Page 90 of The Hearth Witch’s Guide to Spite & Spellwork

“Is that it?”

Avery looked at the file in her hand sheepishly. “When you were getting ready for your drink with Hugh, he dropped it off with me… And I, possibly still addled from the geas, forgot about it until this moment.”

Saga looked from the file in her hand to Avery’s face. “You haven’t looked at it yet?”

Avery looked down, immediately self-conscious. “Well, when he handed it off to me, I had a prior commitment that needed tending to, and then today, we were called to a crime scene, so…”

Her heart skipped. “By a prior commitment do you mean being there for me when I met with Hugh?”

Avery’s cheeks pinkened. “You said you wanted me there.”

Saga could not fight the growing smile that spread across her face. “I did.”

Avery cleared her throat. “Well, there you have it. I had made a commitment.” She raised the folder with one hand and tapped the surface with the fingertips of her other. “And now we get to go through this together.”

A moment of emotional vulnerability was rare for Avery, so Saga did not draw further attention to it. It was better to accept it with quiet gratitude. She resisted the urge to inquire further and eased to sit on the rug beside her friend. “Seems a little thin for a murder investigation.”

“You forget, this was not ruled a murder by Scotland Yard,” murmured Avery, fanning out photographs from the crime scene. “They ruled this as the result of an overdose.” She pointed at multiple points of disarray in the photographs. “Impossible to say definitively, but these disturbances could potentially have been our killer looking for something.”

“What else could they be?”

“Depending on the state of our victim, these disruptions could be from his own erratic movements.”

“Do you think maybe our victims all found something that the killer is hunting for?”

“A theory that fits our evidence, but until we find evidence of the object itself…”

“Then we shouldn’t assume,” Saga finished. She took the file herself. Even though the police had written John’s death off as an accident, the contents of the file were sparser than she’d expect. There was the transcript from when his wife had called Emergency Services, the coroner’s autopsy report, the photos Avery was currently looking over… “Both the news article and the autopsy report claim evidence of a drug-induced psychosis, but the coroner doesn’t name the drug, and I don’t see a toxicology report anywhere in here.” She flipped to the back where she found a sticky note in Lahiri’s handwriting.

Winter Court—Sealed File.

“Um.” Saga peeled the paper off the folder. “Does this mean something to you?”

Avery leaned toward her, face open and curious…until she read the note. Her expression crumpled immediately. “Faex.”

“This is bad, I take it?”

Avery took the note as if the simple penciled sentence would reveal more to her if she looked at it more closely. “As I understand it, it is very unusual.”

Unusual did not typically give Avery the face she was now making. Unusual inspired excitement, curiosity, that twinkle in her eye that seemed somewhere between mischief and madness. It did not invoke what was undeniably a scowl. “You look angry.”

“Irritated,” Avery spat the correction, which did not support her claim that she was feeling less than angry.

“Because it can’t be unsealed?” Saga hazarded a wary guess.

Avery’s exhale came from the depths of her diaphragm and bottomed out into a growl. “Because it will require a meeting with my brother in order to do so.”

Saga weighed what little she knew about Lord Blackthorn. At best, it was clear they didn’t get along. “You think he’ll refuse?”

“At best, he’ll refuse.”

“And at worst?”

“He will add another link to my chain.”

Saga worried at her lower lip and tried to imagine how the process of her work might change if any portion of it required her to request anything of her mother. “If the fey have a file on John Hingley, it’s relevant to our case.”

“It might be,” said Avery. “It might be entirely unrelated.”