How did they find us?
“They didn’t find us,” Henry said.
Pru growled, the sound rumbling against Henry’s palm as he smoothed it over her sleek head.
“Hush, Mama Bear.”
She growled louder.
“My apologies. Mama Wolf.”
Do you think it’s Roland?
His hand stilled. “Roland’s dead.”
So are you.
“But not in quite the same way.”
Are you sure? Maybe Roland found a means to come back too.
“The man hated witches. He burned them. He burned us.”
With all that blood on his hands, he could probably do just about anything.
Henry got a chill, which was an interesting trick considering he wasn’t really … real. But he was a witch. Roland wasn’t.
One doesn’t have to be a witch to benefit from magic.
Sometimes Henry didn’t even have to speak for Pru to hear him. He never had.
“Roland believed magic was evil, that witches were the tools of Satan.”
Pru’s lip lifted into a snarl. He was tool.
For an instant, Henry didn’t know what she meant, then his seventeenth-century brain translated the word into twenty-first-century-speak and his lips curved. Tool, modern slang for arsehole, fool, and the like, was a perfect description for Roland McHugh.
He was obsessed. He would have done anything to have his vengeance.
“You don’t think he had his vengeance? We burned, Pru.”
And the girls disappeared. That had to have made him insane.
“He already was.”
Precisely.
“The latest murder wasn’t committed by Roland.”
He always had minions.
“They should be as dead as he is by now.”
Pru shook herself, and her sleek black fur shimmered brilliant blue in the silvery light of the moon, its only relief a ring of pure white fur that surrounded her own brand.
Someone has resurrected the Venatores Mali.
“It doesn’t mean they’ve resurrected him.”
The wolf that was his wife turned her all too human green eyes in Henry’s direction.
It doesn’t mean they haven’t.
Chapter 5
Bobby dreamed of the dead.
Though he tried to put his cold cases behind him, only taking out those files and looking over them when he had no fresh murders to ponder—and how often did that happen in New Orleans?—nevertheless they were his failures and he would never rest easy until they were solved.
Two men and a woman—he remembered their faces, their names. He knew pretty much everything about them, except who had killed them. No wonder they haunted his nights.
He woke to the scent of coffee and the muffled clatter of a pan, the tink of silverware. The sun wasn’t up, though the sky had lightened. The red numbers on the bedside clock read 6:15.
He was into and out of the shower in ten minutes flat. Bobby Doucet had never been one to waste time.
Coming downstairs, he considered heading straight out the door. There’d be coffee at the police station. There always was. However, the scents and sounds trailing from the kitchen revealed that John Larsen had taken the breakfast portion of bed-and-breakfast seriously, and as Bobby’s stomach growled loudly—he hadn’t eaten since leaving New Orleans—he decided he should too.
“Coffee’s on the counter,” the older man said, never lifting his gaze from the stove.
“Thank you.” Bobby served himself. The brew wasn’t as strong as he was used to, but considering the coffee in New Orleans, what was?
“Sit. It’s almost done.”
Whatever it was, it smelled too good to miss.
“I was going to make pannukakku,” Larsen said. “But I took you for more of a hoppel poppel man.”
“Sir?” Bobby asked. What language was he speaking?
“Call me John.” Larsen turned with a cast-iron skillet in one hand and what appeared to be a hamburger turner for a very large hamburger in the other.
He crossed to the table and divided the heavenly smelling mass onto two plates. Bobby recognized potatoes, eggs, onions, salami. He took a bite and also tasted cheese, spices.
“Salt and pepper?”
“Shh,” Bobby said, and let the mixture of flavors mix and melt on his tongue. He took another bite, chewed, swallowed, and did it again.
“I was right about the hoppel poppel.”
“If that’s what this is, then definitely.”
“You’ve never had one?”
Bobby shook his head and kept eating. In every bite he found a different taste, each one better than the last.
“It’s a German breakfast casserole. A lot of Germans in Wisconsin. More Scandinavians round here. Which is why I nearly made pannukakku.” At Bobby’s quizzical expression John continued. “Finnish oven pancake. They’re good, but not as filling, and they take forty-five minutes to bake. I got up too late.”
Bobby glanced at the window, through which shone a watery gray dawn. There’d been far too many days when he’d come home in light like that.
John refilled both their coffee cups. Bobby let him. He was still filling his face.