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CHAPTER NINETEEN

OUR NUMBERS WERE DEPLETED, COMPARED to the last time we had met on the second floor of Wim’s greenhouse. I wouldn’t let Ghaliya walk along the dirty, pot-holed side streets in the dark. Not now. Ghaliya had meekly abided by my wish and settled on the purple sofa in our apartment with some of the dusty books beside her. “But I want to know exactly what everyone said!” she called after me as I left.

Broch had remained behind to manage the bar. Hirom was still in bed, subsisting on his whisky and the chicken soup I made for him. Frida was also trying to eat some of the soup, but she couldn’t leave the hotel, anyway.

That left me, Olivia and Wim, Trevalyan, Ben and Harper.

It took nearly an hour for me to go over everything that Riley, Damian and Nicholas had said, earlier that day. I left the news about Riley’s takedown notice expiring for last and repeated my conversation with Riley on her stoop word for word.

Silence. Olivia reached out and squeezed Harper’s arm.

Harper’s reaction was wildly over the top…for her. The corner of her mouth turned up.

“I spent an entire day improving my driving for no reason,” I summed up. “Riley Connor is exactly the dead end that Axel King had decided she was.”

“We know for certain now, and that’s not nothing,” Ben said.

“But now there’s nowhere else to go,” I said. “I tried to figure it out all the way home. No wonder Axel King is sitting on his tush drinking cider. He can’t figure it out, either. We’re missing something. Why did Calloway relapse and start hunting Harper?”

“He didn’t relapse,” Hunter said. “What he had isn’t a disease.”

“Some might call obsession a disease of the psyche,” Ben said.

Harper shook her head. “Even a mental problem isn’t something that comes and goes.”

“Bipolar disorder,” Ben said instantly.

Harper scowled at him.

“What if Calloway wasn’t hunting Harper?” I said.

“Riley Connors said he was. It was all over the dark net,” Trevalyan pointed out.

“No, she said that everyone else said Calloway was looking for Harper, and they thought he’d relapsed again. But what if he was trying to find her for some other reason? They were both hunters. They both had vendettas against vampires. That’s a lot of common ground that could give him a reason to want to find her.”

Silence.

Ben’s tone was thoughtful as he said, “I wish I could see the body. That might tell us a lot that King isn’t.”

“We don’t need to see the body,” Harper said. “We need to see his hotel room.”

“Where he died?” I asked.

“Dying is peripheral, at the moment,” Harper said. “I need to see the room where he was staying.”

“Same thing,” Trevalyan said.

“Still irrelevant,” Harper said. She made an impatient hissing sound. “King isn’t telling you anything more because he and his groupies don’t have anything more. Crackstone said it, minutes ago. Everyone is missing something. That’s because Calloway was a hunter.”

“You had best explain yourself, dear,” Olivia said. “Pretend we’re not hunters.”

Harper gripped her own knees. “They didn’t find anything interesting on Calloway’s body or in the room.”

“We don’t know that,” Trevalyan said.

“We do,” I said. “Broch can hear them perfectly from the bar. And they’re going over everything endlessly, trying to find a way forward. If they had found something on the body or in the room that would give them a direction to go, they would be constantly talking about it, wondering why King doesn’t follow that up, instead of hammering Harper.”

Harper held out her hand as if to say, “See?” She added, “I need to see Calloway’s hotel room.”

“You just said nothing was there, dear,” Olivia said.

“Nothing that King’s people found, or the police before them,” Harper said.

“You think you can find something that a forensics team could not?” Trevalyan asked in his wavering voice.

“Hunters stash things,” Harper said. “Specifically, they stash things where other hunters would think to look but no one else would.” She held up her hand and pointed to the thumb with the other, then each finger as she said, “Inside a spent bullet casing, taped under the sole of his boot, inside a false bottom of luggage or a med kit, or anything with a flat bottom, inside the battery compartment of a flashlight. Stashed in a hidden pocket of his belt or jacket. In his gun cleaning kit.” She dropped her hand. “If Calloway was the half-way decent hunter Riley Connors says he turned into, then I’ll find it.”

I said lightly, “I guess we’re going to Gouverneur again.”

Trevalyan smiled. It held a degree of wickedness. “But first, you have to talk to Axel King.”

“I do not ,” I protested. The last time I’d spoken to him, I’d had nightmares that night. King was…slippery.

“Then how else are we to find out where he was staying?” Harper raised her brow at me.

I sighed. “I guess I’m going to talk to Axel King again.”

Trevalyan lifted his hand. “I can help with that.”

“What you’re going to cast a spell, make King cough up the room number?” Harper’s tone was as dry as it ever got.

“As it happens, yes,” Trevalyan said.