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My eyes flew to the man in question. “You knew who the shapeshifter was this whole time?”
“I know a lot of shapeshifters. What’s the problem, Rebekah? What’s going on?”
“I told you about the thing wearing my face. I told you about Nadia. How could you not tell me you knew—” I waved my hand at the girl in front of me. She had my eyes, my nose, my mouth. The only difference was a stud in her nose and the dark makeup around her eyes. Poppet. She had a name.
“To be fair. He wasn’t here last week.” Poppet snorted. “You were talking to me.”
Reaching behind me, blindly searching for something heavy to use as a weapon, I picked up a tea kettle. “Stay away from us.”
“Uhh, please don’t break that,” Matteo said. “That’s an antique.”
Poppet held up her hands in surrender. “I’m not going to hurt you, Rebekah.”
“You shot my husband, so you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t believe you.” I glared at her and inched my way around the cushion I’d been sitting on, putting at least some sort of obstacle between us. “It kind of doesn’t track with your actions this far.”
“Is that so?” Her shoulders sagged, and she dropped her hands back to her sides. “I thought you were smarter than that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I took another step around the cushion, inching back towards the door a little more as well.
Poppet pivoted on her heel but didn’t move from her spot in the center of the room. Her clothes were all black. Her jeans were torn at the knee. “If I wanted you dead, I could have done it ages ago. I’ve been watching you for a little more than a year.”
The weight in my chest gave a sharp pulse, and a dull ache reverberated through my bones. A year? She’d been hanging around for a year, and I hadn’t noticed her.
“Maybe this will jog your memory.” Poppet closed her eyes and her shape blurred. I blinked and the girl was gone. Replaced by a familiar eighty-year-old, with bushy red-dyed hair framing her face.
My jaw dropped. “Mrs. Kingston? She was my client six months ago.”
“Not exactly,” she said, in an exact replica of the older woman’s voice. “Poor thing died in her sleep, before your meeting, so I decided to come instead. I wanted to see how you work.”
“Did you kill her?”
Matteo scoffed. “Poppet’s not a killer.”
“Actually, I am,” she said. “But I didn’t kill the old lady.”
“What!” Matteo’s face paled. “What’ve you done?”
I clenched my fists, ignoring him. “Who else? Who else have you been?”
Poppet arched an eyebrow and her figure blurred again. This time into the rookie cop that found me in the cemetery, standing over Nadia’s body. His lips turned up in a smile, and his hands rested on the gun belt that came with the uniform. “Now, this was a fun one. Your face when I showed up at the cemetery. It took everything I had not to laugh.”
“What did you do to Nadia? How did you turn her into that…thing?”
“Oh, you mean this?” The police officer thinned and blurred again, transforming into the pale grotesque form of the demon that had attacked me, and punched a hole through my chest. The image flickered and then her figure snapped back into the cop. “That blood spell of yours ruined my connection to her form. I can’t hold it for more than a few seconds anymore.”
“And then you were Ingrid, and Viktor,” I said, making a mental note about the success of the blood spell. “Why Viktor? How do you even know what he looked like?”
Poppet returned to the form she’d started with, a dark shadow crossing behind her eyes. “That’s a story for later.”
“Tell me,” I said. Viktor’s lessons about negotiations and pressure points rang in my ears. If she didn’t want to talk about him, then he was exactly the button I needed to push.
“Later. Right now, we have to go.” She took a step towards me and extended her hand.
It was my turn to laugh. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Please, don’t make this harder than it has to be.” She sighed. “Come with me and I’ll answer whatever questions you have. Staying will only put Matteo in harm’s way.”
“I thought you weren’t gonna hurt him?”
