Page 3

CHAPTER THREE

“I’M THE LEAD INVESTIGATOR WITH the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit – Serial Crime Division,” Agent King told Harper. “I would like you to come along with us. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Go along with you to where?” Ben Marcus asked, his tone merely curious.

“Gouverneur,” King replied, barely glancing at Ben. His attention was on Harper.

Harper hadn’t crossed her arms again, which was her usual pose when she wasn’t sitting at the dining table. But her eyes narrowed. “It takes six of you to ask me some questions?”

King lifted his hand in a tiny wave of dismissal. “This is my team. We had other business on our way here. If you would come along…” He turned, as if he expected her to fall in with him.

The other agents grew still, watching her.

“Why do you want to speak to Harper?” I asked.

“That’s not something you need to know,” King replied. “Ms. Gibbs?”

Harper hesitated. She turned toward the dining room. “Broch…do I need a lawyer?” she asked the vampire. He had remained by the archway, while everyone else moved closer to the agents and me.

My lips parted in surprise. I had never seen her voluntarily address Broch before. And she had never asked him a question. When she did speak to him, she usually snarled. Insults were common.

Broch didn’t move. “I think you might be a person of interest,” he said, his deep voice smooth.

“Are you Ms. Gibbs’ lawyer, sir?” King asked Broch.

“I am a lawyer,” Broch said, surprising me for the second time inside sixty seconds.

“He’s my lawyer,” Harper said firmly.

King considered her, then Broch. “You are a member of the New York Bar Association?” he asked Broch.

“Not currently,” Broch admitted.

“Then you must remain here,” King said. He turned back to Harper. “I’m afraid I must insist that you come with us.”

“Yes, you’re a person of interest,” Broch said.

The other agents were once more tense statues, watching Harper closely.

Harper considered King for a moment. Then she smiled. It was an astonishing expression, making her whole face light up. She had nice teeth, and for the first time I noticed that her eyes were rather beautiful. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll go with you to Gouverneur.”

My mind stuttered for a moment. “But…”

Someone squeezed my elbow from behind. I shut up and glanced over my shoulder. Ben had silenced me. I withdrew my arm from his grip.

The agents surrounded King and Harper. The group moved through the front door, heading for the cars.

King led Harper to the car he had been driving and put her in the back seat. An agent settled on the other side of the seat, while a second took the front passenger seat. King got behind the wheel.

The other three agents piled into the second car. No one discussed where to sit. They’d clearly done this before.

Because that didn’t worry me at all.

Hirom shut the front door of the hotel, now the foyer had cleared out. He didn’t lock it. The front door was only locked after the bar shut down each night, but guests could still open it from this side. It was a simple deadbolt.

I opened my mouth to protest. I preferred the door stay open so people wouldn’t hesitate to step inside because we were run off our feet with customers and thirsty travelers here in Haigton.

Before I could actually protest, everyone gathered around in a circle that seemed to include me, as I found myself standing in it. I turned so I was facing the middle of the circle.

“Quickly, quickly, before they come back.” Olivia kept her voice low, for my three guests were still in the dining room and all three had turned to watch the FBI arrest Harper in all but name. “Does anyone know that name? Raymond Calloway?”

“Before they come back?” I repeated.

“I can look him up, see what’s out there,” Ghaliya volunteered. “But the laptop is in our apartment and I’m not running anywhere…” She put a hand on her belly.

Broch took off. I could almost feel the air swirling against me, for he had been standing beside me. He flashed up the stairs at a speed that looked…no, it was faster than a human could move.

“You should sit down,” I told Ghaliya, as she rubbed her belly. “Maybe you should go upstairs.”

Ghaliya rolled her eyes at me.

“Then the table,” I insisted.

She nodded and headed back under the big arch. Everyone turned and followed. Wim pulled out Ghaliya’s chair for her, while Hirom headed back to the sideboard to see if there was anything else he could eat. I rarely had leftovers, thanks to his ability to tuck away food.

Olivia offered to make Ghaliya some tea, then moved over to the sideboard as well, to dig through the drawers for herbal tea.

The three guests were rising to their feet. Perhaps our noisy return to the dining room had encouraged them to leave. It would give us the room which was fine by me. I was still figuring out how to be a hotelier. Customer service was a bit further down the list.

I settled back in my chair. From there, I could see the tail lights of the last sedan disappearing around the bend.

Harper was in the leading car.

I got it. “The town won’t let her leave…”

Everyone glanced at me. Olivia gave me a little nod. An affirmative, or congrats because I’d figured it out.

Broch returned. He didn’t breathe hard or look stressed as he put Ghaliya’s laptop in front of her. He settled on the chair at the end of the table where Harper had been sitting.

Ghaliya opened the laptop and got busy with a search on Raymond Calloway. She paused, read, frowned, typed; rinse and repeat.

“While Ghaliya searches, can anyone recall the name at all?”

“I know the name,” Broch said. “But I can’t summon the context yet.”

“Thought vampires didn’t forget anything?” Trevalyan said as he squeezed out a herbal teabag.

“We don’t. Which means recalling stray facts becomes even more difficult,” Broch said. “You are asking me to find information in here—” and he touched his temple. “It is the same as asking me to dig up a random but specific fact from among all the books in the New York Library, without consulting the catalogue.”

Not for the first time, I wondered just how old Broch was.

“It will come, if I leave it alone to rise to the surface,” Broch said.

“Ha! Then I beat you to it,” Ghaliya said, straightening. “Detective Raymond “Ray” Calloway,” she recited, studying the screen. “He’s a former homicide detective.”

“Where was he active?” Broch asked.

“New York City.”

“Harper never worked in the city,” Broch said thoughtfully.

“How old is he?” Olivia asked. Then, “ Was he,” she corrected herself.

“Huh,” Ghaliya said, and tapped. “Wow…”

“Aloud, Ghaliya,” I murmured.

“Right, sorry.” She gave everyone a quick smile. “His wife and two kids—all his family—were killed by an animal attack near Albany, when they were travelling back from the Adirondacks. That was…twelve years ago. And his retirement announcement is dated for the next year.”

“They’re related,” Olivia said. “For certain.”

“What kind of animal attacked them?” Broch asked Ghaliya. His tone was touched with sharpness.

It wasn’t just me who noticed. Everyone looked at him.

Ghaliya shook her head, her blue and brown bangs swinging. “There are about six different newspaper reports and blogs about it, but the two I’ve scanned say no one knows what type of animal. Just something wild with claws.”

“God, what the poor man must have gone through…” Olivia breathed. Wim rested his hand on her shoulder.

Ben, who was sitting across the table from Broch, which just happened to be the farthest away from me without separating from everyone else at the table, looked at Broch and raised his brow. “That means something to you?”

Broch glanced around the table. “It’s not an official code, but just…a trait among authorities who do not understand what they’re dealing with. The average police officer would look at the corpse of a human who had been attacked by gargoyles and could only think that an animal did it.”

The silence around the table held for a few heartbeats.

All I could think of, stupidly, was, now gargoyles are real, too .

“You think this Calloway lost his family to gargoyles?” Ben asked. “I thought gargoyles had been wiped out.”

“They were,” Broch said calmly. “Only two years before Calloway’s family were attacked…and in the same general area in which the last gargoyle clan resided. It was the third time the Stonebrood clan had risen, and it was the last time. The hunters who tracked them down made sure of it.”

“And Harper is a hunter…” Trevalyan intoned, then sipped his tea.

“There might be some connection there,” Olivia said.

“Only, gargoyles couldn’t have killed them,” I pointed out. “There were none when this Calloway’s family died.”

“I said that wild animals were what human authorities reach for as an explanation when they have no other,” Broch said. “It isn’t just gargoyle attacks that leave them puzzled.”

“Vampire attacks,” Ben breathed.

Slowly, Broch nodded. I might have been imagining the reluctance weighing him down.

“I thought…” I cleared my throat. “I haven’t read the manual, Broch. But I thought that after they feed, vampires…um…clean up after themselves. And do something so humans don’t remember what happened.”

“We do everything we can to make sure the human we feed from is left as we found them, none the worse for the feeding other than waking to find themselves starving and thirsty.”

This time I had no trouble spotting his discomfort. He brushed at the tablecloth. He picked up his empty coffee mug. Put it down again. Brushed at the table again, then straightened the fold of his trouser leg over his knee.

“Guess there’s asshole vampires, like there’s asshole humans,” Trevalyan said, then sipped his tea.

“Seeing as vampires were all human once, that makes sense,” Olivia said crisply. “That makes it even more likely that somehow, this poor Calloway man is connected to Harper. She hunted vampires exclusively, did she not, Broch?”

“Yes,” Broch said shortly. “Which is how she found her way here.”

“Where you are,” Ben finished.

Broch grimaced.

Something glinted, catching my attention. I sat up straighter and peered through the windows. “They’re back,” I announced, as the two sedans rolled sedately around the bend and headed for the crossroads.

“This should be interesting….” Trevalyan breathed.