Page 7

CHAPTER SEVEN

ONCE WE WERE OUT ON the sidewalk, the cool of the evening registered against my cheek. I took Ghaliya’s arm and glanced at her to see if she was going to protest.

Instead, she steered me away from the crossroads, which was the direction I had intended to go in and headed west.

Well, we couldn’t walk far in that direction, either. The road went on for not quite half a mile, then came to a dead end. We would reach the wards shielding the town just before the road ended. I suspected the town would not let both of us cross over.

I let Ghaliya steer me across the road to the sidewalk on the other side, which ran farther into the trees than the sidewalk on this side. It was a good chance to check which houses were showing lights. I could figure out from there who lived in which house, because I already knew Ben’s house. His was next door to Olivia and Wim’s house, which was on the corner, right beside the crossroads.

And Trevelyan’s house was two up from Ben’s.

The house between them was dark. That might not mean it was empty, though.

“You need to slow down,” I told Ghaliya. “You’ll get a stitch and have to sit right where you are until it passes.”

“I’m fine,” Ghaliya said with a touch of impatience.

I let it drop. But I kept my hand on her elbow. A light touch.

We passed Trevalyan’s house, which showed the flicker of candles. He was a touch traditional in his practice. He liked the power of candlelight.

I mentally sighed. I had not gone back to attempt the spellcasting once more, as I had promised I would this morning. We had all been a little distracted, but I guessed that Trevalyan would be disappointed in me, anyway. He didn’t get angry. Well, not often, even though I was a terrible student. He just looked at me with his mournful large brown eyes behind the magnifying glass of his lenses. My insides squirmed.

On the other side of Trevelyan’s house was a side street. Narrow, dark, and without sidewalks. Gravel, pebbles and leaf litter had accumulated on the street, because vehicles rarely used it.

Ghaliya turned firmly into the street.

“The footing doesn’t look good,” I pointed out.

“It’s fine.”

“It’s too dark to know if it’s fine.” The strong light that poured out of the hotel windows to illuminate the main street, which also lacked lights, didn’t reach this far.

Ghaliya had her chin set in a way I recognized. That was my “don’t mess with me” look. At least, that was what Jasper had told me more than once as we both watched her grow up.

I sheered away from that thought. I didn’t want to think about Jasper, or the white envelope sitting on my desk, waiting for me to do something with it.

I stayed silent and scanned the littered roadway ahead of us with my gaze, looking for anything that Ghaliya could trip over. Our boots crunched in the pebbles, but the old leaves were damp and silent.

The road seemed surprisingly smooth. By the time we reached the next corner, I was feeling a bit more comfortable, but not enough to let go of Ghaliya’s arm.

The intersection was as littered as the road we were on. The cross street ran left and right. Ghaliya turned left and trudged down the middle of the road for about twenty yards, then veered over to the curb.

I kept my mouth shut and stepped up onto the pale new weeds with her. The house we were in front of showed a glimmer of light through the front windows that wasn’t the cheerful flicker of candlelight. It was too red, and it was showing in every window, not just one.

A fireplace, I guessed. Someone who felt the cold the way Ghaliya and I did. Not Broch’s house, then.

Something stirred. A recent memory. I could hear Trevalyan’s voice in my head, wavering, but rich. The house directly behind mine…the gray one? Wim uses it as a greenhouse. Works remarkably well, especially in winter. A classic greenhouse would be a king’s ransom to ship in here and build.

This house was Wim’s greenhouse. That explained the red glow in the windows. I knew the house had two old-fashioned open-faced fireplaces, which was partly the reason that Wim and Olivia had chosen it as a greenhouse.

It also didn’t have a front porch. Just a simple concrete stoop in front of the centrally placed front door. The door had once been white, but paint flakes that still clung to the door gave it weird little shadows all over from the moon rising behind us, as if the door was clothed in camouflage.

I let Ghaliya knock on the door, which opened almost straight away. Olivia smiled at us and beckoned us inside.

We stepped in and I sighed as the warmth of the room registered. The two fireplaces were on either side of the large front room, and each held a banked fire. Red hot coals glowed. Tiny flames played over them, as if they were trying gamely to linger. On the far side of the room were more windows, and an old-fashioned, deep metal kitchen sink standing on metal legs.

Someone had pulled out the interior walls. The entire main floor of the house was all open space. To the left, against the wall, narrow stairs ran up to the upper floor.

Between us and the windows on the far side of the room were hundreds of plants. None sat on the floor, which I had half-expected. All the pots and trays sat upon a range of objects that provided a horizontal surface at approximately waist height. I spotted old tables and desks, and lots of cardboard boxes, some of them stacked to gain the correct height. Old wooden fruit crates were stacked vertically and planks rested across them to create the horizontal surface.

On the walls, rough shelving made of raw timber and steel brackets held up even more plants. Some of them climbed up netting that had been stapled to the wall behind them.

The bigger tables had been pushed under the windows, beside us, and were covered with big terracotta pots.

I’m not a gardener. Any of the plants that did not have fruit or vegetables hanging from them I couldn’t identify. But I do know vegetables. By the front windows were tomatoes and strawberries, pepper plants and leeks. Elsewhere I spotted green onions, potatoes, salad greens, basil, beans, cauliflower, onions and enormous cabbages. Broccoli, parsley, even a lemon tree, its leaves reaching toward the ceiling.

Climbing up the wall near the fireplace was a vine from which cucumbers hung. Another vine was festooned with long green beans.

“Wow…!” Ghaliya breathed.

I didn’t have time to catalogue everything in the room. “Most of this ends up in my kitchen…” I murmured, for Wim and Olivia had been bringing me boxes of vegetables all summer. I paid them fairly, and they paid me for turning the produce into meals.

Ghaliya glanced at Olivia. “Everyone’s upstairs?”

She nodded.

We moved up the stairs, going single file. They were steep and I stayed right behind Ghaliya and watched her every step. She was breathing hard by the time we reached the next floor.

Whoever had torn out the interior walls downstairs hadn’t stopped there. The top floor was as open as the main floor, and just as crowded with green, growing things. The air was slightly cooler up here, but not by a lot. I spotted grills in the floor. They weren’t modern central heating vents, but simple channels that allowed warm air to rise up to this level. The walls jutted where the chimneys passed up to the roof, and those walls would be warm, too.

A small area had been cleared out in the middle of the plants. I could see that the rows that had been there had been pushed up against others, out of the way.

More old orange crates had been turned on their ends. Broch sat on one of them, his laptop on another crate in front of him. Ben, Trevalyan and Harper each had stools of their own, and there were three extra crates, forming an oval inside the little space.

A pair of candles flickered on the floor between us, giving the room just enough light to see details. They were the plain white ones that Trevalyan favored. I looked at him as we settled on the spare crates. “you left candles burning in your house?”

“I wanted to make it look like I was there.”

I had spent years trying to teach Ghaliya and Oscar safety around candles. They’d both gone through a phase of wanting to keep lighted candles in their rooms. Ghaliya had also burned incense. I had thought she was hiding the smell of cigarettes, but I had been proved wrong. Ghaliya had never picked up the habit. Oscar had smoked for a few months, until he’d sat down to figure out the annual cost of even a few cigarettes a day. That had offended him more than the long term health consequences and he’d stopped smoking that same day.

Now Trevalyan was letting candles burn in his house, untended. “You could have turned on a light switch,” I pointed out. It vexed me that a touch of my “I’m your mother,” voice emerged.

Trevalyan grinned. “I can make candles out of fat for pennies. Are you going to pay my power bill for me? Because that seems to increase every time I get one.”

I couldn’t dispute that. The monthly power bill for the hotel made me feel faint.

Nor could anyone sitting around us.

“It’s the taxes,” Ben said.

“And the fees. They add up to more than the power we use,” Broch added.

I looked at him, surprised. “Aren’t you all…well…financially independent?”

“Thanks to Juda, we were,” Broch said. “But…well…” He shrugged.

“You’re using your capital now?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Olivia said. “But with Juda gone, we must be careful to avoid that. And shares are not doing well right now. I don’t know why.”

“The value goes down and interest is cut,” Ben added.

“I thought…” I began. Then I shook my head. “It’s none of my business.”

“This is Haigton,” Trevalyan said. “We all know each other’s business. It’s how we get by.”

“What did you do before Juda came along, with his day trading?” I asked.

“He was here when I got here,” Olivia said.

“Me, too,” Trevalyan said. And Trevalyan, I thought, had been here the longest out of everyone, except maybe for Ben. I didn’t know Ben’s full story. I hadn’t coaxed him to speak about it. Just the idea of a cozy chat like that made me feel uncomfortable. Even now, I avoided meeting his eyes.

“Then everyone in town is squeezing their budgets…” I murmured, shunting aside the idea of chatting with Ben.

“Hard times come and go,” Olivia said brightly. “We’ll get by.”

Olivia would likely remember the Great Depression. She had actually seen hard times come and go.

“Why is Wim not here?” I asked her. Apart from Hirom, who was running the bar where King and his people were drinking, and Frida, who was agoraphobic and couldn’t step outside the hotel, every other local was in this room except for Wim.

Olivia said, “Wim isn’t feeling well.”

“Anything I can help with?” Ben asked. His tone was light.

Olivia shook her head. “I don’t think it’s anything to worry about, yet. He’s just…he’s not responding to spring as he normally does. At least I think that is all it is. He’ll come around.”

Everyone nodded except Ghaliya and me. “What happens to Wim in spring?” I asked.

Trevalyan smiled. It was an extraordinary expression on his normally sad face. And Olivia blushed. In that dim light, I could see her face turn red. All over. Even her throat turned a bright red.

She patted her hair, cleared her throat and looked down at the floor, unable to meet anyone’s gaze.

“In spring,” Trevalyan said, “Wim…gets younger, shall we say?”

His observation, and Olivia’s blushing let me grasp their meaning. Perhaps Wim actually grew younger, but more likely they were saying in a roundabout way that he grew frisky, responding to the renewal of the season the same way animals did. He was a dryad, and more closely connected to nature than modern man.

“The renewal of the year?” I suggested delicately.

Trevalyan’s smile broadened. “You might say.”

Ben touched Olivia’s shoulder. “Let me know if he doesn’t pick up soon. It’s nearly Beltane….”

Olivia nodded and said nothing.

“Let’s get on with this before King starts wondering where everyone is,” Harper said.

Broch nodded. “You were in the room itself for most of it, Harper. You tell us what you learned. Then I’ll tell you what they spoke about after they let you go.”

Harper looked bored. “I told you. They wanted to know where I was two days ago. When this Calloway person got himself killed. They gave away nothing.”

“They gave away a lot,” Broch told her. “You didn’t listen.” His tone wasn’t chiding. He was just stating facts.

“I don’t give a damn,” Harper said, with a touch of anger. “I don’t get why any of you do.” And she looked around the circle with a glare.

“We want to help,” Olivia said.

“I don’t need anyone’s help.”

“Then look at it this way,” Broch said. “If we don’t help you get off the hook with the FBI, and stop them from looking into your past, they’ll start looking into everything and everyone around you. If that happens, the town itself will be in jeopardy.”

“So? It’s not like I like this place.” Harper’s tone was sullen.

Trevalyan crossed his arms. “You don’t care if the town begins to think of King and his agents as enemies?”

“It already thinks they’re enemies. It’s not letting them leave,” Harper pointed out, with a withering tone.

“No, it’s stopping you from leaving with them,” Broch corrected her. “It keeps assets close. It lets the harmless and the useless go. I’m fairly certain that if King tried to leave by himself, the town would wave him farewell, if it had the means to wave.”

“You really don’t want to see what the town would do to them…to us, if it came to believe we were enemies,” Trevelyan said softly.

“This damn town!” Harper railed. “We all kowtow to it like it’s some sort of crime lord. It’s just a two-year-old with a temper!”

“You should stop thinking of it in human terms,” Ben said. “It isn’t human. Nor is it good or bad. It just is. And it wants to survive, just as all of us do. It doesn’t have morals, or human sensibilities. That is why what it does to survive appalls us.”

“I don’t care !” Harper ground out.

She was lying. I could tell by everyone’s faces that I wasn’t the only one to recognize her lie for what it was.

Broch opened his laptop. “Former New York detective Raymond Calloway was last seen in Gouverneur on the day he died, and that’s where the body was found. King’s people learned that he was asking for directions to Haigton, because Haigton wasn’t on the map he had and he couldn’t find it on Google Maps, either.”

He looked up from the screen, and around at us. “He was stabbed with an iron knife identical to yours, Harper.”

Harper smiled. It was a cat-that-ate-the-cream smile. She leaned down and delved in the top of her boot, then withdrew a knife with a pitch black blade. The edge was sharpened and glinted silver in the candlelight. “ Not my knife, though.”

“Where do you keep your backup?” Broch asked. “Have you checked it lately?”

“Of course,” she said, her tone cool. She returned the knife to her boot.

“When?”

“Just before I came here. It’s where I stashed it.”

As soon as King had let her go, she had checked her backup weapon. That meant that she had learned that much about Calloway’s death. And she had been worried enough to check as soon as she could.

Harper was not as cool and indifferent to this as she wanted us to believe.

Broch considered her for a long moment. She stared back.

He returned his gaze to the laptop. “Calloway was seen talking to someone in a diner in Gouverneur. He was heard to bellow ‘Harper did this!’ by a dozen witnesses who were in the diner at the time.”

I could understand why King and his agents had hotfooted it to Haigton, where a woman called Harper had some sort of connection to Calloway that I still didn’t understand.

Apparently Harper didn’t, either, because she said, “He has to be talking about some other Harper. I tell you, I don’t know the man. I told King that, too. For four straight hours.”

Broch held up his hand. “I’ll get to that. Calloway’s shout about ‘Harper did this’ was at a woman he was sitting with. The woman had her back to the security cameras, and her hair was down. The side view wasn’t clear. She never looked up. The Feds figure she knew where the security cameras were, because her face wasn’t clear, the whole time she was there.”

“Why aren’t they chasing her then?” I asked.

“ Thank you,” Harper muttered.

Broch pointed to the screen. “Because Harper’s past as a hunter means she has a violent history. ‘Harper’ is not a common name. Any ‘Harper’ in the North Country would have been checked. Your record, Harper, made them sit up and pay attention. Nothing quite official, but King figures that’s because you were smart enough to avoid charges. Lack of evidence, or people providing solid alibis for you. But you have been peripheral to a lot of strange things and that has King convinced there’s much more there that they haven’t uncovered.”

“And he’s right,” Harper said, with a smirk. “Except that I have zero connection to Calloway.”

“Are you sure about that?” Broch asked, his tone smooth.

“Yep.”

“His family died by something supernatural, right here in New York. Possibly vampires…but definitely Otherworld.”

Harper’s smile faded. Her eyes narrowed. Then her lips parted. “ That guy? Was that his name? Calloway?”

“You tell us,” Broch suggested. “You’ve remembered something.”

“It’s…damn, it was fifteen years ago,” Harper said. She gripped her head with long, elegant fingers, pressing in on the temples. “It can’t be the same guy….”

“I think you had best tell us what you do remember, dear,” Olivia said. “We can pick through it. Ghaliya is rather good at finding facts online.”

Hunter snorted, showing her disdain for all things online. Or perhaps her disdain was for Ghaliya. She dropped her hand. “I don’t know if it is the same guy. It’s the family torn up by vampires…that’s the bit I remember.”

“Of course you do,” Broch said, his tone dry.

She glared at him. Then she crossed her arms.

Defense mode , I catalogued. I’ve seen lots of clients my old boss offended take that stance. That was my signal to soothe and ease and make them laugh.

But I didn’t feel like putting Harper at her ease. I kept my mouth shut.

“Fifteen years ago, more or less. I can’t remember the exact year,” Harper said. “Those times…it’s a bit blurry now. I was half out of my mind with…” She paused and glanced around the room, as if she was totting up who was listening and realizing she didn’t want to expose herself. “I was angry a lot,” she said, with an air of confession.

Olivia rubbed her lips, as if she was considering a deep thought. No one else reacted, except Broch, whose mouth quirked up into a grin.

“Go on,” I said softly.

Harper cleared her throat. “He was a hunter, this Calloway – if it’s the same guy.”

“That makes sense,” Broch said. “You lost your family and turned to hunting. So did he.”

Harper ignored him. “I had found a nest, just north of Albany. I found a vantage point where I could watch the entrance, while I waited for sunrise.”

“Why sunrise?” Ghaliya asked.

“Vampires used to be nocturnal, once,” Broch said. “Our energy is still at its lowest when the night is done.” Unlike Harper, he didn’t seem to resent speaking about a topic that some might call personal.

“Oh…” Ghaliya breathed.

“Vampire’s nest?” I asked. If personal questions didn’t bother him, I’d take advantage of it.

“Some call it that,” Broch said. “Some don’t. The variety of domestic arrangements are as wide as human ones. People live alone or share housing. A nest is an old term.”

“It’s still valid,” Harper shot back. “There were six of them, and they were sucking the life out of the little hamlet they’d found. Every night. Turning some and leaving them to fend for themselves. As if they needed more numbers and more food.” She sent Broch a withering look.

“And there are humans who are barely worthy of the label, too,” Trevalyan said, his tone a little sharp. “Move on. You waited for sunrise…?”

“Then this dick amateur hunter showed up. With a tire iron ! He elbowed in on my kill, so I explained it to him.” She shrugged.

Broch’s gaze was on the laptop. “Four witnesses, including one with a cellphone with video capabilities—”

“Cellphones had video way back then?” Ghaliya asked, sounding amazed.

I rolled my eyes at her.

“There were a few high end models that did,” Broch replied. “Although the video they captured would not impress you.”

“I bet,” Ghaliya murmured.

“Four witnesses,” Broch repeated, “watched you beat the hell out of Ray Calloway. You left him on his hands and knees, bleeding from all orifices—”

“All?” Harper repeated.

“All,” Broch said.

“Damn.” She grinned. “I’m impressed.”

“The video is what got this onto Calloway’s file and let King connect you together,” Broch said. “The video made Calloway a laughing stock at his precinct. He became a pariah in law enforcement. He was forced into early retirement, which meant his pension was a fraction of what it might have been, and his reputation was tanked. He couldn’t find work on the civilian side of the street.”

I held up my hand. “All that because he got beat up?”

“He was beaten up by a girl,” Broch said. “Some men…some professions that are still deeply patriarchal, like police forces…wouldn’t like it.”

“But still, to force him into early retirement…it’s extreme.”

“And perhaps Calloway brought some of it on himself,” Ben said. “Maybe he was the type of man who would find it demeaning, even soul-destroying, to lose a fight to a woman. Maybe he couldn’t get over it and it affected his work.”

“I think his work was already affected,” Broch said. “He lost his whole family, then turned to hunting. That implies obsession.” His gaze, I noticed, did not swing toward Harper. Not even a flicker. “This fight with Harper might have been the last straw for his senior officers.”

I nodded. That made sense.

Broch closed the lid of the laptop. “King has the connection between Harper and Calloway from fifteen years ago. Calloway was heard to speak her name in the diner, only hours before he died, plus he was looking for directions to Haigton. That makes a compelling case for considering Harper a suspect.”

“Except I didn’t do it,” Harper said.

“And where were you two days ago?” Broch asked.

“Here.” Harper rolled her eyes.

“Where, specifically? King didn’t come and ask any of us to swear we saw you. I don’t remember seeing you on Tuesday, either. Did anyone else?” He looked around the group.

“Harper was at dinner,” I said. “Roast pork chops and apple sauce,” I added.

“Oh, yes!” Olivia said, with a small sigh.

“Yes, I saw you at dinner, Harper,” Ben said. “But you weren’t at the table in the bar any time during the day.”

Broch raised his brow, looking at Harper.

She recrossed her arms. “I was hunting.”

“Hunting what, precisely?” Trevelyan asked, with a tone of professional interest.

“Anything that moved.” Harper gave an exasperated sound. “ Not sentient. Jeez.”

“And that’s what you told King?” Broch asked, his tone sharp.

“It’s the truth.”

“It’s…not helpful,” Ben said, his tone diffident. “You were alone in the forest. As far as King figures it, you could have trekked to Gouverneur and killed the man, trekked back, and we here would never know you’d been gone.”

“As if I could step over the damn wards!” Harper snapped.

“King doesn’t know that,” Broch said. “From here, moving cross-country, Gouverneur is a little under ten miles. With your stride, you could get there in well under three hours, slip into town, do the deed, and trek back…possibly without a soul in Gouverneur even knowing you’d been there.”

The silence lasted a long moment.

Then Trevalyan blew out his breath. “No wonder the laddie kept at it for four hours. It’s a solid case, as far as he’s concerned. He just needs the evidence.”

“Or a confession,” Ben added.

“Oh, dear,” Olivia breathed.

I agreed. It did look bad for Harper. “What do we do next?”

Broch switched his gaze to me. “You have to talk to Axel King.”

I sucked in a breath. “Me? Why me? And what do I talk to him about?”

“It has to be you,” Trevelyan said.

“He likes you,” Ben added.

I was speechless for a few heartbeats, then found my tongue again. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Yeah, Mom. He likes you,” Ghaliya said. “He watches you when you’re in the room.”

“Even while he was eating,” Ben added.

“How would you know? You had your back to the room,” I shot back.

Trevalyan touched my arm. “You said you can be nice to people, if you have to be. That overqualifies you. We’re all out of practice. We don’t get to talk to anyone but ourselves most of the time.”

I opened my mouth to say no, as firmly as possible, and suggest that Broch deal with the man. He was the lawyer.

But then I saw Harper.

She wasn’t saying anything. She was sitting squarely on her crate, looking ahead. Looking at nothing.

Her hands were between her knees, held there as if her knees were a vice. And beneath, the heel of her boot was knocking a tiny tattoo against the floorboards, so minute that no sound was made. Just the little up and down movement, which might have been compensating for the tremble that she wouldn’t let her hands show.

The sight of her tumbled me back over twenty years. To the bio booth at the back of the private cinema that my asshole of a boss, Danny Ortiza, had built at the back of the office suite, to run clients’ movies and other productions, plus test films, daily rushes and more. We’d all learned how to load footage and get it going. Ortiza had no reason to step into the compact booth and close the door.

His hand on my ass told me exactly why he was there.

I’d heard the whispers, before. But I’d ignored them, because…well, he signed my monthly cheques. I owed him a modicum of loyalty. He’d never once shown even a hint of anything toward me. I had decided that I would go with the evidence, not the rumors.

Then his hand had cupped my ass, and his thumb stroked.

I didn’t even think about it. I straightened up, making his hand fall away, moved over to the old reel cabinet and closed the door, then turned to face him and ask if I should get the film I’d queued rolling.

There had been sweat on his temples, but I’d said…I can’t remember what I said. I pretended nothing had happened, while sickness rose in my throat and made it hard to breathe, and the sound of my heart screaming in my head made it hard to hear. I had used every social skill I had learned while soothing his clients to get Ortiza to laugh and walk out that door and leave me alone.

But that wasn’t the worst of that day. The worst came when I was sitting on the sofa that night with Jasper, trying my best not to weep and be all feminine and weak, while I told him what had happened, the rumors about Ortiza, and how I didn’t think I was safe at work, anymore. I wanted to quit. Tomorrow. I’d make an excuse. And I’d knock myself out to find another job.

And Jasper had taken my hand and brushed my hair back the way he did with Ghaliya, to make her sleep, and told me I must have misinterpreted it. “Why now, after working for him for two years?” he’d added.

“I don’t care why now. He did it, Jasper. I don’t want to wait around for him to try again. It will be more than a hand on my ass, next time.”

Jasper had studied my hand for a long moment, before lifting his chin and saying, “You can’t quit. Not right now. We need the money, Anna. I didn’t want to tell you this, but the business…it’s not doing well….”

And I had sat on the sofa, numb and shaking, while he laid out for me all the reasons I had to go back to work tomorrow. And the next day. And the one after that. Because no one else would pay me what Danny Ortiza paid me, just to make clients feel good about themselves. I had no other skills.

The trembling in my middle had spread out along my arms and legs as I realized I was trapped. Stuck. I had to do this. I had no way out….

….just as Harper was sitting there, probably thinking she had no way out, either. She couldn’t leave Haigton. The town wouldn’t let her. King was convinced she was the killer, no proof existed that humans would accept as evidence of her innocence.

I lifted my chin. “Okay, I’ll talk to King,” I told everyone.

And even though she appeared to not react at all, from the corner of my eye, I saw Harper’s boot come to a frozen halt. Her breath stopped.

But the oddest reaction in that room was Broch’s. His expression…I didn’t know what to make of it. It defied analysis.

I took a deep breath. “ Why am I talking to King?”