“For me.” Morrie stared at a spot over my shoulder. “When I first ended up in this world, I was reeling from Holmes’ betrayal. And here was this guy who didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought of him. He took me in, gave me a room in the shop, allowed me to drink myself into a stupor in front of the fireplace when I found out that I’d never see Holmes again. His nihilism was the perfect antidote to my own rage. I wanted to fall into that scraggly, filthy beard and drown myself. I readWuthering Heightsover and over and dreamed that he might one day turn that obsessive devotion to me.”
“You didn’t,” I scoffed.
“Possibly that’s a slight exaggeration, but Idofancy him. All that barely-concealed rage… it’s delicious. I made a move once, when we were both drunk. He nearly tossed me out the upstairs window.” Morrie smiled ruefully. “Now that we’re naked together on a regular basis, with you, I’m feeling things, stirrings. There’s still something unspoken between us.”
“So, just Heathcliff, then? Not Quoth?” I hated the idea of Quoth being left out, although that was partly for selfish reasons.
“Quoth is a fucking beautiful specimen of humanity. Don’t tell him I said that. But he’s far too wholesome for me. Besides, his heart is spoken for. Quoth loves you with a love that is more than love, the kind of love the winged seraphs of heaven must covet. I can’t compete with that. But Heathcliff… there’s enough of that majestic creature to go around. So yes, I’m debating making a move next time we three arein flagrante delicto. Seizing the moment, carpe diem, that sort of thing. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Mind that you fancy Heathcliff?” I smiled. “Hell no. I think that’s hot as fuck.”
Morrie’s grin could have melted the polar ice, it was that fucking beautiful.
I held up a hand. “But… Idomind that you don’t tell me these things. You should have told me this before today. We can’t have a relationship if you don’t tell me things.”
“I do tell you things. I tell you every brilliant thought that enters my head.”
“That’s true. You talk a lot, but it’s mostly bullshit. I want to know aboutyou, Morrie. Who you are underneath all the posturing and bravado. Do you understand?”
Morrie nodded, his eyes fixed on the top of his shiny brogues.
“So, with that in mind, is there anything else you want to tell me? Anything at all?”
Morrie looked up at me. The wounded expression had gone from his face, replaced with his usual half-smirk. He studied me, his smirk turning up at the corners as a blush crept along my cheeks.
“What?” I demanded.
“Suspicion isn’t a good color on you, gorgeous.”
“Don’t act innocent. You’re up to something. What’ve you done?”
“I’ve done everything I needed to, and more than I hoped.”
“Oh, that’s not cryptic at all.”
Morrie sighed. “I was hoping to tell you about it once I’d cracked the entire puzzle. But since you insist, I found out something. About Dracula.”
“What? How?”
The ice in Morrie’s eyes was hard as flint. Unease flickered in my gut. Whatever Morrie discovered had turned him serious, which I knew from experience was never a good sign. “I wrote an algorithm last night to search through news sites across the world. It identifies specific parameters – namely, the types of crimes that a vampire might commit. Blood-lettings, beheadings, that sort of thing. Then it verifies the stories across multiple sources and creates a map of space and time that might tell us something about his movements.”
“That sounds like a pretty complex algorithm to write in a single evening.”
“Well, it wasmycreation,” Morrie smiled. He could never ever miss an opportunity to show off. “Besides, I’ve had a lot of time on my hands lately. The only thing I haven’t had nearly enough of is your body, which is a shame, because I think another orgasm or ten might do you good, eliminate all this suspicion and negativity.”
“If I want to eliminate negativity, I’ll go to Sylvia’s shop for some banishing incense. What did this algorithm tell you?”
“Look for yourself.” Morrie handed me his phone.
I swiped across the screen, viewing a complex timeline of events. The trail started over a year ago, around the time Heathcliff first appeared at the shop. There was a single newspaper clipping from theArgleton Gazette, reporting a Barchester arboretum was broken into. The thieves made off with three large cartons containing rare orchids from the Carpathian mountains encased in their natural soil.
“I remember this from the novel. Dracula was trying to move from Transylvania to England, in order to find new blood and spread his curse. To regenerate his powers, he transported fifty boxes of Transylvanian earth.” My hands trembled as I swiped to the next entry in Morrie’s program. “If he found himself already here in England, alll he needs is the dirt from his homeland to regain his strength and regenerative powers.”
“Precisely why he stole only three specimens, all brought from Romania,” Morrie said. “He’s starting small.”
After a few months of no activity, the timeline expanded rapidly, with locations popping up all over the map. More articles revealed thefts from private gardens, rare plant displays, anywhere with plants transported from Romania. No one seemed to have connected the crimes, and there were few clues and no arrests. ‘It’s as if the burglars flew over the fence, like a bird or a bat,’ one reporter said.
But the burglaries weren’t what made me gasp. Notices of strange deaths, missing people, bodies found in the woods, blood smeared on the door of a church. When looked at individually, it was all business as usual given Britain’s high crime rate. But put together like this and connected with the dirt burglaries…
