I didn’t answer, not wanting to risk her overhearing me nearby and realizing I was watching her.But I listened to the not so quiet message she left. “George Wickham, if you think that hitting me with annulment papers will be enough to frighten me off for good, you need to think again. First of all, I’m not signing anything until we talk face-to-face. Second, I don’t care if you don’t want to be married to me. I don’t care if you hate my guts. I won’t let you face this on your own. Call me back.”
No crying, no whining. Only fire and determination. That was Lydia. I couldn’t help but admire her.
She rose and proceeded down the street and entered Elixir and Ivy, the local apothecary shop. Frost curled around the windowpanes, and little black hearts braided from ebony thistle stems hung on display. I waited several minutes before entering after her. The warmth of the shop blasted into me, the air thick with the scent of dried herbs, beeswax, and simmering spice. Shelves lined every wall, brimming with jars labeled in looping script, and I ducked down a side aisle as Lydia moved to the rear of the store, her nose pink from the cold. She loosened her scarf and tugged off her gloves before shoving them into her pocket. The store owner, who took Lydia to the object she sought, said something, and Lydia burst out in a loud laugh that had me smiling.
Bundles of herbs hung upside down from the ceiling beams, their silhouettes swaying gently with the warmth that rose from the iron stove in the corner. Lydia disappeared into an aisle, and the owner returned to the front counter. Staying out of both of their lines of sight, I eased out from my hiding spot and trailed Lydia a few aisles back, sliding in and out of each row as silent as a ghost. Being a vampire had some perks.
I waited and waited. What was taking her so long? The sound of creaking shelves brought me to the row on the other side of her to see what she was doing.
Through the shelves, I saw Lydia straining to reach a jar of glowing orange dust on the top shelf. She’d climbed up several of the shelves and was straining to grab it. The shelves began to tip, and she let out a startled gasp.
She tumbled backward, throwing her arms up to protect herself against the tipping case.
I reached out and caught the shelves, yanking them into place. I knocked the jar of dust forward, and it fell into Lydia’s lap.
Her eyes grew round and she stretched, trying to look through to the other side. “Hello? Is someone there?” In the blink of an eye, I was at the front of the store. The owner, a woman in her late twenties, made her way toward Lydia.
“Are you okay?”
“Y-yeah. Did you see… is someone else here?”
“Not that I know of.”
I wasn’t invisible, but I could move so quickly that, to the untrained eye, I was easy to miss. Despite my speed, I would have been caught in an instant by another vampire.
Lydia’s footsteps sounded, and I rushed out the door and around the corner. A second later, the door opened, and Lydia’s heels clicked on the pavement. I tensed, but the noise from her footsteps paused for a long moment. Then shesighed. The door to the shop opened again, and her footsteps disappeared inside.
I released my breath, it coming out in a puff of frost.
After another few minutes, the door opened again, and I heard her feet again walk off in the opposite direction at a fast clip. When I stepped out, I watched her round the corner and disappear from sight. This could work. I’d satisfy my sire’s compulsion to keep an eye on Lydia during the day. She’d told me that Cupid’s Confections was guarded by a protection spell at night. So when she was safely asleep, I’d fulfill my sire’s other compulsion to hunt down this murderer.
I could pretend that I was only doing the second because my sire forced me, but even I knew that wasn’t the case.
There were two reasons I needed to discover why someone would set me up. And one of those reasons had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the fireball strolling down the street.
Chapter 5
TheoldNorthangerAbbeymanor held the weekly Midnight Kitchen Society on Wednesday nights, where the local vampires met. It wasn’t so much a secret as hiding in plain sight.
Since Lydia was safely at home, my sire’s compulsion drew me in another direction. I walked up the worn abbey’s path. The building had indeed once been an abbey, but it was destroyed in a fight between fae a century ago. When they rebuilt it, they turned it into a manor house but kept the name. The massive dwelling looked slightly more cheerful with the snow on its roof and blanketing the yard. In the fall, this was a haunted house attraction open to the public. At all othertimes, we’d gotten permission from the ever-travelling owners, the Tilneys, to hold our weekly baking session here.
I grabbed the latch on the door and walked into an open foyer with worn tile. A large crystal chandelier hung above my head, wrapped in ivy, and a grand staircase twisted away from me up to the nether reaches of the home. People said that this historic house was haunted, but if it was, the ghosts mostly gathered upstairs. We never bothered them, so they never bothered us.
The heat of the manor washed over me, and I found myself peeling off layers of clothes and hanging them on the nearby coat rack. Several hung coats and sets of drying shoes by the door told me that most of our assembly had already arrived. When I wasn’t off touring with my band, I made it a habit to attend the cooking group every Wednesday night. There was a feeling of solidarity about attending that helped me deal with the hidden parts of myself.
After moving from the dimly lit foyer, I stepped into the front room, which held a sizable old-fashioned fireplace. On the mantle rested pinecones and frosted branches dotted with tiny holly berries. Several large upholstered chairs surrounded a woven rug on the floor. An opening off to the right led to the kitchen, where I picked out voices.
“You made it.” Bradley appeared from the opening with a grin on his face and an apron made of soft, flour-dusted linen that was stitched with tiny black hearts and a saying that said, “Love at First Bite.” I rolled my eyes. Bradley was discreet… usually, so I’d let the normal arguments about being too obvious go. We were with vampires after all, and it wasn’t like I had any room to talk at the moment.
“Did you think I wouldn’t come?” I asked.
“I wasn’t sure, what with your new wife and all. I thought you might be engaged in more… husband-like activities.” He wriggled his eyebrows at me.
“Wow, Bradley.” I definitely needed to change the subject. “Is Mason here?”
He nodded. “In the kitchen, making buttermilk biscuits. You never gave me an explanation about earlier today. Why were you spying on your wife?”
“You know me, trying to keep things exciting,” I muttered.
