“You’re quite safe. For tonight.” He extended an arm, inviting me to move closer.

I did, and he put his arm around me, pulling me tight against his side and holding me close enough I knew it wasn’t a purely friendly gesture. We walked in silence because all the noises of the woods had quieted in his presence. Everything hidden in the dark was withdrawing, and I wished I could do the same.

“He didn’t do it,” I insisted.

“Mmm.” His hand squeezed my shoulder and it hurt. “Did young Mr. Chancery tell you that?”

“He didn’t have to.”

“So you no longer want to know what he’s done, because you are so certain he is innocent?”

It wasn’t what I said, but I didn’t feel up to correcting him. “Something like that.”

“You’ve been to see the Oracle tonight.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” I confirmed anyway.

“And did she tell you anything about Holden?” For the briefest flicker his voice sounded hopeful, and it all became clear. I halted again, and this time he was forced to stop along with me or risk knocking me over.

Sig couldn’t ask Calliope about Holden’s guilt or innocence, because he was banned from Calliope’s realm. Some time during the Renaissance they had been an item, and he’d broken her heart. The thing they say about hell having no fury like a woman scorned? You can amplify it a thousandfold for an immortal. Calliope was still mad, and to my knowledge the only time he’d been permitted in her reality, she had forced him to stay outside and had only let him get that far because he’d come to see me.

My eyes searched his, hoping for some further evidence of the hope I’d heard in his voice. Something in his face had to tell me I wasn’t jumping to insane conclusions. He looked curious but little else.

It only then dawned on me. “You think he’s innocent too.”

“What did the Oracle tell you?” He wasn’t denying it, and that was close enough to an admission to satisfy me.

“Calliope couldn’t tell me anything.” I could tell he didn’t believe me because disappointment knit his brows together. I explained why Calliope hadn’t been able to read anything off me that night. “I was too far gone for her to see my path. She had to feed me.”

I wished I’d thought to visit Calliope as soon as I got home. Had I known how linked Holden’s path was to my own, I might have realized she could give me some of the answers I craved.

“Stupid girl,” he seethed.

Sig and I stared at each other, a breeze rustling the charged air between us. He grabbed my other arm so suddenly I didn’t see his hand move. I knew vampires were fast, but this was unlike anything I’d experienced before. There was no blur of motion, nothing to indicate he’d moved at all. It was as though his hand had always been on my arm.

My heart tripped a little as he bent his head and lowered it to my neck. I was trembling, but just as he’d warned, I did nothing to stop him. He was so tall he had to stoop down to reach me. His lips brushed the skin of my neck against the rattle of my trapped pulse, and goose bumps rose all over my body.

He was doing exactly what I’d done to Nolan, by demonstrating how unprepared I was. The shock of it was enough to shake me into action.

I closed my eyes and called up my vampire half. Between being freshly fed and engaging my werewolf with the run, the vampire part of me had been content to rest dormant, but now I was reaching deep inside myself to pull it out of its restful state. It wasn’t happy.

I hauled back and punched Sig. My new knuckledusters did an admirable job of making a solid crunch against his jaw, and at least this time the sound wasn’t made by my bones. He barely flinched, but he did straighten up and release my arms. My fangs were extended, this time for a fight, not the feed. I snarled at him, and in return, he smiled. Maybe I couldn’t hurt a master vampire in hand-to-hand combat, but at least I could still surprise him.

He started walking again, touching his jaw as he spoke. “Something about the accusation of Holden never sat right.”

I stood trembling in the middle of the path, a trickle of cold sweat sliding from the back of my neck all the way down my spine. It had been a test. One I gathered I had passed. What if I hadn’t resisted? Would he have actually bitten me?

Looking at him as his lithe, tall form disappeared down the trail, I wondered what I was to Sig. Ingrid referred to me as his pet. Calliope seemed to imagine something different, but she never voiced what that was to me. I had just seen the disapproval on her face when he’d come to see me. I’d never been able to understand why he showed so much interest in me.

This time I didn’t run to catch up with him. He was walking slow enough my regular pace was suitable, and I was soon in step behind him. I was thankful he didn’t try to make me walk next to him again. That much contact rendered me at his mercy apparently, and I didn’t want to be at the mercy of Sigvard, Finnish vampire and destroyer of immortal hearts.

Once I was close again, he continued. “Holden is a meticulous record keeper, I don’t know if you know that about him.” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “He has dozens of journals, and he has a keen mind for detail. They go back decades, these books he has, but they seem to have increased in number in the last five or six years.”

The emphasis on the time wasn’t lost on me. Holden had been assigned the unwelcome task of becoming my warden six years ago.

Sig continued. “See, Holden has records of everything. He wrote about meeting you for the first time. I believe his phrasing was ‘irritating teenager hell-bent on her own destruction, won’t live out the year’.” His muted Scandinavian accent dropped away in a perfect imitation of Holden. It was so spot on I was too stupefied to even reply to the insult. Besides, when Holden met me, I had been a stupid, foolhardy sixteen-year-old. His description was almost polite.

“So, Holden wrote a lot. What does that prove?”

Sig shot me a warning look over his shoulder. So this was going to be a monologue, not a discussion. I could handle that, couldn’t I?

“Funny thing about those journals is that he stopped sharing them with the council about two years ago. Funnier still, most of Holden’s current problems can be traced back about that far.” He paused and looked at me meaningfully.

I still didn’t understand. Nor did I think any of what he mentioned was very funny. So Holden had journals, and he kept them a secret. Big deal. If I had a diary, I wouldn’t want Sig to read it either.

Then something occurred to me. “Wait, I know you can’t tell me what he’s accused of, but if it’s something specific, there must be a date involved. Can you tell me when it happened?” My heart skipped a beat. If Sig believed Holden was innocent, then maybe there was a way to get his help without ignoring the rules of the Tribunal.

He smiled and put his hands back in his pockets.

“Dates.” He looked up at the dark night sky and rocked back on his heels. Then he turned to leave, speaking as he walked. “Dates can be so fleeting. I can say things like August 14, 2009. Or December 6, 2008.” I stopped breathing when he said the latter. My birthday? “I don’t know if dates will help you. I just know something didn’t sit right about the warrant.”

Sig vanished into the darkness, leaving me alone and cold against the heat of the summer night. He had told me something important; I just wished it wasn’t shrouded in so much mystery.

Why couldn’t vampires ever say what they meant?

Chapter Seventeen

When I awoke the next night, there was a voicemail from Lucas waiting on my cell phone. It was short and to the point. “I’ll be at Two Moon Grill at ten, and I hope you’ll meet me there.” After I’d listened to it for the twelfth time, I stopped arguing the multitude of reasons I couldn’t go—I had to find who was framing Holden, after all—and settled on one very good reason I should go. I had a werewolf king who was in love with me.

Problem was, I had been neglecting a major part of my warden assignment, and if I didn’t want Sig sending Brigit to live with me again, I was going to have to check in on my charge. The last thing I needed was more attention being drawn to me because I wasn’t doing my job for the council, and at least this job I was still somewhat willing to do.

That was how I found myself seated at the foot of a king-sized bed, in a cozy, furnished apartment in Chelsea. How the council had found an apartment in Chelsea that could hold a king-sized bed was beyond my comprehension, but Brigit seemed blissfully unaware of how lucky she was.

I’d arrived at the apartment about ten minutes earlier, and the entire time I hadn’t gotten a word in edgewise.

“…says there’s this amazing place off of Delancey that does these incredible Thai massages. And then, when I was at that other place? You know, the one where they have all the trees in the windows?” I had no clue what she was talking about. “Anyway, someone else told me there’s a busboy there who will let you…”

I stopped listening, because I was entirely certain I didn’t want to know what said busboy would let a buxom young vampire do to him. Brigit was speaking to me from the depths of her closet, and every so often her voice would muffle as she tried on whatever it was she was finding in there.

Climbing off the foot of the bed, I took time to survey the apartment, curious as to what kind of arrangements Sig had managed to make for her on such short notice.

The living room and kitchen were classic New York—cramped and hot. The kitchen was smaller than mine, with barely two feet of counter space between the two-element stove and the ancient fridge. There wasn’t room for a table, though I doubted Brigit would notice, considering all of her food was stacked in individual bags inside the fridge. The kitchen had no upper cupboards, but there were hooks on the wall where pots and pans had once hung. While the paint on the lower cupboards had probably once been white, years of smoke from a previous tenant had left them an unpleasant yellow-brown. The floor was the type of tile that had been popular in kitchens throughout the late seventies. That is to say hideous brown linoleum.