. “Just let me take a look around, and I’ll be able to jump back here when we’re better prepared. Now that I know the location, we can come back with keys and weapons and… hell, whatever we need to get the job done. But whatever happens, we don’t want to get caught down here by ourselves.”

  Oleander shuddered but didn’t try to free himself from my grasp. Warm, salty tears splashed onto my hand as he stared down at his cousin. This had to be his worst nightmare. Shasta wasn’t just dead; she’d been turned into a bloodsucker without her consent and forced to murder an innocent.

  I scanned the room, drinking in every detail. The dirt floor and the bodies on it. The shelves were full of clock parts, the spare manacles, every speck of blood. But mostly, I examined Shasta, committing her to memory. I was sure if I just memorized her face, I could follow her location, no matter how far away they dragged her.

  I released Oleander a moment later, letting out a shaky breath. “Okay, I think I’ve got it. We’ll come back when we have Rook and Morgana. Give me a second, and we’ll—”

  Something moved in the darkness beyond Shasta, and I froze. A moment later a pair of shiny dress shoes stepped over Shasta’s prone form. The man wearing them was dressed in his usual black attire, which seemed all the more sinister in this shadowy cellar. His skin shone alabaster in the flashlight’s beam, and both his fangs and the ruby stud in his ear reflected the light back at us.

  Against this grisly backdrop, Professor Valserak’s smile was a thing of nightmares. I drew on my power without thinking, forming a nebulous doorway behind us. I doubted the haze was visible, even to a vampire in the low light.

  “Ah, Ms. Depraysie. I was hoping you’d drop by tonight. I knew it was only a matter of time after I scented you in my office.” He paused a moment, no doubt to let that thrilling information settle in. “Where’s Chesley? Trying to scout out Location A, I presume?”

  “You’re not going to find him,” I said, voice coming out on a shaky exhale. “He’s already two steps ahead of you.”

  Professor Valserak’s grin widened. “Oh, I don’t have to find him, dear girl. I’ve already found you. The rest will follow in time.”

  He moved too fast to track. One moment he was standing at the bottom of the stairs; the next he was so close, I could smell fresh blood on his breath. I didn’t even have time to scream when his arms closed around me, vise-like and immovable. I flailed, kicking Oleander in my struggle to get free, which only made the professor chuckle... until Oleander disappeared through my doorway and was lost from sight, exactly as I’d hoped. The doorway popped out of existence in a flash of red-gold light, leaving only a shower of autumn leaves behind. I wasn’t sure if the portal would take him to the castle, as intended, or strand him in Autumn. Either way, he was out of the vampire’s reach and that meant he was safe—for now, anyway.

  “What the hell was that?” Professor Valserak snarled.

  “Magic, asshole,” I wheezed.

  “Where did the faerie go?”

  “Away. Somewhere you’re never going to find him.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Professor Valserak answered, snaking one hand into my hair. He wrenched my neck at a painful angle and in a second, I realized what he meant to do. Right before it happened.

  The clocks on the floor above began to chime, drowning my scream when Professor Valserak’s fangs pierced my throat.

  Epilogue

  Maverick

  “I need you,” Taliyah said, leaning her weight against the door frame.

  Unfortunately, she wasn’t wearing lingerie or speaking in that breathy, excited tone women adopted when they were in the mood. We weren’t even in private. She’d stepped into Wanda’s shop and addressed me without preamble, which meant this was business, not pleasure. More’s the pity.

  Furthermore, her wardrobe supported the theory. She wore a pair of charcoal gray slacks and a silver blouse beneath the knee-length leather coat I’d enchanted for her. It had been a pain to do written spell work on the rigid medium, but the results were worth it. The luck and protection potions combined with the sigils had helped her avoid her brother’s fate more than once. She might have been immortal now, but that didn’t mean she was invulnerable.

  Taliyah had pulled her shining silver hair into a no-nonsense braid, instead of letting it fall in loose waves around her back. This was definitely about work, then. She was watching me appraise her with a slight smile on her lips. It broadened when I sighed in resignation. Like most of the women in my life, she seemed to take some sort of perverse pleasure when she could make my day a little less comfortable.

  Taliyah aimed her gaze over my shoulder, settling her attention on Wanda, who had camped out behind the till, idly sketching new clothing designs while I completed the stitched spell work on a double-breasted suit jacket. The trick for a piece like this was to hide the delicate work in places it wouldn’t be seen. Men’s wear had significantly less room for embellishment, which meant I’d come to hate working on it. Taliyah’s arrival was a welcome distraction.

  “I need to borrow your cousin,” she called to Wanda. “There’s something in a lake north of the Hollow and it’s scaring the hell out of some mundane campers.”

  Wanda immediately chuckled at that.

  “What’s it doing?” I asked.

  “It’s mostly making creepy noises at night and posing just long enough for blurry photo ops, so I’m guessing it’s some kind of nature spirit playing pranks. It shouldn’t take more than a few hours.”

  Wanda’s lips curled into a smile, but she didn’t look up from her notebook. She waved an airy hand and said, “Sure, but have him back by his bedtime, Taliyah. I hate working with a grumpy warlock in the morning.”

  “You hate working with a warlock, period,” I grumbled, finishing the section I was on before setting my needle and thread aside.

  Taliyah was probably right about the time frame. If this was routine, we could have the reprobate out of the water and into a submersible holding cell before midnight. If it was a more complicated case, we might be chasing this thing for a day or two. She was right to ask Wanda to loan me out since I was technically still on Wanda’s payroll, so it would impact her profit margins. Still, it rankled to have the woman who was now technically my wife talking to my cousin like Wanda was a 50s matriarch approving our first date.

  “See?” Wanda said, waving a dismissive hand in my direction. “Grumpy. If he doesn’t get a solid eight hours, you just can’t live with him. I pity his wife.”

  “Ha,” Taliyah drawled. “You’re just so funny, Wanda. You should do stand-up.”

  “Maybe I will,” Wanda said with an unrepentant smirk. “Good luck and Maverick, don’t get eaten because I need you tomorrow.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  I cleaned up my workstation and then paced back to Wanda’s back room to retrieve my coat, wallet, and keys. The weather didn’t bother me much, but my coat was a twin to Taliyah’s, offering extra protection against whatever supernatural shenanigans we were about to face. But when I bent to retrieve it from the table, I found curling red and gold leaves on my coat, and a piece of notebook paper folded on top of the pile.

  Curious, I lifted the page and examined it. It was pastel pink and decorated with a smiling marshmallow, and the writing had been done in glittering gel pen, which convinced me neither Wanda nor Taliyah were the culprits. Wanda regarded pastels with the same kind of wariness vampires reserved for garlic bulbs. Taliyah wasn’t a pink sort of woman either, preferring to dip into the more subdued tones of Wanda’s palette: Silvers, dark blues, and blacks, mostly.

  But when I examined the penmanship, the source became clear. I’d kept every hand-written letter she’d ever sent me in a drawer along with the few family keepsakes I had. It was Astrid’s handwriting. How she’d gotten it here, I had no idea. As far as I could tell, she still had a month or two left at that damn school before she came back for spring break.

  Trouble at Blood Rose Academy. Can’t explain in detail. If I don’t write back in a week, come looking for me. Morgana will know what happened and can fill you in. Love you all, -A

  The words themselves were as vague as they were chilling.

  If I don’t write back, come looking for me.

  Which implied my harebrained little sister anticipated a scenario where she might be in danger, and was trudging forward anyway, counting on Wanda or me to come after her in the event she failed at... whatever it was she was attempting.

  I knew it had been a bad idea to send her to that blasted school, but did anyone listen to me? No, they didn’t. And now she was in trouble. There was no way I was going to wait for a week to see if she’d check in. A week would be too late. I needed to find a way to Blood Rose, and I needed to find it ASAP.

  Wanda and Taliyah both looked alarmed when I left the back room at speed, face grim and determined. I brushed past Taliyah, pushing the softness of her skin and the intoxicating way she smelled out of my thoughts for the moment. The chime over the door dinged as soon as I thrust my way through it.

  “Where are you going?” Taliyah called after me when I bypassed her patrol car. “We’re taking my car, not yours!”

  “Maverick?” I heard Wanda’s voice call after me but I wasn’t stopping.

  Yes, I could have used Wanda’s help but as far as anyone else knew, she was a vampire and the last thing she needed was to be up close and personal with anyone who would be able to tell the whole thing was a ruse—aka witches.

  No, I needed to do this on my own.

  I drew on the power of the air, sending the note back to Taliyah on a light breeze so she’d understand why I couldn’t help her with the swamp creature.

  “Maverick, wait!” she called out as I started to slow. “Please!”

  I stopped walking and turned around at the exact moment that she snatched the letter before it could whip past her and back into the shop. Quickly scanning it, her face grew impossibly paler as she read.

  “I’m going to see Olga,” I said. “She was a teacher at Blood Rose Academy, and she’ll know how to bypass the usual bureaucracy of entering the school. I’m sorry, but the swamp thing will have to wait. My sister is in trouble.”