AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“There’s a back door.”
Even though Cal was handy in a crisis, right now he was getting on my nerves. “I saw Katrine hanging around outside Ian’s clinic last night. We drove past and straight to the Fosters’. She could have gone anywhere. She’s probably holed up with—” I stopped.
She could be with anyone, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to say so until we knew what had happened. This could end badly, and I didn’t want to have spoken ill of the dead.
But I doubted Katrine was a victim of the Raven Mocker. The witch tended to go after people in their own beds, although that didn’t mean it had to. Still, if Katrine were dead by Cherokee witch, this would be the first time we had no body and the first time, as far as we knew, that the Raven Mocker had killed so many times in one night. The violence was escalating.
“Start searching for her,” I said. “I’m sure she’ll turn up.”
I only hoped she turned up alive.
* * *
“I gave Katrine a buzzard feather, too,” Ian said as we drove away.
“When?”
“When I gave her the jar of vitamin solution. I’ve been giving a feather to every person who comes into the clinic. Figured it couldn’t hurt.”
“It didn’t help, either. Where do you think she is?”
“Like you said, she could be anywhere. But for her to have been a victim of the Raven Mocker breaks the pattern again.”
He’d noticed that, too. It was so nice to work with someone I didn’t have to explain my every thought to. Cal was so literal sometimes he made me want to bang my head against a wall.
“Not that the pattern can’t be broken,” Ian continued. “We’ve already seen that. I just wonder why.”
Considering the first suspect in Katrine’s disappearance had been Ian, I had an idea. If I hadn’t been with him, I’d have wondered if he were responsible. Which might just be what the Raven Mocker was after. Divide and conquer. Get the man who knew the score and was trying to find a way to even it thrown into jail, and leave the woman who didn’t know much alone and floundering.
However, if the Raven Mocker realized we were on to him-her-it, why hadn’t the creature just ripped our hearts out of our chests? It would be easier.
My phone rang. I glanced at the caller ID. Claire.
“Any news?” she asked.
“You know there was another death?”
“Yes. Same as the others?”
“I assume so, though I haven’t heard from Doc yet.”
She sighed. “Why is it that since you and I took over, weird stuff keeps happening?”
“Yeah, why is that?”
“You think that weird stuff happened before, but our dads were better at keeping it quiet?”
“Doubtful. More likely our dads figured out a logical solution and rationalized away all the scary stuff.”
“I doubt rationalizing did any good. Someone would have had to kill something.”
“Maybe last summer wasn’t the first time Edward came to town.”
“Hadn’t thought of that.” Claire paused. “Listen, can you come over here?”
“I’m a little busy with a shape-shifting witch and its epidemic of death.”
“It’ll only take a minute; there are a few things we have to discuss about festival security. Life does go on. We’re going to have hundreds of visitors pouring into Lake Bluff real soon.”
