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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I PICKED UP MY EMPTY bucket and moved directly to where Orrin stood waiting for me. I couldn’t put this off. “You saw that?”

“The king gives you obeisance. Yes.” His voice sounded like rocks tumbling in a cement mixer. The grumbling sound was clearer today. Did that mean he was angry? Or was it because he was outside?

Clearly, he attached no significance to the deer nudging Juda’s headstone. But he had not been here in the days after Juda died.

“Will you excuse me? I have to find Trevalyan.” I needed to talk to him. I needed Trevalyan to tell me I was wrong about the message the stag had given me.

“You have much to do,” Orrin said, inclining his head. “The mage is by his own hearth.”

Was Orrin bowing, too? I stared at him startled. “Well,” I said inadequately. “Trevalyan is at home?”

Orrin nodded. It was just a nod, this time.

I turned toward the hotel and walked down the center of the normal road, angling toward the houses opposite the hotel. Trevalyan’s was the little house two up from Ben’s, which was the house beside Olivia’s. If the houses had ever been numbered, those numbers were long gone. No one got traditional mail here, anymore, and all parcel deliveries came to the hotel.

I was just about to step onto the curb on that side of the road when I heard my name being called.

I looked around.

The informal parking lot beside the hotel had precisely two cars in it, illuminated by the bulb over the door into the bar. Given the number of guests staying in the hotel and the even higher number of people that drank in the bar each evening, the wee number of cars in the parking lot should have goosed the curiosity of anyone not walking in their sleep.

It was little wonder that King thought something was screwy with Haigton.

The two cars in the lot were the black sedans that King and his agents had arrived in. Their trunks were open, and his people were sliding backpacks and small rolling luggage into them.

Axel King stood a few paces away from the cars, as if he had moved toward me. He waved at me.

The luggage gave me a spurt of hope. I put my bucket down on the sidewalk and crossed back over the road, and across the lot to where King waited.

He tilted his head as I got closer. “Feeding the chickens?” he asked.

I realized he was talking about the bucket. “The birds. Squirrels. A racoon or two. Some deer. A coyote and his mate.” I shrugged.

King rubbed his jaw. I could hear the rasp of his five o’clock shadow. “I read Calloway’s diary.”

“That’s why you’re leaving?”

King smiled and in the gloaming, his teeth gleamed white. “The man was delusional.”

“You’re not the only one to believe that.” I was thinking of Harper’s reaction to Calloway’s belief that she and he were alike.

“I know that’s why you gave the thumb drive to me. I figured you’d read it first. All that rubbish about demons and vampires…” He shook his head. “I know Calloway lost his wife and children in a bear attack. It clearly warped him. He wanted to find who was responsible so he invented a whole world of hunters and blamed vampires that he could hunt down for himself. A lot of people disappeared wherever he roamed. The man was a deluded serial killer. And now he’s dead. It doesn’t matter what he believed or the constructs he built to justify it all.”

“It doesn’t?” I marveled at the human ability to reason away just about anything. Calloway wasn’t the only one gifted in that department. But then, how else could King spin it and not be laughed out of the service? He had a vested interest in finding an explanation that made the weirdness go away.

“It doesn’t matter what Calloway’s version of reality was,” King said, “because what was clear was that he didn’t consider Harper to be an enemy. He was looking for her, not to kill her or confront her about their original confrontation. She was an ally, in his estimation.”

“That’s what we realized, too.” And I waited.

“This Orpheus he spoke about. He was afraid of the man. He considered Orpheus to be a threat to everyone, not just himself. That included Harper. He was trying to find her to warn her.”

I let out my breath. “Yes,” I agreed.

King looked like he had more to say, but he shifted and glanced around, as if he had just remembered where he was and that his people were just behind him. “Anyway,” he said. “My team tell me they want Dunkin’ Donuts. Tonight. And the store in Gouverneur closes at eight, so….”

“You’re leaving,” I concluded.

“You said you wanted the rooms.”

“I do. Does this mean Harper is no longer a suspect?”

King weighed up his answer. “It’s looking unlikely. The timeline doesn’t fit. The feud we thought was there has evaporated. Harper is unpleasant and tiring to speak to, but people can be like that because they insist upon living life on their own terms. And her terms are to be left alone. Do I think she killed Calloway? No. But I can’t take her off the books. Not just yet.”

“Oh.” Disappointment circled me.

“Relax, Anna. Calloway was a killer. We didn’t catch him, but he has been stopped. I call that a good day.”

And a part of me did relax.

“We’re going to look into this Orpheus,” King continued. “But the pressure is off.” He paused. “I might even get home to see the end of the hockey season.”

“Go Rangers?” I guessed.

“ Les Rangers sont nuls. Allez les Canadiens. ?Olé!, ” he said.

“Umm…” I knew a bit of Spanish, enough to get by. This wasn’t Spanish. French, perhaps. Except for the last word.

“Montreal Canadiens,” King added. “Go, Habs.”

Yes, he’d been speaking French. “Oh.” I shifted on my feet, crunching gravel, and feeling ignorant. And my foot slipped. It was a stupid, weird thing. My boot slid on the gravel. I didn’t have time to brace myself. My weight went out from under me, and I was going to land on my rear. Hard.

King’s reactions, for a human, were insanely fast. He lunged forward, got an arm around my back, grabbed my arm with the other hand and hauled me back up onto my feet.

We froze that way, while my heart raced. My nerves were jangling. The unexpectedness of it was most of my shock. It had come out of nowhere, as if someone had pushed me from behind. “Wow,” I breathed. “Thank you. That could have been nasty.”

“You need better soles on your boots.” King’s voice rumbled in his chest, which was pressed against my shoulder. It felt like he was pure muscle under the blue business shirt. “Got your balance?”

“Yes. Sorry. Yes. I’m fine.”

He let go and stepped back. Behind him, the trunks thudded closed and car doors were shut. “If they don’t get their caffeine…”

I nodded. “Good luck with your case, Agent King.”

Now he had moved from where he had been standing, the shadow that had hidden his eyes was gone. He considered me for a long moment. “This town…there’s something about it,” he said softly.

“It’s old,” I assured him, my heartrate spiking yet again. “Lots of history makes for intriguing backstory. We’re just a little hamlet going about our business.”

“Perhaps,” King said. Then he seemed to shake off the mood. His shoulders straightened. “Well…” He went over to the car and got in behind the wheel.

Most senior agents would sit back and let someone else worry about the driving while they dealt with business. King liked the control. And he liked solving puzzles.

The two cars rolled past me, turned onto the road. The bulk of the hotel hid them from me as they headed for the crossroad and the road to Edwards.

I glanced at the corner of the hotel, where the sidewalk ended. No one there. Neither was anyone standing or sitting on the wooden steps up to the side door.

Relieved, I headed back to the road, to collect my bucket and to talk to Trevalyan.

●

I knocked on the faded front door and waited.

“Anna?” Trevalyan’s wavering voice came through the door faintly.

I pushed open the door—no one locked their doors in Haigton—and leaned in. “Yes, it’s me. You didn’t want to sit with everyone in the bar?”

The front room, which most people would have used as a sitting room, Trevalyan used as a studio for his practice. The furniture in it changed as his interests did. In the last few weeks, a long narrow workbench made of pallets had appeared, pushed up against the wall that was common with the kitchen. Trevalyan was processing and drying herbs that Wim had grown over the winter in his greenhouse. Bunches of herbs hung overhead, and small glass jars and tins were lined up on the bench. The smell was divine.

Frequently, Trevalyan liked to sit in front of the fireplace, on the floor and cross-legged. He would meditate while staring at the flames or smoke his beloved cannabis in a pipe and contemplate…everything, I suppose. Like everyone in Haigton, Trevalyan had a long perspective on life.

Tonight, though, Trevalyan sat in the one narrow armchair in the house. He had wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and from the front door I could see that he was sweating, even though the small fire in the fireplace was the only light. It was overly warm in the room.

“A fire ?” I asked, stepping into the room.

Trevalyan coughed. “Don’t come too close,” he said sharply.

I halted on the bare floorboards. Close to my toes, I could see where a chalk line had been wiped away. A trace of it remained. Following it, I could make out the ghost of a pentacle. “You’re sick?” I asked.

“You could call it that.” His tone was grim.

“It looks as though you have a fever. Do you want me to get something for it?”

“There’s nothing natural about this illness,” Trevalyan said. “It came on too fast and too severely.” He coughed again, then pushed his glasses back into place. “It has power running through it, Anna.”

I thought of Orrin Stonebrunch, standing at the crossroads. He’d known where Trevalyan was. Had he also known Trevalyan was ill?

I lowered myself to the floor right where I was, at the tip of the faded pentacle, and crossed my legs. “The stag came to me. Just now. Out on the crossroads.”

Trevalyan shivered and pulled the blanket in around him. “What did he want?”

“How did you know he wanted something?”

“A guess.”

I told him about my dreams, the ones where I stood over Juda’s grave with a burning torch. Then, the stag leading me to the grave and nudging the gravestone. The tips of his antlers, glowing in the last of the sunlight. “I’m supposed to burn Juda’s body,” I concluded. “The first time the stag was in my dream, I ignored it. Now it has come in person and told me the same thing. I just don’t know how to go about it. I’m not sure I even want to, but it seems I must.”

“The message has become more urgent, the closer we get to Beltane.” Trevalyan paused to wheeze and cough. “I believe you must do this on Beltane eve.”

“In front of everyone ?”

“Why not? People attend funerals all the time. This one is a pyre instead of a grave. The Vikings and Hindus would approve.”

That steadied me. A little.

“But be wary, Anna,” Trevalyan said. “A pyre, the dead, and Beltane…it is a powerful cocktail. Shake it the wrong way….”

“And it explodes like Oscar’s chemistry set?”

“Something like that. You must shepherd the power, make sure it is channeled away from the elements that it should not mix with.”

You . I squeezed my hands together. “You won’t be there…”

Trevalyan shivered. “I think that if I tried to move out of the house, this sickness would only worsen. Whatever it is, it has removed me from the board.” He grimaced. “You must see this through on your own.”

Everyone would be there, but I knew what he was saying. I would be the only one there with the ability to deal with whatever the wild mix of people and power generated.

“I’m not ready,” I said, my throat tightening. “I haven’t learned nearly enough.”

“You know more than you think you do,” Trevalyan said.

I tried to take comfort from that, but it didn’t help. All I could think of was that Orrin Stonebrunch was waiting to judge me and Haigton on Beltane eve, and dozens of other people would try to tap into the power that would flux and flow at that time.

And now I was about to introduce a destabilizing element that could tear it all apart.

Everyone’s future depended upon me.