As the humans filed out of the room, Ilya plucked the book out of Heidi’s hands and gave her a fang-tipped smile. “This is Ms. DeVine’s property.”

“Oh, but . . .” Heidi began.

“We wouldn’t want anyone to think you were trying to leave with something that wasn’t yours.”

“Who would cut up stiff about a paperback?” Hershel snapped.

“Do you know where you are the moment you walk out the door of this building?” Ilya asked, his focus still on Heidi.

“The Jumble?” she replied hesitantly.

He shook his head slowly. “You’re in the wild country, and there are a lot of beings between you and the nearest human place who would ‘cut up stiff.’”

Heidi trembled. Tears filled her eyes.

Her husband didn’t put an arm around her, didn’t do so much as take her hand.

Dismissing the man, Grimshaw studied Ilya and realized the vampire hadn’t been trying to frighten Heidi; he’d been trying to warn her.

Mikhos, watch over me.

Thirty minutes later, Vicki DeVine was still in her office with Natasha Sanguinati. Grimshaw figured that was Ilya’s doing. Ineke was at the front door, tapping one foot as she waited for Heidi and Hershel to get their things packed. Or repacked, since Conan insisted on looking inside their luggage to make sure they hadn’t taken anything from the cabin.

None of the Others took pity on the humans who had to haul their luggage back to the cars unassisted. Neither did Julian. And Grimshaw decided he needed to keep his distance from these people, just in case Darren or Vaughn upset something that had bigger claws than Conan Beargard.

It took more than thirty minutes, but the three couples finally headed for the boardinghouse, leaving him and Julian in the hall with Ilya Sanguinati until Vicki and Natasha came out of the office.

“They’re gone?” Vicki asked.

“They’re gone,” Ilya replied.

“Thanks for your help.”

Grimshaw wasn’t sure who was being thanked, but since the Sanguinati seemed to be waiting for him and Julian to leave, they walked to the cruiser and drove back to Sproing.

He didn’t say anything until they turned off the access road and were heading for the village. “You get any feeling about those people?”

“I don’t get feelings about people, Wayne,” Julian said. “I sense places.”

“What’s your sense of The Jumble?”

Julian looked out the passenger window. They were pulling into a space in front of the police station before he finally said, “It’s no longer a safe place.”

CHAPTER 50

Them

Moonsday, Sumor 3

The four men and their wives met in the Danes’ room in the boardinghouse because Yorick couldn’t even leave to go to the bathroom without that damn dog trying to dig a hole in his groin looking for who knew what.

Damn Vicki. He wasn’t sure there was a way to pay her back for shooting off her mouth like that, but he’d sure like to try.

Vaughn poured the wine, looking pissed and pleased in equal measure. He hadn’t expected to be thrown out of The Jumble; hadn’t expected to be thwarted when he sent Trina to look through the papers in the office and pull out anything that could support Vicki’s claim to The Jumble. But Vaughn said those things were a temporary setback in turning The Jumble into a high-end moneymaking resort.

Yorick wasn’t so sure they would be able to turn The Jumble into anything. Not anymore. The other men had done these kinds of deals before, buying a run-down property and fiddling with the deed in order to add a few more acres of land from neighboring plots. Then they built what they pleased with none of those creatures being the wiser. But those deals, from start to finish, had been made with other humans, had been done quietly, and they had been done before the Humans First and Last movement made that colossal blunder last year that riled up the scary forms of Others that usually didn’t even notice humans. But this? People dying and Vicki making such a fuss, bringing in cops who had no allegiance to Vaughn or the rest of them, to say nothing of those freaking vampires. Too many people, too many things, were watching them now.

When he’d first started flirting with Constance, he had bragged about owning a rustic resort right on the shores of one of the Finger Lakes. He’d known from family stories that there was no practical way to do anything with the place. But it had impressed Constance, who was Vaughn’s cousin, and Vaughn was a top-tier member of the TCC and had barely noticed him before he started dating Constance and had sneered at his business deals, as if they were too insignificant to impress a true entrepreneur.

Then the dating became a hot affair, and Vaughn and other top members of the TCC began commenting on the affair drawing too much attention within their social circle, and Constance no longer found it amusing to be the Other Woman. She demanded that he divorce Vicki and marry her, but she had wanted to keep the house in Hubbney, and the car, and all his other assets, and he had to put up something that he could claim was of equal value and then browbeat Vicki into taking it as her half of the assets. He’d known the buildings in The Jumble were in poor condition, but signing over the place to her made him look generous, especially when he added the cash settlement that almost matched Franklin Cartwright’s estimate of what it would cost to upgrade those buildings enough for people to use them.

Days after the divorce was pushed through, he and Constance were married—and Vaughn introduced him to Darren and Hershel and said they were all interested in investing in this resort he owned to help him bring it up to quality standards. Yes, Constance had told her cousin all about the resort, had talked it up because he had talked it up to impress her. But she hadn’t known he’d signed it over to Vicki so that Constance could keep the house and expensive car and all the other things she had claimed they just had to keep.

Vaughn had been furious when he’d learned about the division of the assets because he had talked up The Jumble and had Darren and Hershel salivating over the chance at running a posh lakeside resort. After seeing that side of Vaughn’s temper, which wasn’t half as unnerving as Hershel’s cold sympathy about troublesome divorces, Yorick had been afraid to tell the men about the wording of the original agreement and that it wasn’t laziness or lack of vision that had stopped any of his relatives from making money off The Jumble.

“Here’s to the Tie Clip Club’s next successful business venture,” Vaughn said, raising his glass.

“We will make a success of it,” Constance said.

“Where would the Clippers be without their women?” Hershel said, giving Yorick a chilling smile.

The Tie Clip Club. People collected all kinds of rubbish, and in school there had been all kinds of clubs. Who would suspect that the movers and shakers in all kinds of businesses, and even in the police and government, formed their alliances by belonging to a club that collected tie clips? Who would suspect that the tie clip that had been specially designed for club members would have real significance when those young men left school and began working in their various fields? While they were in school, members who weren’t society boys endured being laughed at for belonging to such a dorky club—and never forgot the names and faces of the ones who had laughed when it came to awarding job contracts or hamstringing someone’s climb up the business or social ladder.

Members helped members. Saying no was not an option. And that was the catch. When a member asked for help, the rest of the membership was expected to provide whatever assistance they could. It was one reason why the founding members hadn’t stuck to their own social circle when they began recruiting a couple of generations ago. Rubbing elbows with young men who were attending the public university, the tech college, and the police academy hadn’t felt right, but when those men became the owners of their own construction companies, or owned the garages where you could get your expensive luxury car fixed, or became high-ranking members of the police force, putting up with them while you attended the private college along with your real peers made sense.

Just like marrying Vicki had made sense. She had been such a social nobody, it had been easy to dazzle her with the great future they would have together, and he had dangled that dream in front of her during the years when she’d worked to support them while he’d waited for his trust fund to kick in and dabbled with working whenever she balked at making a payment on his tailor’s bill instead of paying the electric company to keep them from turning off the service. She wasn’t the right wife for a man like him, but she’d been useful, and it had been so easy to convince her that his affairs were her fault because she wasn’t enough for any man when it came to sex.