Chapter 18

T he kitchen was dead and silent without Ingrid, a room without a soul. I was grateful I was alive to be able to miss her.

“What were you thinking?” Hemlock snapped for the third time. “Ordell warned you not to get too close. I thought you were good at following orders.”

He paced, short lengths with sharp turns that made my stomach ache.

I held the ice pack he’d given me to my bruised and swollen throat.

It hurt to swallow. It hurt to breathe.

At least my pulse had stropped racing, but for a moment, I’d been certain I was about to die. If the wards hadn’t been muting Ezekiel’s strength, and if Ordell hadn’t returned, he would have crushed my windpipe and ended me.

Ezekiel slept now, trapped in nightmares once more.

“He’s not himself, Orina,” Ordell reminded me. “He’s living in another time. He doesn’t see you. He sees Loviator.”

He’d thought I was Loviator wearing someone’s face. Arabella’s maybe?

“Where the fuck is Ingrid when you need her?” Hemlock muttered.

“About that…” Ordell said. “I spoke to Ariella, and she confessed that she used a spirit trap on Ingrid. Ingrid suspected that she wasn’t who she said she was.”

“So whoever sent her knows about Ingrid and the spirits?” Hemlock asked. “Who the fuck is it?”

But I was more concerned about Ingrid. “Where…” My throat pinched and burned. I winced and forced out the words. “Where is the trap?”

“We don’t know,” Ordell said. “Ariella…Ruby, her real name is Ruby, said the trap vanished from her room a couple of days ago.”

“Do you believe her?” Hemlock said.

“She has no cause to lie,” Ordell said. “She’s told us everything else, and she knows she isn’t safe if the person who hired her finds out she’s failed.”

“So we have to keep her here?”

“Keep up the ruse and keep Orina away from Ezekiel.”

“I’m not leaving him.” I winced as pain lanced through my throat.

“You have to,” Hemlock said. “You’re probably being watched. We need to ensure that nothing seems out of the ordinary.”

“He needs me.”

“We can get Godor to fly you here late at night,” Hemlock suggested. “For a few hours.”

Ordell nodded. “Okay, it’s a plan, then.”

“What about Ingrid? The other ghosts…I can’t feel them.”

“They’re still here,” Hemlock said. “But Ingrid acts like an anchor for them all. The house runs on autopilot when she rests, and so do the specters. Everything keeps running, but it slows.”

“We need to find her.”

“Ordell and I will search the castle. But we should get you back to the chapter house now.”

I wanted to go to Kaster’s, but if he saw my injury, there would be questions that I couldn’t answer, so I set down my ice pack and nodded stiffly.

Ordell helped me up and pulled me into a hug. “It’ll be all right. We’ll find Ingrid, and we’ll help Ezekiel. He has something that he never had the last time he fractured. He has you. He has hope.”

I had to believe that.

Haiden and the team made a huge fuss of me, and Merry offered to heal me, but the last thing I wanted was for her memory to reset, which tended to happen every time she used her ability on me.

I settled for an herbal salve and some special tea then sat at the dining table while Haiden whipped up a batch of soft cookies, haltingly filling them all in on that had happened with Ariella.

Holly was now in the circle of trust when it came to the Ezekiel issue. The fact that Lorenzo had sent her should have been enough, but we’d opted to wait and see how she gelled. She’d been amazing with the tracking, and now her glamour removing spell had allowed us to uncover a plot we would have missed otherwise.

We had to trust her because her skills could prove invaluable in the fight ahead. If she betrayed us, then I’d put her down.

Or lock her up.

Or something.

But for now, we needed her.

She absorbed everything, chewing on her cheeks in thought. “First someone tries to put him in a vampire coma, then someone tries to weaken him and take his throne, and now someone wants to keep him awake and coherent but away from you because they think you might be the key to breaking his curse. What the fuck is going on?”

“I don’t know, but I can’t even think about it until Ezekiel is okay. Once he comes out of his waking nightmare, then I’ll worry about finding out who sent Ariella…I mean Ruby.”

“What if he doesn’t…come out of it?” Edwin said tentatively.

I’d been wondering the same thing, and all I could say was, “He has to.”

“In the meantime, we might have a solid lead on the missing persons,” Padma said. “Tell her, Holly.”

Holly set her cup down and sat forward, forearms braced on the table. “I’ve been seeing this guy for a couple of weeks. We do lunch sometimes or meet for a drink after work. Anyway, I met up with him after work today, and he took me to this hole-in-the-wall bar. We were chatting to the owner, and she was moaning about how the streets aren’t safe and how many people have gone missing and how the fucking Sangualex are doing shit about it. I mean, I told her we were looking into it but getting nowhere, and she got real excited. Asked if I’d spoken to Rodney. Turns out this Rodney guy has been interviewing a bunch of people who have lost someone…Turns out this is much bigger than we could have imagined. A bunch of the accounts mention a white van. She says he has a partial plate and took it to the Sangualex, but they kicked him out without giving him the time of day so…” She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket. “I paid him a visit.”

“You have the plate?”

“Not all of it, but enough for us to find the van with a little help.”

“Kaster.”

She beamed at me.

I nodded. “Give it to me. I’ll speak to him tomorrow.”

“Like that?” Padma pointed at my neck. “If he sees those bruises, then he’ll have questions.”

Shit, I forgot about that. “Then I’ll drop him a text with the details once we’re in New Town tomorrow.”

“The bruising should be gone in a couple of days,” Merry said. “But I can heal it fully now if?—”

“No. I’ll wait.”

She sighed and nodded.

“What am I missing?” Holly asked.

“Padma?” Merry gave her a questioning look because their stories were entwined. Was Padma willing to bring Holly into that circle of trust?

Padma exhaled and angled her body toward Holly. “We’re trusting you, Holly, but if you breathe a word of this to anyone outside of this room…”

Holly shook her head. “I won’t. You can trust me.”

“Okay, so it started with a fire…”