Chapter 20

Nothing good ever comes from forcing an arising on a preternatural person. This is why witches spend so much of their time before they come into their powers in study, to prepare the brain for absorbing all the new and wild things that encompass our world and the worlds beyond.

-A Witch's Guide to the Arcane

Rorick

The most impressive thing about Chief Warren wasn't the medals on his chest or his spacious office. It was his mustache. It was long and full, extending across his cheeks in a salt and pepper gray starkly different from his white hair. I was more aware of his facial hair after the conversation with Quiet about shaving. He dressed with the precision of a military gentleman, always with his medals at his breast on full display.

His presence demanded respect, but his etiquette was greatly lacking, especially when it came to preternatural populations. He respected me because he found me useful, but there wasn't any doubt in my mind that as soon as I ceased to be such, he'd cast me off.

Quiet had already painted a vivid picture for him of the scene of the crime and the evidence she'd found, leaving out specific details, as she'd warned me she would. I kept my word to her, allowing her to tell the story that suited her coven best, and when Warren glanced my way with even a hint of skepticism, I stepped in to support my partner's conclusions.

Warren mulled it over, glancing at Penace's journal on his desk and the stacks of threatening letters beside it. "Murder-suicide, you say?"

"It's all there," she insisted calmly. Though her expression remained placid, the way she sat on the very edge of her seat gave her mind away. "Penance and Alex used the same blood honey concoction in the murder of Jonathan Rorick. As threats began to pile up around them, Penance saw no way free of their consequences. She poisoned her lover, then herself, and moments before she died, she cast an enchantment called the Last Breath."

"The blood honey was readily available at the scene of the crime," I added. "If it wasn't so volatile to handle, we'd have brought you a sample of it."

"It took some time to find the faces of Alex and Penance, but eventually my partner and I managed it." Quiet paused to work her throat. "Penance gave a full confession."

The lie cost her. I could see the pain of it on her face as her gaze dropped to the tile floor and her feet shuffled uneasily beneath her skirts.

She hadn't asked me to lie, but I would do this and more for my partner. "I was also present for the confession," I said, and I didn't feel even a pang of guilt over it. Not when it kept my partner and her coven safe.

"I'll need my people to see this laboratory for themselves," Warren said.

"Certainly," I said.

"But in the meantime," Quiet insisted, "can we agree that I've accomplished what you asked, Chief Inspector? You wished for me to bring you the witch responsible. That witch is dead and gone, but her body is all yours. The matter is resolved."

Warren's mustache twitched as he chewed over her question. Lacing his fingers in front of him, he set them down on the desk. "I will abstain at this juncture from moving against your coven," he said finally.

Quiet released a relieved breath. "Thank you, Chief Warren. You're a most reasonable man."

The chief held up his hand, silencing her. "Assuming that Inspector Sheridan has no further concerns after paying the castle one final visit to look into some of the matters you've brought to my attention."

"That's more than fair," I said, and Quiet agreed. Sheridan was our man—or Hecate's man. There was no doubt in my mind he'd give a favorable report.

Warren concluded the meeting. I rose to shake the chief inspector's bulky hand.

As Warren dropped hints about another "unnatural situation" he'd like to get my eyes on, Quiet slipped out of his office without a word. Warren paid well, and I appreciated the puzzles he sent my way most of the time, but I sensed my partner needed me more.

I parted from Warren as politely as I could, then rushed into the hall.

Quiet was already gone. I moved down the corridor, peaking into open doorways for the sight of her voluminous skirts and her familiar woolen cloak.

"Rorick," Sheridan called as I came upon his office, surprising me. He was standing by the door, at the ready, like he was expecting someone. He lowered his voice. "Quiet asked me to give you this. She suggested you read it away from prying eyes."

I sped out of the Iron and Salt Co. building and found a secluded place farther down the road to open her letter. It read:

Rorick,

I've solved it at last, but there just wasn't time to explain it all to you before our meeting with Warren. I know you'll have questions. I have answers for you, but please give me two nights to put to rights the many matters that require my attention before you visit me at the old firehouse. After that, I'll expect you at dusk.

Yours,

Quiet

* * *

The former firehouse converted into a laboratory was made of aged red bricks and wide glass windows. It stood as the only man-made boundary before the old-growth forest at its back near the historic township. I let myself inside, able to step over Quiet's elaborate wards because I'd been invited. The entryway had an earthen floor built of rows and rows of flowerbeds. A kaleidoscope of moths and butterflies visited the colorful blooms. Pathways of flagstones led to a second door, a rounded metal one like the sort one might find on a ship.

I knocked in warning and found it partially open. I pushed inside to be immediately greeted by hanging braids of garlic. A short dark hall led to an inviting sitting room where music played. Anita wove an intricate web for herself in the corner. I raised a finger at her in salute, and she paused her weaving to lift a foreleg in return.

Gilbert got a wing caught in her webbing. He struggled there for a moment before hanging limply in defeat.

Anita darted side to side along the woven silk in a scolding fashion, then she freed the chunky moth from her web.

Quiet greeted me with a warm smile, a manilla folder squeezed to her chest. "There you are."

She sat me down in an armchair decorated with too many mauve cushions. The music came from a gramophone sitting on a sideboard, playing a plucky tune with string instruments. Quiet's folder was fat with documents. She lowered to her knees on the rug in front of me, tucking her golden skirts beneath her. The folder she set beside her within reach.

"There are cigars and a lighter in the drawer there. Help yourself. Do you like the music?" she asked conversationally, but there was an edge of worry carefully hidden in her tone.

"It's fine." I glanced at the end table but didn't go for a cigar. My mind was too focused on the answers I sought to pause for a smoke.

"The music . . . It's supposed to be relaxing," she insisted, pointing at the wide horn that expelled the jaunty tune. "It's important that you're soothed."

I grinned at her. "It's fine so long as you talk to me. There's a lot I still don't understand, but you seem to."

"You're probably not hungry so soon, but would you like a bite first? Recreationally?" She laid her arm across my lap like an offering, pulling back the sleeve of her blouse.

Tempted, I ran a finger down the delicate blue vein in her wrist. The rush of her pulse under my touch zinged through me. "Later."

She rolled back down her sleeve. Quiet chewed her lip contemplatively.

"Go on," I encouraged her.

She plucked a newspaper clipping out of her folder and set it on the floor in front of her, facing me. It was a halftone photograph of me in profile, taken while I was leaving police headquarters during a case I'd consulted on last year. It was a heart-wrenching investigation involving the death of a ged woman and the werewolf who was her daughter. No one in the family, including the girl, had yet realized the child had caught the curse.

"This man," she said, stroking the image of my face, "this wonderful man," she added sweetly, and my dead heart lurched, "is called Liam Rorick."

I scoffed. "I know my own name. Why are you talking that way?"

"The conversation we're about to have qualifies as an arising. I've done quite a lot of research the past two nights on them. Utilizing dissociation came highly recommended for working through complicated preternatural matters. Please, trust me. For this conversation, we're talking about this man here, called Liam. Not you."

My arms pebbled, worry sinking under my skin and making me feel cold all over. "All right," I said gruffly, because of course I trusted her and that beautiful brain of hers. If she thought I needed to play this strange sort of mind game, then I'd do it. I didn't have to like it. "That man there is Liam," I repeated obediently, and I gripped the arms of my chair to steady myself.

"Liam goes by Rorick because he's always hated his first name."

"He has." I nodded along.

"It's a perfectly common name, but it doesn't fit him." She touched the picture gently, then reached for me and squeezed my hand. "It doesn't feel right because it isn't his name."

I blinked at her.

She pulled out another slip of paper. This one was thin and discolored with age. It was the letter written by Eloise Harker. Quiet continued, "Everything Rorick's dreadful cousin Alex ever told him about his life was a lie, including who he was. Everything except for the one time Alex made a mistake. In a moment of vulnerability, Alex slipped up and showed himself. He told this man here," Quiet said, petting the photo once more, "that they'd been the best of friends as children. It was the one time he didn't lie."

My skin felt tight and itchy. I scratched at my chest and didn't interrupt her.

"This man's actual name is Jonathan Rorick," she said, stormy eyes sinking into mine.

My hand tightened around hers. "John is dead. Probably a vengeful spirit somewhere. I . . . I can't be John."

"He can be John," she said, tapping on the newsprint until it crinkled under her finger. "He's dead too. A vampire. The fastest and strongest vampire I've ever met. So strong he brought down a shifter the size of a house. He's Jonathan Rorick, the first Duke of Castleway. He loves puzzles, and his favorite books are detective novels."

"Just like . . . Liam," I breathed.

Quiet thumbed the signet ring on my finger. "This band was a perfect fit in the castle, and somehow he knew instinctively exactly how it worked and that there was a small key inside. Never mind that he looks so very much like John. He's the spitting image. They could be twins, but how would Rorick ever recognize that in himself? He doesn't have a reflection."

I worked my throat. She fell silent, waiting for me to signal I was ready to continue. The pleasant music didn't fit my current mood. I didn't know if I was ready to learn more, but I nodded at her, propelled by curiosity to fall further down the rabbit hole.

"This man, Liam, supposedly died in a carriage accident," Quiet said. "He was trapped in a cabin and flung into the water. Strange that he isn't bothered by carriages or water at all. But John Rorick died in a fall."

"And I'm afraid of heights," I said, my stomach sinking.

She brought me back to the newspaper, brushing her hand over it. "Thisman is made nervous by heights. Yes."

"Right. Him." I rubbed a hand along the back of my neck, feeling an uncomfortable prickling sensation there.

"John's favorite sister Eloise was substantially older than him," Quiet said. "She had a son about his age, and they grew up the best of friends."

"Alex," I whispered.

"In adulthood, John became a bit of a recluse. He and his similarly aged nephew stopped spending time together. Eventually, John died, but he came back again. Death gave him wings, made him the first vampire. His beloved sister was getting on in years then, and her one wish was that her powerful little brother please save the life of her ill son. So John did. He gifted Alex with the magic in his blood. But John had no idea how ambitious and selfish Alex had grown to become." Quiet paused, her gray eyes searching mine.

"Keep going," I told her, voice rough.

"If it gets to be too much, if you need me to slow down or stop, you have to tell me," she insisted. "All the things that have happened to . . . to poor Rorick. It's important that I'm so very careful with his brain."

"I'll tell you." I reached for her, touching her chin, then her lips, making sure she knew I meant my words. It was a lot. I didn't know how much I fully believed her theory, but I wanted—needed—to hear more of it.

"Eventually Alex met Penance." She exhaled deeply. "What started as good intentions to end the poor treatment of immortals by a ged governing body warped into something so dark."

"They went too far." It was easier to talk about Penance and Alex than it was to talk about the Rorick in the newspaper photo.

"They began dosing John with blood honey," Quiet said. "Not only would it preserve his magic as they administered it to others, but it also kept John confused and sickly. It created a malady of the mind and made him easy to manipulate."

I knew what came next. "John developed a tolerance to the toxin. They had to give him more."

"They gave him too much, and they thought they'd killed him, so they disposed of him coldly. Alex had the perfect location. A place no one would ever look. The empty grave of young Liam Rorick. Liam was a drunk and a gambler. When he had his accident, no one bothered to search for him."

"But I . . ." I swallowed. She was right, it was too hard to talk about all this as though it were my mess of a life. I jutted my chin at the halftone photo. "But he, John, he wasn't really dead."

She took my hand in both of hers, her touch so warm and sweet. "They buried him alive." She kissed my knuckles comfortingly.

A flash of the many nightmares I'd suffered blurred through my mind. The bitter cold. Squirming worms loud in my keen ears. Packed earth, so dense it hurt my fingers to claw through. Dirt caking my nostrils and mouth. "John dug his way out."

"John has a talent for brute force. He's much too tough to keep down," she said kindly, a proud glint in her gray eyes that shot warmth through my chest. "I bet you—I mean, I bet he scared the devil right out of Alex when he showed up at the castle, covered in mud and pursued by ichors."

I brushed fingers through the satiny strands of her hair, the ones that always stubbornly found their way free of her braid. The gesture helped ground me. "But John didn't remember anything."

"Too much blood honey. He had no idea who he was, just vague recollections of the castle and the man standing before him and the name on the grave he'd just crawled out of. Alex isolated him while he recovered. While John lived in the castle as Liam, I believe Alex and Penance went back to stealing his blood to father more vampires, but they had to stop using the toxin. They couldn't risk killing him by mistake again. Some part of Alex probably still cared for John."

"They couldn't risk losing access to his magic for good," I said gruffly, unwilling to be so generous with my cousin—nephew.

"Perhaps Penance took from him during the day while he slumbered. By the time night fell, he'd have healed up and never noticed. Alex tried to manipulate him, tried to control him with guilt instead of the toxin. He encouraged John to become a detective, a useful distraction, maybe even the thing John had always wanted. Something that had been out of his reach when he was a duke. But John isn't easy to control. He's curious and he loves puzzles, and he asks far too many questions for his own good. John left the castle, and now they were in trouble. They'd promised immortality to too many powerful people, and they were no longer able to deliver on those promises. Desperate, they began mixing vampire blood with rare and mysterious substances."

"Fairy bone dust," I added. "Have you figured out which of them killed Alex and Penance? Was it a cleaner on Alex's payroll or an angry initiate desperate for their chance at immortality?"

Quiet's gaze dropped to the manilla folder on the floor beside her. "Neither," she said gently, and she lifted the folder and handed it to me.

I opened it. Inside, two nearly identical fingerprint analyses were pinned to opposing sides. The report on the left was marked as subject "laboratory," and the one on the right was marked subject "wine bottle." I couldn't make complete sense of the entirety of the report—the red ink used to circle loops and whorls in the images looked like madness to me—but I could piece just enough together to recognize that both prints came from one and the same person.

The murderer who'd left their mark on the book in the powder of poison and on the wine bottle that dosed their victims. They were a definitive match, according to the fine work of my partner. Those were her scribblings all over the reports.

"These are a match, of course," I said, "but who—"

"They're your prints, Rorick." She laid a hand over my thigh, and just in time too, because I almost leapt out of the chair.

"No. I didn't do this. I didn't—"

"You held that bottle," she said, "while you were inspecting it for clues the first night we entered the castle. Do you remember? You left clean prints on the glass that I took because I watched you and could identify which were yours. There were other prints too on that bottle that belonged to you. Prints on the neck and the bottom. And even more on that book in the laboratory, the book I wouldn't let you touch because it was covered in blood honey. But your prints were already there."

"I remember the bottle but . . ." I shook my head, brow furrowing. "I couldn't have done this. I—"

"It's fortunate that you'd built up a tolerance for blood honey. Even in its concentrated powdered form, it didn't kill you when you handled it quickly while adding it to Alex's wine. It very well could have killed anyone else. But it did come with side effects. It created a malady of the mind, though a lesser one, thank Fate. You touched it, absorbed some into your skin, and lost three whole days of memories. That's why you thought it was Fratersday when we were fixing the wards together that first night. That's why you don't remember doing it. That's also why I think you were so thirsty. I have a hard time imaging that you just walk around the city that close to blood fever. You needed nourishment because you were injured. You just didn't know you were injured."

She was right. I didn't in general walk around, especially in the winter months, so uncomfortable . . . I could remember feeling poorly and not myself . . . I had no idea I was hurt. I had no clue that I'd . . .

"But why . . . ?" I wanted to protest more vehemently, but her calm assurance was so damn convincing, and the pieces just kept falling together, one after the other, in perfect order. Everything fit. It fit too well, and she'd stopped using the dissociation. It was no longer the man in the newspaper we were discussing. My next breath escaped as a wheeze.

We were talking about the man seated in the armchair. The man who now desperately needed a cigar or two or three. A sharp pain pricked behind my eyes, a massive headache brewing.

We were talking about me. Johathan Rorick. The Duke of the Damned. The man who conquered death.

"That's where things aren't as clear," she confessed, and her touch squeezing my knee helped ground me. "We know you were investigating him. Rorick, you've always been so good at solving puzzles, I wouldn't put it past you that you did just that. You solved it. Who wouldn't want to bring a stop to the man who'd poisoned, experimented on, and buried them alive? He force-fed you so much toxin, he drove you mad and then nearly murdered you. He stole your very home from you. Your wealth, your life, your title. He took it all and then heaped lies upon your head. Lies so buried in manipulation, you could never dig out from under them."

"But Penance," I said.

Quiet's eyes watered, and her chin dropped, hiding her gaze. "Hardly anyone knew about the two of them. Maybe you didn't even know she'd be there. But even if you did, Rorick, she was far from innocent."

"She's one of your sisters."

"She was," Quiet agreed with a sad bow of her head. "She helped trade four poor foundlings—foundlings just like me—to fairies. Don't get me wrong, I'll always love her. I miss her and I wish her ending had been different, even now, but there are consequences for the choices she made. There have to be. That's the natural order of things, and she had to be stopped. I read her journal through from beginning to end, and the entire time I kept hoping I could reach through it and stop her. Stop her before it became so much worse. Stop her before I had to be the one to kill her."

"Your coven would have—"

"Yes," she said sadly. "We would have brought her immortality to a swift end had we known what she'd done. Astor would have been asked to do it, and I would have been called upon to witness it . . . And we would have done it."

"But what you would have done would have been justice. What's been done feels like murder in cold blood," I said softly, my mind crawling through the possibilities, still fighting against accepting all I'd learned. Victim.Murderer. Her theory made me both.

Monster.

"No one ever has to know," she said, her words measured. And then she looked at me as if I were still her partner, not at all a monster. Those were the eyes of a woman who cared very much for me. And if Quiet didn't think I was a monster, well, how could I argue with the logic of the wisest person I'd ever met?

Alex was a true monster.

And I hadn't done it. I hadn't killed anyone. The man in the photograph had.

I didn't remember killing anyone.

I peered at her sidelong. "Your coven won't be as understanding about your theories as you are right now."

"They don't need to know, either. They currently believe the same story I told the chief inspector two nights ago. Murder suicide. And now, if any of them are ever questioned, they can very convincingly give the law the right answers. Protecting you protects them too. I don't make a habit of lying—"

"You never tell lies."

"As I was saying, I'm not a fan of the half-truths I told. But they were necessary. I spared you and my coven with a bit of colorful storytelling, and if that's wrong, then . . . I'll just be wrong this time. I'm willing to be wrong for you. Let me do this for you, please."

I frowned. "I don't want you to have to lie for me."

"Too late," she said sweetly, "I've already lied twice now. For my partner, I'd do it again if I had to. Are you going to tell on me?"

"Of course not." My lips quirked. Then silence fell. Even the music had ended. I had little tolerance for the weight of the stillness between us, and I shifted uneasily in the chair. "Now what?" I asked quickly.

"Now, I think I'm supposed to just let you feel your feelings . . ." She chewed on her bottom lip. "Have you gone mad yet?"

Mirth bubbled out of me, misplaced and ill-timed, but it made me feel lighter. "I don't think so."

"Good." She rose from her sitting position, took my chin in her hands, and turned my face to peer into my ears.

"Are you trying to see if my brains are still in there?" I said playfully.

"They're not bleeding or anything. That feels like a good sign. How are you feeling?"

"Small headache. Nothing serious." I ran a finger up the underside of her arm and heard the rush in her pulse in response. "About that bite . . ."

She climbed into my lap, linking her fingers behind my head. "Feeling peckish?"

"A little. May I slumber here with you when the sun rises?"

"Oh, I insist upon it." Her smile was mischievous.

"Are you planning to hover over me during the day to make sure my brains don't ooze out of my ears?"

She smoothed my hair off my brow. "Something like that, yes."

Her concern made my dead heart squeeze sluggishly in my breast. I kissed her soundly before coaxing her onto the floor. I wanted to begin my meal with dessert this time, rather than end it that way.