Miss you, too, Princess. See you soon, I hope.
Embry forced herself to catalog Rye’s expression as he read the texts, but whatever she was hoping to find there wasn’ttelegraphed. He scanned the screen, his mouth held in a neutral line, his eyebrows steady, the line between them nonexistent. “Nothing since then?”
“No. And I only texted him in the first place because Ames and Fairfax said they hadn’t seen him all weekend. Wait—should I text him now? I think I should text him now.”
“If it’ll make you feel better, yes, do it,” Rye conceded, “but I would like to point out that you took photos with an old phone at the morgue because you’re worried about what the inspector will conclude from what’s on your active device.”
Okay. Yeah. He had a point. Embry could’ve dwelled on the fact that she’d already texted Balthazar, which was probably a mistake, no matter how careful she’d been about it, but another thought occurred to her just as Rye began to verbally work out the timeline at hand. “So, either he went missing after Sunday night or—”
“He’s been missing this whole time and I’ve been texting the person who took him!”
Embry’s heart began to rise as suddenly the worst possible outcomes unspooled in her mind like a yeoman’s scroll. “A sorcerer is just as rare as Oakley—what if this person stole him away? What if this person killed him? Can sorcerers be leached of their magic like vampires? Because of the dark well or whatever?” She gripped Rye’s elbow. “What if he’s another victim and these texts are another way to entrap me?” Her voice was definitely louder than the holiday antics ofHome Aloneplaying on the TV. “It’s possible, right?”
Rye aimed to put a calming hand on her knee, but Embry wiggled away, agitated. “Wait—hold on. You’re jumping to conclusions—”
“I know you’re not a fan of Balthazar, you’ve made that more than clear, but he’smissing. And I highly doubt that is unrelated to what happened to Oakley, or to the fact that I’m the lead suspect in her murder.”
“And all I’m saying is that there could be another explanation.”
“What? Like the vampires stole him, too? Like, while they were doing a smash-and-grab to steal Oakley’s cadaver, they decided to make off with a whole magical boy as well? If their magic can be taken, maybetheycan take the magic of another magical person?”
Rye waited until she was silent and breathing hard, her words squatting, hot in the air between them. Embry wanted to steal that silence as her own to keep going, to keep spiraling into the worst thoughts possible, but she had the sudden clarity that no matter what she said next, what Rye would answer with would be just the same.
“The explanation could be that Balthazar is guilty.”
Embry felt the wind knocked out of her.
“I’m not saying that because I don’t like the guy.” Rye’s hands flew up in placation. “First of all, research shows that vampires are the only ones with transferable magic as far as what’s in the Table’s archives. That motive doesn’t compute when it comes to Balthazar. Secondly, like witches, sorcerers have the ability to absorb vampire magic. Thirdly, one thing guilty people do is remove themselves from the situation as fast as possible. He has removed himself, except, conveniently, when it comes to talking to you.”
Embry leaned into this sudden frustration, the familiar vexation of Rye Knighton. Always the devil’s advocate, always pushing, prodding. “If he left because he’s guilty, then why didn’t you say the same thing about Alistair when we learned he’d dropped out?”
Rye’s placating gesture flared again, and Embry’s anger flared with it, stoked by his neutral tone and unsatisfying reply. “I’m just saying, Balthazar’s disappearance is suspicious. More so than Alistair’s—even if diviners can also absorb magic.”
“Yet you’re not dragging Alistair through the mud,” Embry snapped.
“I’m not dragging anyone through the mud; I’m focusing our investigation on them for two seconds if you’d let me. Will you let me?” Embry pressed her lips together, annoyed but silent. Letting him speak—for two seconds. Rye filled that time with an extremely sarcastic, perhaps sardonic, question. “Bothof them are missing? I mean, come on. That issuspicious.”
Embry narrowed her eyes. “If you’re suggesting they’re working together on this, you may have missed the fact that they kind of low-key hated each other.”
“No one missed that. Their hatred wasn’t low-key; it was basically the broadside of a bus decorated in blinking neon.”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“Itwasthat bad, even if it was mostly subtext.” A small laugh crept out of Rye. “And it was from the very moment Balthazar showed up from wherever he was—”
“Romania.”
“Romania, the land of the vampires?” Rye arched a brow into his mop of sandy hair. “What was a sorcerer doing on a summer holiday in Romania, Embry?”
“He was with his family. I don’t know, going to the beach? Hiking?” She tossed up her hands. “What is there to do in Romania?”
A smug smile joined that arched brow on Rye’s handsome face. “I would assume that would have been a topic of conversation as you got to know him.”
“Well, it wasn’t.”
Rye peered at her in a way that was as fiery as it was unsettling. As if he could see through her so clearly, he was counting the ridges of her spine. But not in a creepy way. “Woodcross, how well do you actually know Balthazar Hale?”
“Well enough.” That was a terrible argument. This was not new ground between them. “I don’t need to give you examples. In fact, if I recall, when I gave you examples of all the ways I was hangingout with Balthazar Hale the last time you gave me shit for it, you literally asked me not to list out all the places I see ‘the sorcerer’ when you can’t be there.”
