His girls had gone off the reservation, to use a U.S. government line about my people. I let one side of my mouth rise with relief. “They weren’t taken against their will,” I said. “Good. We’ll keep looking, but I’m guessing they got an offer they couldn’t refuse.”
“Yeah.” He breathed out the word. “Someone at the party offered them something they wanted. It didn’t have to be money either. Bliss and Rachael have been making noise about signing on for full-time service.” At my blank look, Troll said, “Becoming full-time blood-servants to one master rather than working for Katie. They got money. Katie makes sure they have excellent financial portfolios. So whatever they were offered, it had to be worth stiffing Katie. She’ll be”—he looked around the room to make sure there were no children present—“pissed. Sorry, Janie, but she will be.”
I shrugged. Living with the Younger brothers was making me inured to mild profanities and minor vulgarities. “We’ll keep looking, but it goes to the back burner unless we learn something else.”
“Yeah.” Troll stood and looked around, as if thinking. “One other thing. Probably not related. Two of the humans in the footage are blood-slaves looking for a permanent master. “They’re both sick today, along with four others in the city.”
“Sick?” I asked. Blood-slaves, like blood-servants, didn’t get sick. Vamp blood kept them healthy, though it also kept them blood-drunk and passed around to be dinner and sex toys among vamps. “Sick how?”
“Fever. Malaise. Leo sent them to his vamps for healing. But . . .”
“But it’s weird,” I said.
“Yeah. Weird.” Before I could ask, he added, “I’ll find out if they all went to the party.” Troll lumbered to the front door. “Later, y’all. And get this fixed.” He pointed to the covered window. “You already put Katie on the bad side of the New Orleans Vieux Carré Commission with your last construction and repairs.” He let himself out.
I looked at Eli and explained, “Historical commission. I fixed the door last time and it didn’t match up perfectly and eventually Katie had to pay a fine, even though we matched the door to the oldest photos of the house.”
“Last time?” he asked.
“Long story.” I studied the list of names on the spiral paper Troll had stuffed into my hand. “He recognized four vamps and eight humans. We’ll talk to them if the girls don’t turn up soon. Any news on Molly?”
“Just one thing,” the Kid said. “The mileage on Molly’s rental car. According to an online mileage calculator site, the distance from Asheville to Knoxville is eighty-two miles. She paid mileage on one hundred forty miles. Molly took a side trip before she turned in her car and disappeared.”
“My wife doesn’t want to be found,” Evan said, sounding surprised and deeply injured.
“Maybe the other things Molly mentioned in her note to you, the ones that needed putting to rights, are part of the extra mileage on the rental?”
“She took care of something nearby, close to home,” Evan said. “Then she disappeared.”
“Mileage,” Alex said. “Lemme work on that.”
The Kid spent an hour trying to figure out where Molly might have driven to account for the extra miles, but it wasn’t happening. There were too many possibilities. Big Evan had stopped pacing and spent the time sitting on the couch, studying his hands. I didn’t know him as well as I knew Molly, but I knew he was thinking about how Molly had deceived him. I needed to keep him feeling positive, so I said, “I need to know everything about Molly. What she’s been doing, how she’s been feeling, who she’s been seeing, what spells she’s been working—”
Big Evan’s head whipped to me. “I told you her magic’s been off. Plants dying around the house, her not being able to heal them. Her magic’s the biggest part of the problem,” he growled. “She hasn’t been working any spells. None. Not since Evangelina died.”
CHAPTER 4
A Touch of Tasteless Snark
The couple had been having problems, something Evan had confessed to us after an hour of silent hand-staring. He didn’t know what had been going on with Molly.
“She stopped talking to me,” he said, after lots of prodding. “She stopped sleeping with me. She stopped working in the garden. She stopped baking. She stopped . . . singing.” He looked at me, his face stricken. “That was the worst part. Molly always sang. Always. I never remember a time when she didn’t sing. Old songs from movies, or Broadway, or church. Children’s songs. Always singing. The house was silent for months.
“The last time I saw her, she kissed me and said good-bye, just like always. There was nothing different that day, except for this look in her eyes. This . . .” His hands flapped as he searched for a phrase. “This determined happiness. I thought it meant she had worked through whatever was wrong. I had no idea she was leaving.” He broke down then, and turned his face away so we couldn’t see his misery.
I had patted his broad back, as if that might help. It hadn’t. And I had no idea what to say to make it all better.
Now, lying in the dark of my room, I had a feeling that there was a lot of stuff going on with Molly we didn’t know, and the secret stuff was the important stuff. Where had Molly gone on her fifty-to sixty-mile excursion? What had she needed to make right? Why had she said she was coming to see me and then not shown up? And most important, why had she stopped doing magic?
Magic to witches was as natural as rain was to clouds, as natural as the cycle of the moon, as the motion of the tides, the flowing of rivers, the eruption of lava, the growth of plants, the movement of tidal winds. It was nature in all its glory and all its power, and once a witch began using her gift, denying it was said to be impossible, which meant that either Molly was practicing in private or something had happened to her magic. Something bad, or she would have told her husband. Beast padded to the front of my mind and lay down, staring into the dark. Her tail tip, thick and rounded, was twitching just a bit, showing her inner agitation at all the humans and witches in her house. But she had been mostly silent about it all day.
I rolled over and stared out the window. The night and a cloak of fog had closed in the house, making it feel small, isolated, cocooned, and too full. I lay in the dark, wearing a long-sleeved tee and flannel pants for the snuggle effect, hearing people move through the house, little groans of floorboards, small squeaks of stairs, voices murmuring, the sound of breathing. Too many people. It reminded me of the children’s home where I was raised, and none of those memories were particularly wonderful. Unlike at the children’s home, these people were friends and family, but . . . I just wasn’t used to having them all here, all the beds full, the house busting at the seams.
Like pack, Beast murmured deep inside. She wasn’t happy for reasons I didn’t fully understand. And if I would admit it, I wasn’t happy. I flopped back over, my hands behind my head, the covers up to my neck, and stared at the ceiling, the fan above me hidden in the shadows. But if I was honest, I was unhappy for reasons other than the people in my house. I was unhappy because of Molly.
My best friend in the entire world was in trouble. She had told her husband she was coming to see me, though she had refused to see me or speak to me in months. Why? Why would she not just pick up the phone? Why lie? Why all the deception?
Unless . . . Maybe Molly left that note, because she knew if she told Evan that she was coming to see me, he would follow . . . and she wanted him here? Why? My stomach muscles clenched as things started coalescing in the back of my brain, straining to take a form that I couldn’t yet make out. I slowly sat up in bed.