Panic churns in my gut. The man, Baylor or Basil or whatever his name is, hurt this girl. Maybe he drugged her? “We need to gether to the hospital.”
“She’s fine.” Arabella hoists the girl higher in her arms. “She’s fainted. Dora will help her.”
I don’t know how she does it, but Arabella manages to carry the girl back to the van without breaking a sweat or tripping in her six-inch stilettos. Beth and Isis scootch over so we can lay the girl on the backseat. Dora uses some herbs from her pocket to stop the bleeding and everyone bickers over what to do with her. I vote that we call the police, but the others want to respect her wishes not to involve Inspector Hayes, especially since the whole reason we were out there in the first place was so Maisie could stick her nose into an ongoing murder investigation?—
Where’s Maisie?
I look over at the Sanctus gates just as a small figure rolls over the top of the high wall and lands on her feet with a quiet thud. Isis cheers as Maisie leaps back into the van and yells, “Go, go!”
Komal stomps on the gas. The van lurches down the winding lane. I thought taking the country roads in Reginald’s ridiculous car was an adventure, but Komal treats road rules more like road “suggestions” that can be discarded if the soundtrack is angry enough.
“What happened?” Komal demands over the pounding bass as she yanks the wheel hard right to drag one of the van’s wheels out of the ditch. “Did you find out anything about Danny?”
“Why is there a strange girl in the back of the van?” Maisie asks.
“Don’t change the subject!”
Maisie must decide it’s better not to argue with the person currently scraping the van’s panelling down a bramble hedgerow, because she settles back into her seat and says, “The estate is much more lively at night. There were residents everywhere, but I managed to blend in. I found the office and waited in the bushes until the lady got called away. I managed to sneak onto her computer and found Danny’s payslips. It looks as if he was employed as a handyman for Sanctus, mainly to do small repair jobs and hang pictures in the houses that are completed. But that’s not all I found.”
Maisie’s eyes blaze with triumph. We all leanforward in our seats.
“What?” Beth huffs.
“Danny received a disciplinary warning for behaving inappropriately towards a resident of Sanctus. They complained to the management and he was let go from the company payrollthe day he was murdered.”
Celeste gasps. In the backseat, the girl lets out a loud snore.
“I couldn’t get the name of the victim of Danny’s harassment, or any of the other Sanctus residents. Those are locked down tight in a password-protected database, and I only had a moment before the woman came back inside. But it’s a lead we need to follow up.”
Arabella furrows her perfectly tweezed eyebrows. “What do you think happened? A billion-dollar development firm makes Danny pay for harassing one of their clients by brutally murdering him in a back alley? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Not yet, but we can keep digging,” Maisie says.
Arabella sighs. “I suppose if I make somediscreetinquiries with my clients at Sanctus, I might be able to unearth this woman’s name. But only if the opportunity arises. Will that help?”
“We would be eternally in your debt, Arabella,” Beth shouts over the girl’s increasingly loud snores. “Now, what are we going to do about our slumbering friend?”
“Pub?” Komal suggests. “If she’s a regular, Lilac probably knows where she lives. We’ll get her home and tuck her into bed and she’ll forget all about this in the morning.”
“I’ve given her something to help calm her,” Dora says. “And she’s already stopped bleeding.”
“And I’ve tucked an anti-vampire charm into her pocket,” Isis says, “so Baylor will stay away from her.”
“Oh, is that why it reeks in here?” Maisie scrunches up her nose. “I thought someone farted?—”
As Komal careens in the direction of the village and the Nevermore Coven discuss possible murder scenarios, I turn around to watch the sleeping girl. I touch the place on my neck where Alaric’s teeth scraped me. My heart stutters.
What kind of sick man would do that to her?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ALARIC
Callista: Alaric, have you dealt with the husker yet? You know that the fiend has a taste for it now. If we do not bring them to justice, they will take another human life, risking exposing all of us. Don’t pretend that you’ve eschewed texting as inappropriate for our kind. If I’ve learned to text, so can you.
“This room presents us with some challenges,” Winnie says the following week as we stand before the wall of ceramics. “Unlike the tapestries, we can’t display all of these mugs. Why do you makeso manypots?”
Winnie has brought so much joy to Black Crag, the thought of our evenings together ending fills me with dread. In moments like this, when she’s too absorbed in our task to notice me, I find myself studying her, luxuriating over every detail of her lovely face and sparkling eyes, hoping to commit her to memory.
