Baron threw his arms out. “Do you? Because every corpse that floats up here gives the locals another excuse to whisper my name. I haven’t drowned anyone but the damned human. I’ve been behaving.”
“We believe you,” Jesper repeated. “Which means that someone is deliberately using your lake as their dumping ground. That’s why we’re still here.”
“Then figure it out,” Baron snarled. “Because I am about one more corpse away from snapping and making their framing job accurate.” He sucked in a breath, visibly reigning himself back in. His gaze cut to the bodies.
Something like guilt flickered across his face.
“I have cameras,” he said stiffly. “Security system I bought from the fae market.” He jerked his chin toward the far shore. “It seems to be enchanted and impossible to be tampered with. I installed it yesterday. I already sent the feed to your tech team.”
“We have it,” Corin said.
He and Slater sat at the terminal up the shore. The glow of the screen lit their faces, making them look more tired than usual.
It wasn’t just me who had been struggling with the on-call schedule, but my mates, too.
We’d barely had time to get together. Dimitri and I slept together at night, but that was the most I’d seen of my mates. We’d been too exhausted by the time we got to bed to do anything but sleep.
Even Drecken had been working overtime with the council because of the humans.
“Your system isn’t as interference-proof as you were led to believe,” Slater mused. “Every time we get near the timeframe where a victim would have gone into the water, the image warps.”
Corin pressed a button on the terminal, and a projection of the screen appeared above it for us to see. It was a view of the lake’s surface. For a few seconds, it was clear; then, the picture fuzzed with lines of static dragging across. The glitch resolved briefly into a vague figure near the shore. They were tall and slender, wearing a navy robe. Before we could see their face, the screen turned black.
When the video snapped back, the lake was empty.
“And then it loops again,” Corin said. “Same thirty seconds of nothing but the figure. Over and over. The more we dig, the more fae interference we hit.”
“And we saw nothing last night. Most definitely not someone in a robe. Fuck,” Bradley cursed.
“We were on the other side, but I don’t see how we missed it,” Cassie muttered, fist clenched at her side.
“At least that’s more than the Bizarre’s cameras caught.” Kane stepped closer, frowning. “Wait. On that robe are spell sigils woven into the seams,” he said. “It’s a fae spell. The fae magic in the robe is deliberately shorting out the tech every time they act.”
“Which means,” Lysa said with a sigh, “they’re aware of the cameras.”
“I’m sending the system back. The enchantment clearly doesn’t work.” Baron swore low. “Nobody will believe me that an ice fae is murdering banshees and phantoms, dumping them in my lake, and scrambling my security.”
“Whether they believe it or not, that’s our working theory.” Jesper ran his hands through his white hair.
Baron’s jaw clenched. “Fantastic, then find them. If one more corpse floats through my territory, I swear to the Fates, I’ll drag the next person I see into my depths and feed on their last breath.”
Without waiting for a reply, he surged backward and vanished beneath the surface with a furious splash.
“Fantastic,” Slater said, eye twitching. “That’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
“It will be,” Corin assured us.
Irritation flared through my bonds, mirroring my own.
It would not be fine if we couldn’t catch the fucking killer.
Our investigation dragged on for hours.
We searched the shorelines, followed dead trails, cross-referenced fae visitors, banshee disappearances, phantom disappearances, and spoke with the locals.
Every single lead we followed was a dead end.
By dusk, we still had nothing, except three families mourning their family members.
