Page 46 of Slayer

The back door to the room opened, and Celia glanced over her shoulder, so I followed her gaze.

A petite woman in her fifties with dark hair threaded with silver stepped into the room and took a seat in one of the pews, her movements deliberate. She was dressed stylishly in an ankle-length fur coat and white-rimmed sunglasses with a designer bag.

Celia went rigid beside me.

The woman kept her sunglasses on, but I could practically feel her staring at me from here.

“Kitty Sinclair, this is a closed case, but because you are related to the deceased, I will allow you to stay,” the judge said to her.

Kitty Sinclair?

“The devil herself,” Celia muttered to me.

“Oh, how kind of you,” Kitty drawled. “Since no one asked me before digging up my husband’s body,” she snapped.

“Ex-husband,” Celia whispered loudly.

The judge shot Kitty a glare, and I heard no more from behind me.

A man in a three-piece suit walked over to the podium, smoothing his jacket as he moved.

A short woman in black hunter fatigues appeared suddenly behind the judge, and I realized she’d been there the entire time. The judge’s desk was up on a dais three feet in the air, and it had hidden the small woman. I admired her black leather hunter armor with handcuffs at her waist and a small dagger in her belt.

I now found myself wondering if they had jails here.

“State your name and occupation for the court,” the woman, clearly a bailiff of some sort, told the man in the three-piece suit.

He peered at me, and there was something in his gaze. Curiosity?

“Dr. Benson Carter, postmortem DNA geneticist.”

Whoa, fancy title.

The woman nodded. “Do you swear on the hunter codex that what you are about to report is true to the best of your knowledge and expertise?” she asked him, pulling out something that did not look like the Bible as he placed his hand on it.

“Yes, ma’am.”

He pulled out some papers from his pocket, and Celia’s hand slipped into mine under the desk and squeezed, her grip firm.

“I regret to inform the claimant—” he said, gesturing to me, and my stomach fell.

No.

I knew it.

Everyone was being nice to me because they thought I was Molly’s, and I wasn’t…

I pulled my hand from Celia’s, and she frowned at me.

“—that I was unable to find any link to the paternal side of Stella’s DNA. Nothing in our database nor the worldwide databases shows a match.”

Celia bristled beside me. “And her maternal side?”

The man shared a slow, regretful look with Headmistress Rubina.

“Based on the DNA exhumed from Robert Sinclair, Stella is, in my professional opinion, the descendant of Molly Sinclair.”

I gasped, sitting there in absolute shock.