“Get out of the way,” Taliyah snapped at Poppy. She shoved me into the cruiser’s back seat and slammed the door.

  The duplex looked a lot different through the cruiser window. And, as Taliyah started the engine and we drove down the driveway and onto the street, leading into town, I found I still couldn’t think, couldn’t process what was happening. I still had no memory of killing Cain Morgan.

  We passed my store and Poppy’s. We passed Stanley Stomper’s Creamery, the Half-Moon Bar and Grill, and all the other stores and businesses owned by the supernaturals of Haven Hollow.

  When we reached the precinct, that furious glower was still pasted on Taliyah’s face as she marched me into the station. There was no sign of sorrow in her eyes or expression, no sign of grieving. Just raw anger. I didn’t fight her while she took my fingerprints and then escorted me to one of the cells. To my relief, it wasn’t a concrete pit surrounded by iron bars. It was really nothing more than a white room with a locking door. If it had a nicer bed, it would have looked like a hospital ward.

  Taliyah propelled me inside.

  I almost told her I didn’t kill her brother, but when I saw the look on her face, I changed my mind. She wouldn’t listen. And maybe I had killed him. How did I know for certain? I mean, all the evidence pointed to it being me—Cain had last visited me, he’d been angry with me, he was dead in my driveway and I was covered in blood.

  If it looks like a duck, acts like a duck…

  Taliyah left me in the cell without looking twice at my injuries. As soon as the lock clicked into place, I sat down on the cot. I studied the cuts on my arms, but they weren’t anything major. Nothing to be concerned about, anyway.

  I washed the blood off my hands in the sink provided. There was nothing more to do but wait. So, I stretched out on the thin mattress. It wasn’t the Hilton, but I just might be able to get some sleep in here without causing chaos, and that was a thought that actually brought me some relief. I shut my eyes and I’m not sure how I managed it, but I drifted off.

  Thankfully, I didn’t have any nightmares.

  When I woke up, I could tell I’d slept heartily and hours had passed. The cell was in exactly the same condition it was when I’d gone to sleep. No corpses. No maggots. No destruction. Thank the Goddess.

  I straightened and stood up, walking to the small sink in order to wash my face.

  That was when the door unlocked and a different officer entered. He was youngish with very average looks—a face you wouldn’t remember. He unlocked my cell and then looked over at me.

  “Come with me, please. Detective Morgan would like to speak to you.”

  Wonderful.

  He escorted me back to the front of the precinct, where he gestured to a chair opposite Taliyah’s desk. Two other plain-clothes cops stood around the room and as I took a seat, I felt my heart riding up into my throat.

  “You’ll be happy to know we’ve been investigating Cain Morgan’s murder,” Taliyah began in her frostiest tone. Considering she was investigating her own brother’s death, you’d never know it. Her tone was icy, but there was no emotion beneath it. And, as far as I could tell, she hadn’t been crying—at least her eyes weren’t red and swollen. She acted as if this was just another murder victim.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I replied with as much conviction as I could muster. “I hope you find out who did it. I really do.” I could only hope that person wasn’t me. And it wasn’t like I could tell Taliyah the truth—that I was a Blood Witch and lately, strange things had been happening and I was missing my memories.

  Not that Taliyah was a mundane. She wasn’t. But, she also didn’t know what she was. A powerful memory charm prevented her from remembering that she was, in fact, a princess of the Faerie Court of Winter. She was even destined to become Queen. The Morgan family had fostered her to keep her safe from her murderous aunt who wanted to usurp the throne and kill the Winter Court’s rightful Queen. Thus, Cain wasn’t her true brother—by blood, anyway. She was adopted.

  Taliyah flipped through the pages of a folder in front of her. “We searched your house. We found evidence of occult involvement.”

  I waited for her to say something else. “Occult involvement?”

  She looked up at me then, and her eyes narrowed. “Books of spells, ingredients for spells, potions, does any of that ring a bell?”

  I frowned at her. “Sure, but last I checked it wasn’t illegal to be… Wiccan,” I answered, figuring that was the easiest explanation for what I was. And it had worked with RJ. “Is that the only connection you found implicating me in Cain’s death, because that’s not even a connection.”

  “Murder,” Taliyah corrected. “Cain was murdered. He didn’t just happen to fall over in your driveway with a knife in his back.”

  I shrugged. “Fair enough.”

  “You stabbed him. Admit it.”

  “I won’t admit it,” I answered. Because I’m not sure it’s true.

  “We know he went to your home within hours of his death. He responded to multiple calls about noise complaints, but he was in the process of investigating something much more sinister, he believed you to be involved in.”

  “The cult?” I asked, but then thought I probably shouldn’t give her more info to be suspicious about.

  “Right. How did you know about the cult?”

  I shrugged. “Because he’s mentioned it more than once. I’m not sure what he thinks is going on,” I started but she interrupted.

  “Cain believed a satanic cult was operating in Haven Hollow. He left notes here,” she continued as she glanced down at the manila folder which had loose-leaf paper in it. “That the noise complaints about your house involved animal sacrifice, black magic, and voodoo.”

  I laughed. I tried to stop myself, but it just came out. “Come on, Taliyah. You know as well as I do there’s no cult in Haven Hollow. That’s ridiculous.”

  “Then maybe you can explain how a respected officer investigating occult practices wound up dead in your driveway after investigating reported occult practices at your property and then occult paraphernalia was found in your house. How do you explain that?”

  The smile drained from my face. “Being Wiccan isn’t illegal. It’s a religious choice,” I answered. “And our rituals might be different to yours, but we don’t do anything illegal.”

  “Animal sacrifices are illegal.”

  “We don’t sacrifice animals.”

  “Cain mentioned, in his notes, that there were numerous small graves around your building and when he dug up a few of them, he found animal carcasses.”

  Hmm, that must have been what Marty and the crew had done with the animal remains. Dammit. That didn’t look good.

  “From what I can figure,” Taliyah continued. “You killed Cain to stop him from busting your little gang of warlocks.”

  “We aren’t warlocks.” That slipped out, too, but I had to say something. I couldn’t just sit here and let her accuse me of all this heinous stuff.

  “So you admit it! You ARE practicing the occult.”

  “I never said that,” I countered. “There are no warlocks in Haven Hollow because warlocks aren’t real,” I lied, but at this point it was best to make this whole thing sound ludicrous. “This whole cult business is ridiculous and I didn’t kill Cain Morgan. I’m interested in the arcane and you can’t arrest me for that. I don’t practice human or animal sacrifice, black magic, or voodoo.” I laughed again, but more nervously this time. “It’s absurd.”

  “Not so absurd when you add up all the evidence. Why were there animals buried around your yard?”

  I shrugged. “For all I know, it was a pet cemetery at one point.”

  “It’s evidence of occult happenings.”

  “Besides the fact that Cain was found in my driveway, what exactly do you have that connects me to his death? Did you fingerprint the knife to see if my fingerprints were on it? Did you test any of the blood that was on me to see if it was his or if it was owing to my own injuries—injuries you have yet to treat, I might point out.”

  “We fingerprinted the knife.”

  “And?”

  The other detectives exchanged uncomfortable glances.

  “Well?” I demanded. “You didn’t find my fingerprints on it. Did you?”

  Taliyah tossed her file on the desk and the papers inside scattered. She lunged forward and planted her arms on the desk. “There were no prints but that’s meaningless. You could have been wearing gloves.”

  I felt a rush of relief. “I wasn’t.”

  She ignored me. “I’ll find out who killed my brother come Hell or high water. If I find out you had anything to do with Cain’s death, you’ll wish you never set foot in Haven Hollow.

  A crackle made me look down. A layer of frost spread from her clenched fists and covered the table, but another second later, it was gone. She never even noticed it. A blast of freezing air made goosebumps stand up on my arms. Her power was bleeding through which meant the memory spell was falling apart.

  A flash of cold fire sparked in her eyes. In that second, I wasn’t looking at a cop. I was looking at the enraged Faerie Princess of the Winter Court.

  That threat meant a lot more than even she realized. If she tapped her true Faerie power, she could put me in the ground without even thinking about it. She wouldn’t need evidence to do it, either.

  I shrank into my chair and forced myself to look away from her ferocious countenance. “I want my one phone call.”

  One of the other detectives interjected. “We don’t need to play hardball here. Just explain to us what you were doing in the hours before you found Police Chief Morgan dead.”

  I kept my gaze trained straight ahead. “I want my phone call. I won’t answer any more questions without my lawyer present.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  I woke up in my cell again, but this time, it was dark. I couldn’t fall back to sleep. A nagging sense of dread kept me awake. I sat up and that was when I felt it. There was power surrounding me, infusing the air.

  I stiffened and then collapsed in relief when two brilliant green eyes shone out of the gloom. They floated through the wall and came toward me.

  “A fine quandary you have landed us in this time,” Hellcat whispered.

  “I don’t see you in any quandary.”

  “I am unavoidably tied to your presence, despite my best machinations to extricate myself from your tangled web of faux pas. Thus, I am incapable of removing myself from the scandalous nature of this conundrum in which you find yourself.”

  I drew my knees up to my chest. “Well, I never meant for any of this to happen.”

  “No thanks to your own bumbling efforts, there is still a dim prospect of positive resolution.”

  “What… what do you mean?”

  “The phone call you placed to your mother has produced the desired result. Your aunt Tabitha is in Haven Hollow along with the best lawyer the Crescent Circle Coven can offer. They will adjudicate this matter and alleviate your incarceration. They plan to extricate you from the vicinity and we can all live happily ever after in Tacoma instead of this remote wasteland.”

  “No!” I insisted, shaking my head as I crossed my arms against my chest. “As I told Mother, I’m not leaving town. I have to find out what happened. If I killed Cain Morgan, I have to answer for it. I won’t run away and hide under Mother’s skirts. The only thing I asked of her was to put me in contact with her lawyer.”

  He groaned and rolled his green eyes to the ceiling. “This is no time to play the martyr. Those human notions of honor and justice apply only to the mundanes. They don’t pertain to the supernatural.”

  “I’ll never believe that. Being a witch or a supernatural doesn’t exempt anyone from justice. I don’t care what you say. Running away would be cowardly.”

  “He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.”

  I studied him in the dark as a thought occurred to me. “Hellcat, do you have any idea what happened before Cain died? Do you remember anything between when I found you in the living room and when you wound up on the porch?”

  He turned away and tried to look dismissive, but it didn’t work very well. “I don’t need to remember. It isn’t relevant.”

  “I woke up with these cuts and scratches all over my body, even under my clothes. I have no idea how I got them. I could have gotten into a fight with Cain and stabbed him, but even if he had a knife, he wouldn’t have been able to cut me in so many places while my clothes were still on. And… the fabric wasn’t even damaged.”

  “Is this your incompetent way of competing with that Faerie detective?” he sneered. “If it is, you should go back to peddling handbags. You are more skilled at that.”

  Clearly he couldn’t remember anything either. It figured, since his magic was tied to mine. When I was out of it, he was out of it. Dammit.

  “Neither of us remembers what happened, so it’s conceivable that I did kill him. If I did, then Taliyah is right and I should pay for it.”

  “Your mother will see to it that you’re released.”

  I shook my head again. “If a man is dead because I lost control, I can’t let that happen again and I won’t let Mother hide me like a guilty secret. I moved to Haven Hollow to avoid that.”

  “Come, come,” he chided. “Moving to this hinterland was a colossal mistake. We can take up residence in a nice, little…”

  “I said no!”

  “Then what… you shall remain here as a Blood Witch and continue to endanger the lives of others? Perhaps kill someone else and not remember it?”

  “No, if I can’t figure a way to return Lorcan’s Kiss, then I’ll submit to the change and become a fully blooded… vampire.”

  Hellcat hissed in horror and sprang three feet backward. All the hair stood up on his back. “How dare you even suggest such a thing? You would throw away centuries of your family’s honor and esteem to become a common bloodsucker? How dare you?” He stalked through the wall and vanished before I could answer.

  I sank back onto the mattress. So much for loyalty and family support. Aunt Tabitha and the lawyer might be in town, but if I really was guilty of killing the Chief of Police, they wouldn’t be able to do a blessed thing to help me.

  For a start, Taliyah wouldn’t let them. The whole Crescent Circle Coven and even the combined magic of all the witches and wizards in the Western Hemisphere couldn’t stand up to the Queen of the Winter Court. Taliyah would demand justice and she would be well within her rights to do so even if Cain was just a mundane.

  Just a mundane. What an insulting thing to say about someone. Cain was a person. He’d caused the supernatural population of Haven Hollow a lot of trouble over the years, yes, but only because he was committed to doing his job.

  ***

  I couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night. By the time the lights came on in the morning and my cop friend delivered breakfast, I had made up my mind. I was going to see this to the end. No more running. There was only one direction to go and that was straight into the storm.

  Breakfast wasn’t worth mentioning. I wasn’t even all that thrilled when the cop returned and told me that my aunt and lawyer were here to visit me.

  He escorted me, not to the front of the station, but to a different room. It looked surprisingly like my cell except it didn’t have a bed, a sink, or a toilet. It had the same stark hospital atmosphere and only a table and a few chairs for furnishings. Hellcat sat on the table with a bored expression on his face.

  Tabitha leaped to her feet when I entered. “Your mother and I have been worried sick.”

  I doubted that thoroughly but didn’t say anything.

  “This is Mathison Fornbury, the coven’s lawyer,” Aunt Tabitha introduced him. I gave him a small smile.

  Mathison was a cadaverous skeleton of a man who looked like he hadn’t eaten anything since the fourteenth century. He stood behind Tabitha’s chair and dipped his eyelids by way of introduction. If this was the best lawyer the coven could buy, I didn’t hold out much hope for the coven’s future.

  “Where’s Mother?” I asked.

  “She… she couldn’t make it.”

  I frowned. “I specifically asked her to come.”

  Tabitha resumed her seat and smoothed down her silk caftan that draped to the floor. “She was too beside herself to deal with this matter. That’s why she sent me in her place.”

  I snorted. “Typical.”

  Tabitha pretended not to hear me. “You can’t commit suicide by vampire, darling. It’s out of the question. The coven will go to any lengths to prevent it.”

  I glared at Hellcat. “It sounds like someone has a big mouth.”

  “You’re a Depraysie witch, darling,” Tabitha went on. “You have the reputation of the whole family to uphold.”

  “Isn’t that why Mother pushed me out of the coven—to protect the family’s reputation? That’s all I seem to hear about these days.”

  “The coven will make sure you don’t have to undergo the change, dear. So, you don’t have to worry about that. We have plans set in motion to…”

  “Does the coven plan to battle the whole vampire line of Seattle as well as the Faerie Court of Winter to protect one Blood Witch they kicked out in the first place?” Tabitha’s expression faltered as I laughed. “Yeah, I didn’t think so,” I continued. “Besides, I have my own say in what happens to me, and if I decide to undergo the change, the coven won’t be able to stop me.”

  She waved me away. “Nonsense, darling. Vampires are horrid beings. You would lose all your power if you became one and then you would be dead to the coven.”

  “I’m already dead to the coven.”

  “Hardly, dear. If you were, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “Regardless, if my turning into a full vampire means no one else has to die, I’ll do it. My power is out of control and I’m a danger to everyone around me. I have nothing to lose.”

  “But don’t you see, darling? That is exactly what the vampire demons want you to do! They’ve been pressuring you all along to submit to the change and you have put up a valiant fight so far. We’re all proud of you for…”