He frowned. “Date?”
“You brought me dinner,” she said with a wink, gesturing to the empty blood bags and the remaining one she had yet to drink.
He rolled his eyes. “If you think delivering takeout is a good first date, you must have had a miserable experience with men.”
Her lips twitched as she fought a smile. “I met my first and only lover when he was selling my father a deer carcass. I’d say this is an upgrade, wouldn’t you?”
He shook his head. “I’ll have to show you how a man properly courts a woman sometime,” he muttered.
“That sounds suspiciously like a proposition.”
Odd that she found the prospect appealing in the least. He hadn’t been terribly friendly up to this point, and the sudden change in attitude made her head spin. She toyed with the empty plastic bag. She was hungry, and he was handsome. It was a bad combo, and she’d probably regain some semblance of sense after she’d had some time to digest.
“Slip of the tongue,” he said smoothly.
“I might hold you to it.” If only to diffuse tension and make him see she wasn’t what he thought she was. “If it turns out I’m not a psychotic murder machine.”
“There’s that,” he muttered quietly and headed toward the door. He barely glanced over his shoulder when he gave his parting shot.
“I will be watching him. He’s hiding something, Priscilla. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll figure it out before I do. You won’t like my methods.”
She nodded. She planned to get to the bottom of whatever was eating at Dean Chapman just as soon as this murderer was caught.
Somehow she thought prying secrets out of a bullheaded teen was going to be the more difficult of the two.
Chapter Six
“What on earth is that woman doing?” Gabriel hissed quietly at her.
All Priscilla could do was stare, gobsmacked. No. No, she wasn’t. She couldn’t.
But she was.
The Sons had retrieved the body of Absalom Nicholson from the morgue the day after his murder. Arthur had been furious about it, until Gabriel agreed to share the detailed reports that he’d been sent by the nearest coroner on Parliament’s payroll. The adage that you got what you paid for had some merit, because the reports had been very thorough, despite the short amount of time that Absalom had remained on the slab.
Within two days of the murder, the Sons were prepared to lay Absalom to rest. Gabriel had alerted her when and where the service would be. Priscilla hadn’t been sure what to make of it when she’d seen Avalon, of all people in the crowd. A small number of townspeople had gathered to watch the spectacle. It didn’t bother Priscilla so long as they remained respectful to the family.
“Who hired her to sing?” Priscilla asked in a horrified whisper. What idiotic member of the Sons had been duped by her faerie godmother into allowing a performance? Which one? She ought to strangle them and perform a public service.
Priscilla couldn’t sing. On the rare occasions she tried, Anna would turn the volume up on the radio until it drowned her out completely. At least she knew that singing was not her forte and stuck to baking for the most part.
Avalon was worse. So much worse. The faerie had once been mistaken for a banshee, and had scared a group of Irish immigrants away from their home. Now someone had hired her to perform at a dead man’s funeral.
This was going from bad to worse, and quickly.
“What is she doing?” Gabriel asked again, looking frankly baffled. “And what is she wearing?”
While she and all the other mourners, besides the Sons of Adonai, who wore their usual white garb, had donned the traditional black attire for a funeral, Ava was wearing a shockingly purple dress. At least it was fairly modest, compared to her usual standard. The neckline only plunged down to her décolletage, and the heels she wore with them were only four inches tall.
Pastor Jameson stood off to one side, waiting for the service to start. He didn’t look anything like his normal self. The man was normally composed, and could be counted upon for a smile or at least a kind word. Right now he just looked exhausted. Dark bags under his eyes told her he hadn’t been sleeping well for some time. Perhaps she’d suggest he take a nap when he got home.
She couldn’t help but think back to the night when they’d found the body. He’d been well and truly drunk, a detail that most of them had left out of the police report. It wasn’t really relevant to what had happened that night. It just struck her as odd, for a man whose faith prohibited alcohol consumption among senior members of the church. To err was human, but ... well, perhaps that hadn’t been so much as an error as it was a cry for help. Perhaps she’d make an extra batch of thumbprint cookies and give them to him while she was out and about this evening.
Mild-mannered Pastor Jameson couldn’t hold her attention for long, though. Not with Ava doing vocal exercises.
This was going to be a travesty. Perhaps she’d get lucky and her godmother’s voice would be so bad that she actually managed to wake the dead.
Pastor Jameson cracked open his Bible at a signal from one of the other men in the group. Priscilla had seen him around before in the crowds around Absalom. She thought his name might be something like Aaron or Avery, but couldn’t be sure. All of them blurred together when they were shouting at her or picketing her store. This man looked like he was much older than Absalom. Perhaps even old enough to be his father. Perhaps that was how they knew each other. They certainly did favor each other. This new man was also fair-haired, and gave off an unpleasant aura.
Priscilla edged her way around the small circle of onlookers and Gabriel followed in her wake. She wished he wouldn’t stick to her like a bee on honey. It was only going to encourage her godmother’s bad behavior if she saw Priscilla with a man, especially one as good looking as Gabriel was. Oh God, what if she decided to serenade them? It seemed like a thing that ever-hopeful romantic Avalon would think was sweet. Priscilla was better fed now but that didn’t mean that she could afford to bleed from her ears.
She jostled a young woman that she knew only as Tilly Hall. She’d met the young woman about a week ago when Martha Reid had wanted to approach Priscilla about catering for Crepes and Crawlies. Matilda was a nervous woman, but a determined and resourceful one when she needed to be. So instead of coming herself and facing the strong possibility of a rebuff, she’d sent Tilly to propose the event instead. Tilly was the fiancée of Matilda’s grandson, Zachary Reid, and soon to be mother of her first grandchild. Priscilla wasn’t heartless enough to say no to a pregnant woman.
“Sorry,” she whispered as she brushed past. Tilly’s hand automatically went to her stomach. Priscilla had never been pregnant, but had seen enough women who were to know that it was a reflex. It didn’t matter if the bump was small or large, all mothers checked to be sure that the baby was all right and used the bulge to assure themselves of it.
“It’s fine,” she whispered, not taking her eyes off the crowd. Priscilla followed her gaze to find them focused on the man who seemed to be in charge of the Sons at the moment. That Aaron or Avery fellow. He was glancing back at them as well. Priscilla pushed past. That furious look was probably aimed at her. She couldn’t imagine that it was meant for the small, round girl she was walking past.
Priscilla took Gabriel by the hand and led him past Tilly as fast as she could manage. It took them another few minutes to reach Avalon, and by then it was almost time for her to perform.
“What are you doing here?” she hissed at Avalon. “I’ve put up with your antics so far, but this is beyond the pale, godmother. You can’t mean to perform.”
Avalon gave a haughty sniff. “Of course I mean to perform, dear. Why else would they be paying me?”
“You don’t need the money,” Priscilla countered. “And I will personally pay you five hundred dollars not to perform. Just leave, and it’s all yours.”
Avalon shifted her weight from foot to foot and refused to look at her.
It reminded her of the squirming of a guilty child. Priscilla quickly came to a conclusion, and it was not a pleasant one.
“You lost your job again,” she said with a sigh.
At first, Avalon’s blacklisting from all the major temp agencies in the area had been vaguely amusing. Her godmother had spent the last several hundred years finding wealthy men and sponging off them. But her parasitic lifestyle had come back to bite her now that she was living in Bellmare. There were no wealthy men here willing to provide for her, and she had no valuable life skills to show for her almost nine hundred years of life.
Even by faerie standards, she was an abject failure. Avalon’s magic was unpredictable and tended to get her into trouble. Which would have been fine, if only she’d intended it. More often than not, she botched spells. She was so bad in fact, that Titania, the faerie queen, had cursed her to serve a mortal family that had been involved in her most recent screw-up. That had been six hundred years ago. Now she was doomed to follow a certain branch of the Pratt family for so long as it still lived on in name.
Which was why Avalon was not going to be leaving Bellmare any time soon.
When Priscilla had first met Avalon in the seventeenth century, they’d come to an agreement of sorts. They’d exploited a loophole which allowed Avalon her freedom, without forcing Priscilla to take her then-husband’s last name. The French weren’t especially well-liked in Salem at the time, and she hadn’t wanted to be ostracized still further.
So, for the last three hundred and some odd years, Priscilla had not used the Pratt name. It had been as much a matter of maintaining secrecy as it had been about keeping Avalon off her back. But having a false name meant that Avalon wasn’t bound to her any longer. The system had worked. Then, five years ago, Priscilla had opened Fangs in Fondant.
She could have kept her former alias, Priscilla Parker. She’d been paying taxes using that ID for many years. It would have been easy. But it hadn’t felt right. So she’d had her name legally changed back to Pratt, and had opened the business under her own name. She didn’t want to keep living under the lie she’d been forced into for so many years.
Unfortunately, with the Pratt name came a link to an incompetent faerie.
Avalon was just as eager to escape the curse as Priscilla was, but they had different ideas on how best to do that. Avalon had been trying for almost a year now to get Priscilla to date, with the obvious end result being marriage and a legal name change that would free her from the centuries-long curse. As much as she wanted to be rid of her godmother, Priscilla wasn’t marrying someone just to be done with it. Though she’d had only one lover over the course of her life, she still had a strong conviction that marriage should be saved for those who were in love. Call it a radical notion, but she wanted to like the man she married. If she married. Which looked less likely with every passing year. There just weren’t any men well-suited to her. Those whom she did like were married or unavailable.
“That office was dead boring,” Avalon complained. “I was glad to be rid of it.”
Avalon had been working for Bellmare Dentistry for a few months, after Priscilla asked her to investigate a dentist on the suspicion that he’d killed his secretary. He’d been a sleazeball with an immortality fetish, but not a killer. He’d landed himself in jail for embezzlement, not murder. To Priscilla’s surprise, Avalon had decided to stay in the position.
“What did you do? Was it magic? You know that Arthur will have your hide for it if you’ve turned someone else into an animal.” It was an unfortunately common tactic in Avalon’s book.
“I didn’t,” she sniffed. “You have no faith in me whatsoever, Priscilla. The new head of Bellmare Dentistry is much nicer than Simon Grant ever was. She doesn’t deserve to be turned into anything nasty.”
“And yet she still fired you despite the brown-nosing,” Priscilla noted. “What did you do?”
Avalon fidgeted. “Well ... I might have been sneaking some teeth from the office. Only a few. The tooth faerie is a collector, you know. She pays top dollar for them. I tried to cut Miss Harmon in on the deal, but she wasn’t having it.”
Avalon sighed theatrically. “So what am I supposed to do, Priscilla? I am a faerie, not a vampire. I can’t not eat, you know.”
“You could have come to me. I’m not going to let you starve, no matter how irksome I find you.”
Avalon smiled a little at that. “You mean it?”
“Yes, I mean it. I find you very irksome.”
Avalon rolled her eyes. “I was doing karaoke with your darling assistant and one of the picketing men asked me if I’d like to sing at the compound. Of course I said yes. But then someone died, and he asked if I’d like to perform at a funeral instead.”
“Which man?” she asked.
Avalon pointed the man out. As Priscilla suspected, it was the newly appointed leader. He was still glaring back into the crowd, probably trying to find her among the onlookers.
“His name is Amos Buckley,” she said matter-of-factly. “And he’s the new preacher out at that compound. You know, I thought it would be a dirty, nasty place. I’ve seen how humans get when they reject technology. Ugh. It can get positively medieval. But it wasn’t as bad as I feared. A little too much Ingalls-Wilder for my tastes, but fine for a human dwelling.”
“You were inside the compound?” Priscilla asked incredulously.
“Of course I was. Did you think he was going to hire someone he only knew for a few minutes? He took me to the compound and we had tea.” Avalon frowned. “Though he did ask a lot of questions, now that I think about it. Hardly any of them about me.”
Priscilla fought down her irritation. “Were any of them about me, by any chance?”
“Yes,” Avalon said slowly, as the truth began to dawn on her. “A lot of them, actually. He seemed very interested in you. And I kept thinking it was a shame he was married, because he reminded me a lot of your Puritan folk.”
Avalon truly didn’t know much about her, did she? Priscilla had fought all her life to free herself from the constraints placed on her by her Puritan upbringing. What made Avalon think that she’d want to go back to a restrictive religion that had made her think that life as an immortal and, so far as she knew, damned, vampire?
Avalon’s face fell. “Oh. He was pumping me for information. I see. I’ve been had.”
“Just go home,” Priscilla advised. “We’ll figure out your job situation just as soon as I’m done here.”
Avalon trudged away, leaving the chest mic that had been strapped to her in Priscilla’s hand. She tucked it discreetly into the inner pockets sewn into her dress. Well, she’d at least accomplished one good deed for the day.
Avalon would not be singing. That had to be a public service, right? Eardrums and sanity had been saved this day.
Honestly, sometimes she deserved a medal.
Chapter Seven
The services ended at dusk. It had initially surprised Priscilla to learn that the Sons of Adonai buried their dead near dark. The belief was that death was the twilight of one’s life, and mortal death ought to be represented by the coming of night. The belief was dangerously close to some pagan beliefs she’d run across, but she kept her mouth shut about that while the Sons laid Absalom to rest. It was convenient for her purposes, and she just knew that Amos Buckley would try to push for change, just out of spite.
Tilly had been one of the first ones to leave, nearly sprinting for her car as soon as Pastor Jameson had finished the final prayer. She’d moved at an impressive speed for a pregnant woman.
“So what exactly did this accomplish?” Gabriel asked her in an undertone as they approached the grave. Two men hired by the funeral home were shoveling dirt into the open hole. Normally they’d use a backhoe to fill in the hole, but the Sons had insisted on doing things without the aid of a machine.
“We learned that Amos Buckley is asking about me,” Priscilla said. “That’s something.”
“Do you think he’s t
rying to frame you? He doesn’t have to do much to ruin your reputation, you know. The case against you is pretty damning already.”
She scowled up at him. Just when she was starting to like him, he had to go and say things like that. “I’m not a murderer, you know. I helped those people.”
“That remains to be seen,” he said in an infuriatingly cryptic tone. “But go on. You were expositing your conspiracy theory. I’d hate to interrupt.”
“You’re a very cynical man, Mr. Winthrop.”
“And you’re surprisingly naive for a vampire your age,” he countered. “Why is that?”
She ignored him.
“You don’t find it suspicious that he was asking questions about me shortly before the murder of one of their number? Or that he just happened to become the new minister when the younger, more charismatic man died of supposedly supernatural causes? I think something stinks here. You can’t tell me that a frame-up isn’t a distinct possibility here.”
Gabriel scratched his chin thoughtfully. He didn’t sport a beard, though he was probably physically capable of growing one when he’d been turned. He looked like he’d been frozen sometime in his mid to late twenties. Vampires’ hair and nails could still grow, so remaining clean shaven was a conscious choice on his part. Scratching an imaginary beard must have been an old habit that he’d never shaken. Much like Priscilla had never been able to stop chewing her nails when she had bouts of anxiety.
“I’ll concede that it’s not totally out of the realm of possibility, but you’re forgetting one thing.”
“And that is?”
“That the victim’s throat was savaged. You know as well as I that something with fangs did it, which makes a vampire a more likely culprit. Human teeth are blunt. They can tear out a throat, but we’d see a very distinct pattern. My associate at the morgue said that the bite couldn’t have been caused by human teeth. We are looking at a vampire.”
“Or an animal. A dog maybe. I know they have dogs.”
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