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I swung into the forest and followed the gentle murmur until I found the creek. It ran through the middle of a wide strip of cleared land separating two sections of plantation trees, which allowed the gathering brightness of the day to glitter off the trickle of water running along the creek bed. The erosion higher up the banks said that while the flow was currently light, in winter it was a very different story.
I studied the ground for several seconds but couldn’t spot anything untoward, so I went right and followed the little stream back toward Aiden’s position. It wasn’t easy, thanks mainly to the gorse that had taken hold across much of this wider strip. Even at the best times, it was hard to move through that shit without getting snagged or scratched. In a crop top, it was next to impossible.
I was probably halfway there when I spotted the faintest furrow on my side of the riverbank.
Someone had slipped, and while they’d caught their balance relatively quickly, they hadn’t bothered covering their tracks.
But it wasn’t so much the slip that had my heart racing, but the tiny strip of material hanging from the end of a particularly nasty-looking gorse bush halfway down the bank. Sometimes, just sometimes, I could grab impressions from clothing, though I wasn’t entirely sure that scrap would be big enough to be useful.
There was only one way to find out.
I backtracked a little to find a section of bank not covered by the nasty-looking gorse, then carefully went down and across. The slide marks weren’t particularly deep, but whoever had slid had landed hard enough to leave a largish print. Maelle had said her maker was petite, and both the small print we’d found in the summoning circle and the bite on Rosie’s neck backed that up, so this had to belong to someone else. Unless, of course, Marie was endowed with unusually large feet.
I bent and took a series of photos for Aiden and sent them across, adding a GPS location so he could find it later. Then I carefully walked up the steep incline to the spiky bush, taking a few more photos of the scrap before shoving my phone away and carefully—warily—pressing the scrap’s edge between two fingers.
Images flicked rapidly across my psychometry senses, memory ghosts that were already fading into nothingness. In rapid succession I glimpsed the back of a woman wearing a pale, high-collared shirt, her golden hair caught up in a looped ponytail. Marie—of that I had no doubt. Ahead of her were two men, their short dark hair visible over the top of hers. The light sphere that bobbed along above the lead hiker’s head cast a strange purplish glow across the trunks of the nearby pines and was very definitely a darker magic in nature. Then there was a sharp movement, an oddly eloquent but heavily accented curse, and the ghosts faded, leaving little more than a voice echoing through my mind.
The scrap of clothing belonged to a woman. AFrenchwoman who was part of Marie’s entourage, possibly a fledgling rather than a lover.
I released the scrap, then turned and walked down to the creek. There were no further footprints visible, either on this side or the other. I nevertheless stepped over the water and walked up the opposite bank to double check, but there was nothing to find.
That didn’t really surprise me. Whatdidwas the fact they’d made no attempt to cover that slip or bothered to retrieve the material. I doubted it was carelessness but rather that they were already covering their scent and didn’t believe there was any danger in leaving such tiny traces when there was no trail to lead the rangers to this location.
I crossed the creek again and made my way back to Aiden. Ciara—who wasn’t only the coroner but also his sister—squatted next to the body but glanced up as I stepped past the trees.
“Lizzie,” she said, her expression and tone friendly. “I don’t want to give offence or anything, but it would be nice to actually see you somewhereotherthan a murder scene.”
“Well, you could always visit the café,” I said, amused. “There’re free brownies on offer for all rangers and coroners.”
“With my waistline? Unlikely.”
It was wryly said, and I couldn’t help smiling. Ciara’s build was pretty typical of most werewolves—she was tall and rangy, with hair that was on the browner side of the O’Connor pack’s silvery blonde and a sharp but pretty face. She certainlyhadn’tput on any weight in the year I’d known her. Indeed, weight was something most wolves didn’t have to worry about, thanks to their faster metabolic rate. Luckily for me,thatwas one of the DNA adaptations the wild magic was making, which was just as well given the copious amounts of cake I’d been eating recently.
“Received the images you sent,” Aiden said. “Did you find anything else?”
“A scrap of material that came from the clothing of a woman in the company of another who matched the description Maelle gave me of her maker.”
“That description being?”
I quickly told him and then added, “I wouldn’t be putting out an APB though. She’s not just a vampire, remember, but also a very old sorceress.”
“Any way you and Monty can come up with a means of tracking her?”
I shook my head. “Not without Maelle’s help, and right now, she’s not in the mood.”
Annoyance flickered through his expression. “And I’m guessing she’s not likely to change her mind?”
“Not until Marie makes a direct attack on her.”
“Oh, that’s great news,” Ciara muttered. “A vampire war is all we fucking need in the reservation.”
“Look on the bright side,” I said. “If they’re picking off each other’s people, they’re not attacking Castle Rock inhabitants.”
She gave me the sort of look that suggested she was in no way comforted by this thought. “Rosie isnotone of Maelle’s people.”
That was true. I glanced at the time and then at Aiden. “Can I borrow your truck? The gossip brigade are booked in for brunch, and I need to get back to help prepare everything.”
He tugged his keys from his pocket and tossed them over. “Is there any reason they’re hitting the cakes so early?”
