“I haven’t seen her since we returned to New York,” he replied. Something in his tone bespoke trouble.
“Why is Bella mad at you, Harker?”
“She’s not mad. Your sister never gets mad.”
“No, my prim and proper witch sister just gets this irritated crinkle between her eyes as she stares at you in quiet disapproval.”
Harker frowned, and I knew it wasn’t just because of the lack of useful evidence we’d found in the first debris pile.
“Ok, Harker. Spill the beans. What did you do to annoy Bella?” I asked him.
“What makes you think I did anything?”
I folded my arms over my chest and shot him a hard look.
“Bella didn’t want to go back to New York,” he admitted. “She wanted to stay and help you. But I told her it wasn’t safe.”
“You did more than tell her, didn’t you?”
“I escorted her back to the New York University of Witchcraft.”
“And?”
“And I ordered the department heads not to allow anyone to leave their campus until further notice.”
I choked out a laugh. “No wonder Bella isn’t talking to you.”
He stiffened. “It’s for her own safety. And considering what’s going on right now in the world, all the supernaturals being targeted and killed, she’s safer inside those walls.”
“And I suppose you told her exactly that?”
“Of course.”
“Harker, that’s not how a relationship works. You can’t just decide what’s best for her and ignore what she wants—”
I fell silent, suddenly reminded of my argument with Nero. And I wasn’t on the right side of my own lecture.
“You’re suddenly uncharacteristically quiet,” Harker commented.
I shook myself. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. I like you better when you don’t talk.” He flashed me a grin.
I snorted. “Come now, Harker. Don’t waste your best lines on me. Save them for Bella.”
“Something is wrong.”
“Yeah.” I expelled a sigh of pure exasperation—and the crazy thing was, at least half of that exasperation was directed at myself. “I can trust you, right?”
His brows drew together. “Is this a trick question?”
“Yes.” I forced a smile, but it faded as soon as it touched my lips. “Nero isn’t speaking to me right now.”
“Why not?”
It’s a long story, I thought, knowing he would hear me. I didn’t dare speak about this aloud, considering the highly illegal nature of my actions. Before our wedding, I got Nerissa to give me a potion to prevent conception because I won’t bring a child into this world when Faris, Grace, the gods, demons, Guardians, and who-the-hell-knows-who-else would all try to take her from us and use her as a weapon. Nero found out and now he’s mad that I didn’t tell him what I was doing, but you know how things were leading up to the wedding. Nyx had stationed armed guards to keep me and Nero away from each other until the ceremony. We weren’t even allowed to be in the same building. I couldn’t get to him to tell him what I had to do. He’s being very unreasonable about the whole thing and hasn’t spoken to me since he blew up at me in Nerissa’s office last night. I frowned. Ok, I think that about covers it.
Harker didn’t say anything for a few moments. Finally, he declared, “Well, that explains why Nero has been in such a foul mood today.”
“Maybe you can try to talk some sense into him?” I asked—ok, pleaded.
“Oh, no.” He took a step back. “I am most certainly not getting in the middle of this, Leda.”
“But you think I’m right, right?”
“I can see both sides,” he said diplomatically.
I glowered at him. “Thanks a lot for all your help.”
“If you’re really looking for help, I could text Nero and ask him to meet me here because I require his professional expertise in this case.”
“When he finds me here, it will only agitate him.”
“Leda, you’ve made a habit of agitating Nero since you two met.”
“It’s different this time. This isn’t a matter of I tease him, he growls back, and then we kiss. He’s actually mad at me this time.” I clenched my fists. “And I’m mad at him. If he doesn’t want to talk to me, then I don’t want to talk to him.”
“That’s not a very mature attitude, Leda.”
“Neither is Nero giving me the third degree.”
Harker shook his head. “I’ve never met a more stubborn pair of angels in all my life.”
A rustle on the roof of the house next door drew my attention. “I heard something.”
He looked up at the roof. “It’s a bird.”
And sure enough, a bird hopped off the roof and took flight. Funny, I could have sworn I felt like someone was spying on us. Someone who was not a bird.
“Do you smell cookies?” I asked Harker.
“No.”
“I smell chocolate chip cookies, freshly baked with the chocolate bits still all gooey and warm.”
Harker gave me a concerned look. “When was the last time you ate?”
“Last night, but that’s beside the point.”
“Leda, I think that is very much the point. You should eat something. Preferably something more nourishing than a cookie.”
I shook my head. I didn’t smell cookies anymore, and there wasn’t anything sinister spying on us from the neighboring roof. Maybe I was suffering from a double case of hunger and insanity.
Obviously, I still had cookies on the mind. I really needed to grab lunch. Or dessert.
I walked toward the house next door.
“Leda, this here is the crime scene,” Harker called out after me, but I didn’t listen.
There, at the border between the two properties, I found a piece of torn leather stuck to one of the few fence posts that was still standing. An odd symbol was stitched into the leather. It looked like a skull that had been turned into a drinking goblet. Weird.
I returned to Harker and showed him the leather piece. “Recognize this symbol?”
“Should I?”
“I’m not sure.” I folded the piece of leather and tucked it into my jacket, just in case it turned out to be a clue. “Did you find anything?”
“No,” replied Harker. “Let’s check out the other house.”
So we did. The home of the two ice elementals didn’t stand out from its neighbors—except for the rather thick layer of frost coating its entire surface. It glittered in wintery defiance of the hot summer sun.
The fire elementals had been burnt to ash—which really made me wonder how hot that house had gotten—so there hadn’t been any bodies to recover. The ice elementals had frozen to death, so there were bodies here. But it wasn’t the frozen corpses that caught my attention; it was the living, breathing woman in a hooded cape that stood over them.
As soon as she saw me and Harker, she ran for the nearest fence and scrambled up it. It wasn’t the two of us she should have worried about; it was Angel. My cat sprinted forward and sank her claws into the hooded stalker. Angel’s grip was strong, and she managed to drag the woman back down to the ground all by herself.