“Fine by me,” Rye said, lowering his voice, making it just the right pitch so she could hear it but no one else would over the film.
As if on cue, a creak came from above. So, for several minutes, they just sat there, eating popcorn, drinking seltzer, not saying a thing. Then, when it seemed certain Lazarus wouldn’t appear, Rye simply unlocked his phone again, and asked, “Ready?”
Nodding, Embry drew in a deep breath and watched as he tapped, opening the cover page of the autopsy.
Immediately, something caught Embry’s eye. She reached for Rye’s phone, realized it looked as if she were going to cuff the solid meat of his thigh, and withdrew her hand as if she’d grazed a hot stove. “Please tell me if we zoom in that will say Oakley was seventeen notseventy.”
He zoomed in—there it was in black-and-white. Embry’s lipswent numb as she read the words out loud just for added confirmation that her wrung-out mind wasn’t playing tricks on her.
“Tissue suggests vampire victim wasbittenapproximately seven decades ago at or around the age of sixteen or seventeen.” Embry nearly gasped. “That would make her around eighty-seven. Maybe even ninety or so depending on both educated guesses being accurate.”
Rye shifted beside her, running a thumb along his jaw, the Velcro purr still coming off his growing stubble. “I’m unsure what vampires consider the starting point on their age—is it their birth year or their bitten year?”
“I don’t know,” Embry admitted. “I didn’t research it because Oakley kept mentioning she wasn’t bitten, but, like, it says it right there, does it not?”
“It does. And the Table medical examiner lists several biological reasons to believe so.” He pointed these out. “Why?”
“She… Well, she insisted several times that she was a rare ‘born’ vampire. Not that she was made. Oakley told us she was seventeen and eventually she’d just stop aging and stay that way for three hundred years.” Then Embry added, “Ames can totally back me up on this.”
Rye shifted—sitting back into the cushions, recrossing his legs—thinking on this. As he did so, his weight pulled Embry closer, and it was all she could do not to lay her head on his inviting shoulder. As a grounding measure, she scooped up the phone—careful to avoid grazing his sweatpants—and began to read every word on the screen. It was a page filling in as much information about the victim as the medical examiner or investigators knew.
“Why would Oakley lie about this?” Rye finally asked. “Wasn’t being the first vampire at the school in so many years enough?”
“I’m not sure. I just know she said it repeatedly.” Embry shrugged and regretted it immediately because the movement puther hand way too close to Rye’s. It should be illegal how her heart lurched without her permission.
Illegal.
“Wait…” She snapped her fingers. “It’s illegal to turn someone under the age of eighteen. Maybe she insisted she’d been born to cover for her parents.”
“That’s a possibility.”
Embry’s brain began whirring. “And now her name makes sense. Oakley! She told us she was named after Annie Oakley, and I thought that was weird, because Oakley wasn’t a witch.”
Rye’s brow furrowed. “So, you think Oakley kept her original name, even though it didn’t make sense culturally?”
“That’s exactly what I think.”
Rye hummed. “Well, that’s something to note that has a reasonable explanation, perhaps.” Then he leaned over, ostensibly to get a closer look at what Embry was reading, but his head was bowed just enough now that a lock of soft, newly dry hair brushed her cheekbone. Embry cleared her throat as he asked, “See anything else surprising?”
She straightened. “Um, actually, yeah.” Embry reread the information, zoomed in, then out, then back in. She hadn’t imagined it. “See the next of kin?”
Rye nodded.
“Her mother’s name is definitely not one I would’ve expected.”
“Why is that?”
“Because it saysHannah Crawford.”
When he didn’t react, Embry gave Rye the side eye, but even at this close distance, she could see he wasn’t being facetious. He didn’t know. She’d have to spell it out.
“Hannah Crawford,” she repeated, “and unless there are two vampires with that name, Oakley’s mother is the last vampire to attend Raven’s Head.”
Hannah Crawford had been the photographic inspiration for Oakley’s homecoming gown—Allegra had painstakingly designed the ruby-red dress based off 1940s black-and-white stills they’d found of the vampire.
Still, Rye didn’t seem as stunned by this revelation as she did. Instead, he was measured and stoic. “Why is that unexpected? It makes perfect sense that when picking a school Oakley gravitated toward her mother’s alma mater.”
“Because Oakley flat out told us she didn’t know her. Ames did research on the history of vampires at Raven’s Head and found a bunch of information on Hannah—she was homecoming royalty and graduated at the top of the class before absconding to Europe to work covertly as a spy.” And then, because this was Rye and one of the terrible things they had in common was their membership to the Dead Mother Club, she added, “I mean, if you knew that about your mom, wouldn’t you brag about it? I sure would.”
