“Oh, well. You can’t blame a girl for trying.”
“You should ask Boaz to set you up with one of his friends.”
“Have you met my brother? Oh, that’s right. You’re the kook currently dating him.” She winked at me to show she was joking. Mostly. “I don’t want to date my brother, and all his friends are carbon copies of him. They’re all chest-beating knuckle-draggers.”
“Does that mean you think I enjoy being clubbed senseless and dragged into caves?”
“I do worry about brain damage.” She patted my head. “How many times can you fall for the old want to view my cave etchings line?”
“It’s not the etchings,” I purred. “It’s the way he looks in his saber tooth cat fur thong.”
Amelie rolled down her window and made retching noises that might not have been faked.
When we turned onto Whitaker Street, I spotted the absence immediately. I parked under the light, racing the dawn, and we examined the lamppost. I painted an amplification sigil on my palm, and when that got me nothing, I tried a more complex design on my forehead. Nothing I tried earned me the slightest tingle. There was no energy here other than the manmade, electrical kind.
“I don’t understand how the residual energy can hang around for years,” Amelie said, “and then poof.”
I chewed on my bottom lip for too long, and she caught me at it, forcing me into a confession. “I don’t think this was random.”
“What do you mean?” She darted a glance up and down the street like poof might be catching.
While I filled her in on my visit to Odette, I pulled out wet wipes and started cleaning off my hand and scrubbing my forehead. I watched for Cletus, but he was too well hidden for me to pick him from the evaporating shadows.
“I think you’re right,” she said when I finished. “I’m not supposed to say anything.” She gestured for me to get back in the car and waited until we had both settled in to talk. “Mom got a message from Clan Peterkin two days ago. Her youngest brother’s wife was High Society, but she gave up the title for my uncle. She’s a classically trained practitioner, and she’s continued to practice even though she commands a much lower price these days. She performed a resuscitation for the Peterkins about three years ago. It was textbook. They got a new vampire, we got gold. Everyone was pleased.”
“I’m sensing a but here.”
“All made vampires come with a fifty-year guarantee from the matron of the practitioner’s family, and the Peterkins called to demand a full refund from Mom.”
I twisted in my seat to face her. “What happened?”
“They found his corpse in his bed. He was a husk, they said, drained of the magic animating him.”
“It does happen,” I allowed. “How certain are you of your aunt’s talent?”
“She’s no Woolworth,” Amelie said, a trace of bitterness tucked between the words. “But she’s competent. She was well-regarded until she married down.”
And there was the rub. Any shine on her family’s name from having a practitioner in its ranks was dimmed by her association with them. “What will your mother do?”
“Fight.” There was no hesitation. “Even if the family was at fault, she would fight for our reputation.”
“Hmm.” I considered the problem. “How did the dybbuk get to the vamp without his clan noticing?”
The defensive cant to her shoulders eased, and apology was written all over her face. “I don’t know.” She twisted her hands into a complicated knot. “That was about the time Mom remembered she wasn’t home alone and that her daughter studied very quietly. That’s probably why she came down so hard on you tonight. We’d already been fighting before you got there.”
Eager to draw her out of her misery, I cranked the engine. “Let’s check The Movie Rack.”
We did, and it was much the same. The spirit energy that had animated the sign for so long was gone as though it had never been. No wonder Timmy was frightened. Though, I had to wonder, if the dybbuk knew where to find him, and there was no mistaking he was a supercharged poltergeist, why hadn’t he been, well, devoured?
And did I really have to keep thinking dybbuk when I was ninety-nine percent certain the culprit was Ambrose?
“What now?” Amelie yawned until her eyes squinched closed. “Food?”
“Food,” I agreed. “You can stay here. I’ll run inside the Waffle Iron and grab the usual.”
“You are an angel,” she murmured, curling against the door. “Remember pecan waffles are how you get into heaven.”
Necromancers didn’t go to heaven. We were buried beneath yew trees under full moons and returned to Hecate. But pecan waffles sounded good, so I placed the order.
Amelie was out cold when I returned, so I parked in her driveway and divvied up the food.
“What about Jolene?” Her eyes kept drooping. “You can’t leave her out all day.”
“I’ll catch a cab and drive her home after I eat.” I walked Amelie to her house then nudged her inside before shutting the door and carrying my food to Woolly. “Hey, girl. Quiet night?”
The porch light flickered, the equivalent of a shrug.
“How are the wards treating you?” I kicked off my shoes and climbed on the porch to reach for them. A few stanzas of beautiful music flowed through my ears before scratching and dissolving into a muted whine. The discordant noise threatened to give me a headache. I hated that Woolly was stuck with it for the day. “I bet that’s uncomfortable, huh?”
A few more blinks signaled her agreement.
“I promise to finish the job tomorrow, even if I have to bail on Taz and call out of work.”
A warm glow bathed my face, her gratitude like sunlight on my cheeks.
“I’m going to sit out here and stuff my face,” I told her, plopping down in the swing. “After that, I need to catch a ride back to HQ to pick up Jolene.”
Woolly dimmed, her disappointment clear. She was still not a huge fan of me leaving, though she was better about letting me go.
“It’s all right,” I soothed her. “I won’t be gone long, and I promise to make no pit stops.”
A whistled note had me checking the trees for wind, but the branches were still, the predawn quiet.
I set my carryout container aside and munched on a rolled-up waffle as I went in search of the sound. I wasn’t surprised when it led me around the side of the porch that faced the carriage house. I wasn’t surprised when a flash of movement, the pop of a white button-down caught my eye. But I was surprised when the luminous creature stalking through my garden in another borrowed shirt sketched a courtly bow in my direction before he vanished as a sigh on a nonexistent wind.
Eleven
I studied the spot where Ambrose pulled a Houdini like he might pop back into existence and let me question him if he noticed me staring too long. I didn’t make the conscious choice to go knock on the carriage house door, but I shocked back to awareness when my knuckles hit wood.
Suddenly it mattered that Linus answer.
But he didn’t.
I tested the knob and found it unlocked. This time I didn’t hesitate and invited myself into Linus’s temporary home. The living room still held an assortment of trunks. I smelled maple syrup and pancakes and, below that, bacon and sausage, like breakfast was the only meal ever cooked here. The dining room table contained the same clutter as always. The addition of Linus’s sketchbook was new, and he’d left the book open to the drawing of me. Or Ambrose had.
I didn’t want to think too hard about that last possibility.
The bedroom I saved for last, and its pin-neatness worried me. The bed was made, the quilt tucked snug against the pillows. It didn’t look slept in at all. But Linus was an everything in its place kind of guy. Just because he made the bed didn’t mean he never slept in it. I was being ridiculous. Right?