Queen of The Hill (Knight Games) Read online

  “Thought so. Do you mind if we do this outside? I’m stuck in here all day.”

  I nodded. Vampires slept in coffins, even if they were disguised as fashionably decorated bedrooms with bookshelves. I followed him out of his room, up the stairs, and out the heavy front door. Cold night air slapped me in the face. I grimaced. Winter and I were officially at odds.

  “Where’s Julius, Gary?” I asked. “Did he run after he murdered that girl?”

  Gary stopped short just outside the Thames. “First of all, if he’d killed the girl, I would never answer that question. Julius has been good to me.”

  “But you don’t think he did it.”

  “I know he didn’t.”

  “How?”

  He started walking again. I buttoned my black wool coat (a poor replacement for my shredded white Patagonia) and shoved my hands in my pockets. Gary’s light jacket was hanging open. As a vampire, he didn’t need it, so it was just for show.

  “I know who the dead girl is,” he began. “Her name was Calliope. She was a regular with Julius.”

  “Fill me in on what you consider a regular.”

  “Calliope was a local singer and songwriter living on a shoestring. Unlike a lot of the artists around here, she was clean. Her gigs were usually at night, which meant she slept during the day. Julius gave her money in exchange for her blood about once a month.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Any more frequently and he could have killed her. There’s a reason the Red Cross makes you wait eight weeks between blood donations. Four was pushing it, but Julius had it down to a science.”

  “You mean, he was an expert at keeping her alive.”

  “A pillar of restraint.”

  “Funny, he didn’t show much restraint when his fangs were in my neck.”

  Gary frowned. “It’s your blood. He said it tasted of honey and sunlight and gave him an orgasm.”

  I slapped my hand over my eyes. “Oh my God. He said that?”

  “I can smell it all the way over here, pulsing under your skin.” His fangs dropped a little when he smiled. “It’s part of the reason I wanted to be outside.”

  “Gross. Put your fangs away, Gary. That is so not happening.”

  The offending teeth snapped back into his upper jaw. An awkward silence crowded between us while flashes of my history with Gary danced through my head like proverbial sugarplums. It was hard to imagine we’d been an item. He was a shadow of his former human self, and as much as I’d tried to let it go, I harbored negative feelings about our breakup.

  We turned right on Main, heading toward the boardwalk near the river. Thankfully, Gary broke the silence. “I’m not lying to you when I say Julius would never drain Calliope. He had a longstanding relationship with her. It’s hard to find a willing blood donor who will keep what we are in total confidence. Why would he mess with that?”

  “She wasn’t drained. She was ripped apart.”

  “Another good point. A vampire would never waste the blood.”

  “Unless he accidentally killed her and ripped her apart to hide the evidence.”

  “There’s something else you should know, something I didn’t tell Silas.”

  As I suspected. “Shoot. You can trust me.”

  “There was someone else in his room.”

  Part of me wanted to reveal the evidence of the third glass we’d seen behind the bed. By nature, I was a sharer, an extrovert. I liked to compare information. But the longer I was in this role, the more I learned to keep my mouth shut. People tended to say more to fill the silence. So, I pressed my lips together and simply looked at him expectantly.

  He continued. “Vampires have excellent hearing, and my room is close to Julius’s. Yesterday, before Calliope was murdered, I heard her and Julius in his room. But I also heard a third voice, a woman’s voice.”

  “Did you recognize it?” I asked.

  “No, and I was interested, Grateful, because, you know, I’m a man and I’m a vampire. I was half inclined to invite myself to the party, but Julius never liked to share.”

  Gross. “So you have no idea who she was?”

  He looked me in the eye. “No. I asked around after I found the body. Julius was gone and hadn’t said a word to anyone. No one saw or heard a thing. That never happens. The Thames is full of vampires with nothing to do but be in each other’s business.”

  “No one saw anything?”

  “Lots of vamps saw Calliope and Julius arrive at sunrise. No one saw the third woman. No one heard her but me.”

  “This is very important, Gary. Could the voice you heard be Bathory’s?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe—you don’t want to tell me? Or maybe—you don’t know for sure?”

  “I don’t know for sure, which is strange. Really strange.”

  “Why so strange?”

  He paused on the sidewalk and turned his back to me. “Move a finger. Any finger.”

  “What?”

  Just do it.

  I wiggled my pinky finger.

  “Little finger left hand.”

  I tried another.

  “Ring finger, right hand.” He turned back around. “I can tell a human voice from a vampire voice, from a werewolf voice,” Gary said.

  “And which was it?”

  Gary glanced at the street, the people passing by us in their warm cars on the way to who knows where. “I couldn’t tell. Strange.”

  “Bathory has a leprechaun. She could have used magic to disguise her voice.”

  “True.”

  For a moment, the only sound was our footsteps on the gritty, salt-sprinkled sidewalk. “One more question. How did you find the body? Did you hear the struggle? Did the woman scream or something?”

  “No,” he said firmly. “That’s the scary part. There was no struggle. No scream. I’d gone to Julius’s door when I heard glass breaking. Then I smelled the blood. You saw what I found. He was already gone.”

  We’d reached the end of the block. From here on out, mostly abandoned warehouses and processing plants loomed. The types of places where people got murdered and nobody noticed for days. It was risky to go this way with a vamp, lots of dark spaces and no one to hear me scream. But I didn’t want to interrupt him in case there was something more. Under the guise of scratching my neck, I brushed my fingertips over Nightshade’s hilt. I’d have to trust in my ability to take off his head. I kept walking.

  “What time did you hear the glass shatter?” I asked.

  “Just after five, I think. I was up, getting ready for the night.”

  “But the third voice, when did you hear that?”

  “Earlier in the day. Before I fell asleep.”

  “During daylight hours. You’re not sure when they arrived, but they disappeared after sundown?”

  He sighed. “Which suggests it was another vampire.”

  “Or working for one. Like we established, the perpetrator left a lot of blood for a vamp.” Bathory had ways to compel people to do her bidding. She’d compelled Gary to consent to be turned into a vampire. It was very possible whoever murdered Calliope was completely under her control.

  He nodded his head. “She might not risk coming back herself.”

  “Anything else you can remember? Besides Bathory, was there anyone who wanted Julius out of the picture?”

  “No. That’s it. But Grateful, you gotta find him.”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  “There are vampires in the coven who will be happy Julius is gone. They’ll want him to stay gone. A new leader will be elected on the next full moon. I can almost guarantee you won’t like who it is. I know I won’t.” Gary scowled. He’d worked for Bathory once and described the experience as “tortured.”

  I placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll find him, Gary. If he’s still alive, I’ll find him.”

  “Good,” he said. “Now if you don’t mind, I just heard dinner.” With a swift goodbye, he disappeared into the nearest abandon
ed building.

  My stomach growled. Even the thought that Gary was probably sinking teeth into a warehouse rat didn’t sully my appetite. With plenty to think about, I circled back to the nearest diner for some sustenance of my own.

  * * * * *

  After I had drowned my sorrows in a greasy burger and fries, I caught up with Rick to finish our night’s work.

  “How did you find me?” he asked. A stray cat bolted out of the alley at the sound of his voice. “Did you follow our connection? I didn’t feel you coming.”

  I held up my phone. “Not magic. GPS. I tracked the phone I gave you for Christmas. There’s an app for that. Find-a-Buddy.”

  Rick pulled the phone from his pocket and looked at it in horror. “Are you saying this metal square allows others to know where I am?” He tapped the screen in frustration.

  Smugly, I stepped to his side and slid his finger across the screen to unlock the phone. “I find it ironic that you have no problems bleeding a chicken within a ring of skulls to track someone, but this … this amazes you.”

  “It is unnatural. Maybe dangerous. Does everyone know where I am?”

  “Only those people with your number.”

  “Who has my number?”

  I circled my wrist above my head and pointed at myself.

  “Well then, I suppose my privacy is protected.”

  I nodded. “Face it. Life is better in the modern age. Why don’t you try to text me sometime? You might like it.”

  “I highly doubt it.”

  My eyes darted around the alley, trying to remember what evil baddie our magic mirror had revealed to us here. The mirror was an oddly-shaped stretch of silver I’d enchanted in my second lifetime. Its magic pinpointed supernatural activity that could result in harm to humans. The mirror didn’t exactly show the future, more like scenes of what was probable to happen. Rick and I used it to focus the location of our patrol on a nightly basis.

  Tonight, I was anything but focused. All I could think about was Tabetha and what had happened that afternoon. The accusations I’d thrown at Rick lingered in my brain.

  The weight of his stare settled on a spot between my shoulder blades. He wanted to continue the conversation we’d started at the Thames. Sometimes it was a pain in the ass to be able to read your lover’s thoughts.

  “I think we should ignore Tabetha’s invitation when it comes,” I said toward the brick wall.

  Rick groaned. “A blood pact cannot be broken. She will come for us, and we are not strong enough to fight her off.”

  That was the understatement of the year. “The goddess Hecate protected me once. She might again.”

  “I suspect so. But she will not protect me. Tabetha will demand my blood one way or another.”

  I tipped my head back, staring in exasperation at the starless sky. “So the easiest way is to play nice and hope that she gives us an alternative.”

  “Yes,” he said curtly.

  “Fucking awesome,” I said sardonically. I kicked an empty whiskey bottle into the wall and rubbed the spot on my neck where a particularly sharp thorn had cut deep. In the distance, a car backfired. An ambulance passed by on the street outside the alley. Rick said nothing for a full minute.

  “I am sorry, mi cielo.” Rick’s presence pressed against my frontal lobe. I didn’t want him inside my head. I built a brick wall in my mind, cutting him off, but not before I registered what he was looking for in my brain. He wanted to know if I forgave him for Tabetha.

  I wasn’t ready to forgive.

  Awkwardly, I paced the boundary of the alley, actively blocking our connection. I kept replaying our conversation in my head and coming to the same conclusion: Rick was probably underplaying his relationship with Tabetha. It was the only explanation that made sense. Why else would she want him so badly? Yes, she was promised blood, but she was willing to kill me for Rick.

  True, Tabetha was a total psycho-bitch. But a powerful witch like her probably didn’t crush on any man who came along. She could have turned him away entirely or asked for money. As beautiful as she was, she probably had men lined up at her door. But no, she wanted him. How many lingering looks or accidental touches had it taken for Rick to convince her he would become her caretaker?

  To Rick’s credit, he didn’t ask me about the obvious mental block. He seemed to innately understand that I needed space to process what happened that afternoon.

  “What are we looking f—” I didn’t get to finish my sentence. A shrieking apparition flew out of the wall, her ghostly form passing like a cold wind right through me.

  Rick exploded from his skin, his beast snapping at the figure before I could even draw Nightshade. He caught her in his teeth mid-shift, neck jerking with the effort of holding the wispy but formidable apparition. By the time he finished shifting, he couldn’t open his jaws without risking her release.

  I grasped for Nightshade, jumped over Rick’s dragon-like tail, and with a swipe of my blade, sent the shrieking thing to hell. The smell of sulfur filled the alley. I brought the back of my hand to my nose.

  Shifting back to his human form, Rick turned to face me, now completely naked. “Poltergeist,” he said.

  “You shredded your clothes.”

  “I had to. You were distracted.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Do you need the night off?” he asked.

  I considered it. He was right. It had taken me way too long to draw Nightshade. I needed to get my head in the game. For tonight, I would save the Tabetha analysis for a safer time and place.

  “No. I’m fine.” I helped him pick up the pieces of his shredded apparel. None was salvageable.

  “Good. I will go to the car for a change of clothes.”

  “Wait! Your cell phone!” I held up the pocket from his torn pants. “The screen’s not even cracked.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Thank the goddess for small favors.” He plucked the phone from my hand, and then dissolved into a mist and blew from the alley.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Invitation

  I wasn’t naive. Eventually, Rick and I would have to talk out the Tabetha situation. Keeping it bottled up was toxic. But even after a good long sleep and a few more nights of putting him off, I wasn’t ready.

  Three days later, a tree sprite arrived at my door with a rolled up parchment made of birch bark. How did I know she was a tree sprite? Picture a female Peter Pan wearing a dress of dead leaves and looking like she might pass out from fatigue at any moment.

  “Her Highness Tabetha, Queen of the territories of Salem and Smugglers’ Notch, requests the presence of Grateful Knight, Queen of Monk’s Hill, to dine in her presence at six o’clock in the evening, the last day of January.” She lowered her head in a deep bow and extended the parchment with both hands.

  “Thank you,” I said. As soon as I backed away from the threshold, the sprite limped slowly to the dormant oak tree in my yard and slipped inside. What a bitch Tabetha was. She could have sent a pine or fir sprite. Coming out of hibernation like that had to hurt.

  I unrolled the parchment. Poe landed on my shoulder and read the invitation along with me.

  “Six o’clock. After sundown,” Poe said.

  “Of course it’s after sundown. It’s a dinner party and we aren’t over eighty.”

  “The cover of darkness is her advantage. You’ve never been to her residence. Taking away your ability to see clearly is a ploy meant for her benefit.”

  I pulled out my phone and texted Rick the details. “We need a plan, something to offer her in lieu of Rick.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “I’m not sure, but it has to be something Tabetha can’t do herself, something worth the value of Rick to her.”

  “May I suggest you move up the retrieval of your grimoire on your to-do list?” Poe asked.

  I squeezed my eyes closed, kicking myself for waiting so long to force the issue with Logan. “You’re right. I will.”

  * * * * *
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  I showed up at Logan’s penthouse later that day, hoping his sunny disposition would pull me out of my funk. Things weren’t exactly going my way. I had a date with a homicidal witch at the end of the month, and I was still holding Rick at arm’s length.

  “Hey, stranger,” I said when he opened his door. “I was beginning to think you were avoiding me.” I strolled inside, beaming with anticipatory gossip. I hadn’t seen Logan in weeks, and our communication during that time had consisted of a handful of texts. I had so much to tell him, I was bursting at the seams.

  “Uh, sorry about that. I’ve been busy at the restaurant. I bet you’re here for your book.” Logan closed the door behind me. Something was wrong. He wasn’t making eye contact. I’d stored The Book of Light, my powerful magical grimoire, in his penthouse condominium to keep it safe during Bathory’s attack on my home. At one point, I’d even had a key to his place until Rick squashed it in a jealous rage. I did need the book back if I wanted any hope of finding Bathory and Julius. But that wasn’t the only reason I was here. Not by a long shot.

  “It’s okay. Lucky for me, I’ve been able to get by without it until now.”

  “Right. You have some of the spells on your phone,” he said impassively.

  “And Nightshade. She’s handy with the supernaturals.” Damn. This was like having a conversation with a block of ice. What happened to the former ghost who had haunted my house and made me hot chocolate? Shit, he hadn’t even offered me a drink.

  “What’s going on, Logan?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You avoid me for weeks, and now you’re barely talking to me. You haven’t even looked me in the eye since I got here.”

  He leaned one hip against an armchair in his great room. “Just tired.”

  “Are you angry about Rick?” I needed to understand the change. I was already feeling fragile due to the Rick/Tabetha situation. One thing I considered a constant in my life was Logan’s friendship. Yes, he’d had feelings for me at one point, and I suspected he might take my engagement hard, but I thought he’d be over it by now.

  He huffed and shook his head. “No. That’s not it.”

  The answer came with ego-crushing speed and sincerity. It was completely unfair for me to miss being the focus of his affection, but it would have been nice to feel wanted. I smiled for his benefit. “Good. Then what’s going on? You seem totally distracted.”