EVEN THROUGH THE WINDOWS, NORA’S cabin looked nicer than ours. There were lights on inside—still the kind of flickering shadows that came with candle flame, so Nora didn’t have electricity, either. We had to lure her out somehow.
“Can you scream really loud or something?” Leandra whispered.
We opted for something much more childish after a quiet but heated debate. We ding-dong ditched her.
I knocked on the front door of the cabin and then ran, my combined strength and speed from my vampirism and fae powers carrying me away from it far faster than Leandra would have been able to go. Brief exhilaration filled me at the realization that there were some ways my new powers did work in my favor.
I watched around the corner from several cabins away as Nora opened the door and stepped outside. She wasn’t wearing her motherly clothes anymore; instead, she was dressed in see-through lingerie with a robe. What would we do if Nora had company of the intimate variety tonight?
She looked left, then right. And then she scratched her head.
A wolf howled in the distance.
That caught Nora’s attention. She closed the cabin behind her as she went off to investigate.
“That was lucky,” I said to Leandra.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Ren glared down from right behind us. I jumped half a foot in the air. My jaw worked to say something to excuse our behavior, but I hardly could. We were outside when we weren’t supposed to be.
“There’s a safe in Nora’s cabin,” Leandra said. “We were going to investigate.”
“Jesus fucking Christ. Why would you do something so risky? Are you stupid?” Ren pressed her fingertips to her eyelids. “I had to mimic a wolf sound to lure her away.”
“That wasn’t a real wolf?” I asked sheepishly.
“I can’t believe Dee thought you could do this. I have to go tell her she way overestimated you. We can’t hear noises from outside the encampment, can we?”
That would be why Nora was so eager to investigate the noise. She’d brought up the Woods Pack almost guiltily that one time—maybe she thought they were coming back with a vengeance to attack the commune. Cult, I mean.
“If you’re going to get yourselves killed and ruin this entire mission, be my guest. Try not to implicate me when you throw yourselves on your swords.”
The insinuation of our incompetence made my blood simmer. “Mission? Are we spies now?”
“You’re working undercover, aren’t you?” Ren snapped. “Try to act like it. Why are you investigating some random safe? What does that have to do with Beatrice? I bet I know what’s in it.”
“What, then?” Leandra asked.
“A necklace with a sunshine ruby,” Ren said. “Same as Diosa has. But you couldn’t be bothered to ask, could you?”
“We weren’t supposed to reach out to you,” I said.
“No, you weren’t supposed to put yourselves in danger. You were supposed to be the ones who infiltrated the inner circle, not the ones who get caught sneaking around someone’s cabin. You could be killed.”
I balked. “We’re the ones getting access to the inner circle, or Leandra is?”
Leandra’s eyes flashed. “What are you talking about?”
“I never had a chance at getting in, according to Ren. You’re our best bet for it.”
Ren stared at me. I stared back. “Olympia isn’t likely to enter the inner circle because she’s too new. You fit their requirements to a T.”
“Why doesn’t Diosa have another old European vampire to send after this group?”
“Patricia was part of this,” Ren said. I remembered Diosa reaching down into Patricia’s crushed skull to extract a gem from her hair. Just the memory of it made me woozy. “Patricia’s the one who convinced them to move here.”
“Fuck,” I said. I hadn’t actually pictured Patricia as part of this group, even when Diosa mentioned her involvement. Even after her death, Patricia was still fucking things up in Mayfair. “How deep does this go?”
“The point is that Leandra is quite literally Patricia’s people, no? She knows how these vamps work. She knows what makes them tick,” Ren said.
If Leandra was impressed by the compliment, she didn’t show it. “You have got to be more upfront with us about these things.” Like me, she was probably thinking about when her and I had not communicated properly about a werewolf’s death. A minor miscommunication that had snowballed into multiple killings and made her into a fugitive.
“Do you have a necklace?” I asked.
Ren huffed. “No. And I don’t expect either of you will get one.” She glanced behind her. “I can enchant the windows of the nearby cabins so that they don’t see us, but we have to be quick if you want to get your hands on that safe.” She stalked off to the nearest cabin. That was interesting. She must’ve been curious about the safe, too.
Our magical advantage didn’t give us any better of an idea of what the code would be.
We waited for Ren in silence. I clasped Leandra’s hand in my own. When Ren came back a few seconds later, Leandra gave me such an expressive look that it was like she’d said what she was thinking: that I needed to tell Ren about the blood tablets while she could still do something about them. I shook my head. This was more important.
Silent as predators, the three of us covered the distance back to Nora’s cabin.
“She’ll leave the area to check if there are werewolves, even though I’ve told her repeatedly it’s impossible to hear things outside,” Ren said. I wondered if that was an essential part of the magic or just a failsafe Ren made up as a limitation to keep them from knowing too much. She was much cleverer than I’d originally given her credit for. “You have maybe ten minutes.”
Ren grazed the door of Nora’s cabin with her forefinger. The lock unlatched audibly.
Leandra stepped in first, looking either way—maybe for that potential lover Nora had over. Or, hey, maybe Nora just liked to lounge around her home in cute lingerie. Who was I to judge?
My leg fell asleep at the doorway—I couldn’t go all the way in. Maybe another magic thing that Ren had done on the more important cabins. But then, it should have affected Leandra, too.
“Can you deactivate whatever spell this is?” I asked.
A dark expression crossed Leandra’s face.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. How exactly did you plan on getting in?” Ren said.
Uncomprehending, I looked between the two of them.
“You can’t cross the threshold because you haven’t been invited. It’s private property,” Leandra said.
The revelation made me dizzy. How was I supposed to sneak around undercover if I couldn’t break into private residences? How was I supposed to do my bounty hunting job if I couldn’t, either? All the mark would have to do is hide in their own home and not invite me in. No wonder vampires didn’t like to be bounty hunters.
“Can you go in and open a window so I can see what’s going on?” I asked.
“Millennials,” Ren muttered as she followed Leandra into the cabin.
The door closed behind them. I followed the perimeter of the cabin until I got to a window with a soft light emitting through sheer curtains. Quietly, I tapped on the glass.
The curtain parted.
It was neither Leandra nor Ren, but a man in a haphazard state of dress. He looked vaguely familiar in the face area, but his extremely pale chest with its dark tufts of uneven hair distracted me. Fangs poked out over his top lip—a vampire with a little bit of an overbite.
His mouth opened in surprise. I imagine mine looked much the same. One second, he was completely still, and in the next, he bolted for the door.
I ran to the front door of the cabin. It opened with a bang, and then the vampire tumbled out with Ren clutching him roughly by the back of the neck.
“What the fuck, Barty?” she demanded in a hiss.
“Barty?” I asked. It was an unimpressive name for a vampire.
Leandra’s voice filtered in from farther inside the cabin. “Why does that sound familiar?”
“I practically live here,” he said. “I’m Nora’s boyfriend.”
Ren snorted. “Nora doesn’t have a boyfriend. You’re a plaything at best.”
“Ask him if he can invite me in,” I hissed.
“Are you serious?”
“He said he lives here!”
“Invite her in, dumbass,” Ren said in his ear.
“I won’t do that.”
Finally, Leandra’s words registered. The name did sound familiar. Where the hell had I heard it before? I thought back over the last several days. They’d felt as long as several lifetimes.
Something clicked. “Do you have a demon girlfriend who thinks you ran out on her?”
Even in the dim light, his face grew several shades paler. “Fine. Come in.”
Tentatively, I inched my foot toward the door. No odd falling asleep sensation. I could go inside.
I hoped whatever magic Ren used on the cabins was sufficient to keep other people from observing us. We had caused quite a ruckus already, and it wasn’t likely to end now that we had a witness.
The four of us shuffled into the foyer of the cabin. The inside was generic, if a bit decadent. There were some trinkets along the fireplace—action figurines I didn’t recognize—that made the space feel somewhat more lived in.
“You can’t tell Whitney,” Barty was saying to Ren. “She’ll flay me alive.”
“I have no idea who that is,” Ren said. She dropped him to the floor. “You guys know this twerp too?”
“He has a kill bounty listed,” Leandra said.
“The one Dee covered for? How could that be him? He’s brand-spanking-new. That’s great for the commune’s cover. I’ll be sure to inform Nora about that when I get a chance.” Ren shifted a rug that Barty’s body had crumpled with the toe of her boot. “Go get the safe, Leandra.”
Leandra wandered off to retrieve it, leaving the three of us alone.
“They starved him out for initiation,” I said with wonder. “And he got out and attacked his girlfriend for blood?”
“If he did escape this place, they didn’t tell me about it. I think Dee just rushed to cover up anything to do with the cult so that the council didn’t suspect anything. She didn’t give me a name. It probably wasn’t important to her.” Ren tilted her head at him. Maybe her being on probation meant that she didn’t get the inside scoop here. A newbie escaping seemed like it should have been a bigger deal.
But it didn’t explain why he would’ve had one of those gems already. “How did he attack her in the sunlight, though, if he’s so close to initiation?”
Ren’s eyes flashed. “Older European vampire. They get in easily.”
“This pathetic chump?” And in so little time?
As if to prove my point, he was shaking a bit, watching us with wide eyes.
“Where’s your gem?” Ren demanded.
Leandra returned empty-handed. “The safe’s connected to the wall. Won’t come out unless I rip it out, which doesn’t seem like a good idea.”
“Y-you’re going to rob Nora?” Barty asked.
Leandra shrugged. “What’s worth keeping in a safe?”
“Where is your goddamn gem?” Ren asked between clenched teeth.
He touched the space between his collarbones. There was nothing there; no necklace, not even a shirt. “I don’t have one.”
“Yes, you do. You were outside during the day. How did you do it without a necklace?”
Leandra caught my gaze across the room. I got the sense that we were thinking the same thing. Necklaces that let vampires walk in the sun. It hardly seemed possible, even with all the evidence at hand. I couldn’t fathom how powerful the magic in those gems needed to be to bypass one of vampirism’s biggest weaknesses. I’d have to see it with my own eyes to really believe it.
We filtered into the bedroom. On top of a dresser, a small black was indeed caulked to the wall—but it probably took less than vampiric strength to rip out. Maybe Nora was very sure of the security of her cabin. But then why bother caulking it at all?
“Any idea what the code would be?” Leandra asked Barty.
“You guys didn’t even figure out the code before attempting this?” Ren sat down on the bed, defeated.
Trembling, Barty made his way over to Leandra. “I know the PIN.” She leaned away from him as though he smelled bad. “But Nora also knows when the safe is opened. She’ll be aware someone broke in.”
“What if we pin the blame on you?” I suggested.
“She won’t believe that. I promised not to do it again.”
“You stole her gem,” Ren guessed. “That’s how you were able to get out. Son of a bitch.”
“She forgave me,” he insisted, as though he needed to convince himself.
“Just put the damn code in,” Ren said.
His shaky fingers moved to set the numbers in place. I watched with awe. The number he entered was a four-digit year—three hundred and two years ago. The top-secret code was just her birthday. Not exactly the height of security.
The door of the safe clicked. A deeper thunk sound emitted from somewhere below us. “What the fuck was that?”
“That’s why she’ll know I opened it,” Barty said. “Oh, God.”
“We have to get out of here right now.” Ren grabbed Leandra’s shoulder and then mine, nudging us toward the door. “That was too loud. She’s going to come running back.”
Leandra wrenched from her grasp. The safe door smacked against metal, a loud pinging noise that could certainly be heard outside. She reached in and extracted a bright red gem on a string, glowing so brightly it was hard to look at.
I looked at her face instead. The red reflected against her skin, luminous in her irises. I had a visceral memory of the scene from Aladdin where the monkey sees treasure in the Cave of Wonders. Fear struck me like a physical force, not because we were at risk of being caught, but because I recognized that look on her face.
She wanted one for herself.
Ren snatched it out of her hand and threw it back into the safe. “Let’s go, Leandra. Right now.”
Dazed, Leandra blinked a couple of times. And then she followed Ren out of the cabin.
❧
Sitting on the bed in our locked cabin next to Leandra was an exercise in agony. I felt like if I didn’t get outside, I was going to crawl out of my skin. Increasingly, my thirst stole my attention like a frequent guest, pulling at my veins and aching at my gums, demanding to be quenched.
“We’ve learned nothing about Beatrice,” I said. “I don’t understand anything about this place. Diosa and Ren keep calling it a cult. What about it makes it a cult?”
Up to that point, Leandra had been quiet, staring off into the distance. “It’s isolated. Cut off from society. Strict rules for how to live and act.”
“That’s the thing, though. Wasn’t the Woods Pack like that? How is this any different? What makes something a cult? A charismatic leader who abuses power? I don’t even know who the leader of this community is, or if there even is one. We only seem to be interacting with the small fish around here. I haven’t had any ideology pushed on me and nobody has forced me into a blood pact. They let people leave and interact with Mayfair and the outside world. So what about it makes it a cult?”
“The sun worship?” Leandra offered up. “I don’t exactly have Wikipedia at my disposal to research cult characteristics.”
I thought of the noise that resounded in the floor when we snuck into the cabin. “There’s something underneath Nora’s place,” I said.
“Yes, probably. Or you set off some booby trap she had in place so she’d know if someone broke into her safe.”
“Are you not curious about this?”
She settled a hand on my thigh. “We don’t have answers to what makes this place a cult. If Diosa thought that was something we should know, then we would know it.”
“She used Beatrice to get us here,” I said. “But we haven’t seen any signs of her. Do you think she lied?”
“It’s possible.” Leandra squeezed my thigh. “But her girlfriend’s life is kind of on the line here. Would she put her in unnecessary danger by having her look after us?”
That was a good point. “What can we do next?”
“We need to get back into the safe.”
I tried to read the expression on her face—a little distant, like her mind was somewhere far away. Possibly back in Nora’s cabin, holding that gem. “Do we? It was just the gem in there, right? What else is there to look into?”
She was silent for a moment. “When I held it…I could feel the strength of the magic there, Olympia. I’ve never felt anything like that in my life. I could have done anything. I could have run outside into the sunshine and not been eviscerated. For just a second, I was invincible.”
This was a delicate subject. She’d dedicated several years of her life to the pursuit of true immortality based on the model of Viktor Lehmann.
And Diosa claimed he’d been part of this cult.
“I get what it means to you,” I said. “But it isn’t going anywhere. We can’t get caught up in that one gem. We know there are more.”
She leaned her head back against her pillow. I shifted so we were facing each other.
“What did it feel like? Could you tell what it was made of?”
“I don’t know.” Her eyes fell to my lips. “You’d think Ren would have figured it. She should know more about magic than either of us. Why wouldn’t she have shared her speculations?”
“Why was the safe cemented to the wall?”
She snorted. “You would question some small detail like that.”
“Hey, I’ve hunted people down based on clues for years.”
“And look at you now. Stuck in this maybe-cult with little old me.” Her voice was teasing, but missing some of its playfulness because of how tired she sounded.
I let out a big breath. The baby hairs framing her face fluttered. “You know how Diosa knew that Viktor Lehmann died?”
Her eyes snapped back up to mine. “Yes?”
“She was in this cult with him. So he wasn’t really immortal. He could just…walk in the sunlight, I guess.”
Leandra turned to face the ceiling. “That makes sense. It wouldn’t have been right for the legend to be completely correct or off-base. I just never had the chance to follow the trail to the right place.”
She didn’t find this cult even when it was present in the subtext of Viktor Lehmann’s journals. But we were supposed to do a thorough investigation for Diosa in time to help Beatrice not get herself killed by them. This task had always been odd, but now it seemed actually impossible. How could we do in a few weeks what Leandra hadn’t been able to figure out for years? Not to mention Diosa, who had been here at least half a century but never managed to crack their secrets?
“Do you know how long it’s been since I felt the sun on my skin?” Leandra asked suddenly. “I would give anything to feel the warmth of it for just a minute.”
I thought about that sometimes, too. That I would never feel the sun again. I suppose I hadn’t considered it like this, though—that at some point, a hundred years from now, I would still not be able to go outside during the day, and I would look back on the time I’d been just a fairy like it had happened to someone else. Left with only a faint memory of sunshine’s warmth.
So badly, I wanted the gems to be something good. I wanted them to be some miracle of magic. Someone cracked the code of a major vampire weakness, and they were just keeping it to themselves.
But magic didn’t work like that. It was too good to be true. The most important matter at hand was the catch behind it all, the checks and balances that made magic function. Something this huge had to have some sort of blowback.
I saw the same look on Leandra’s face, hungry like mine but in a very different way. It could be that it made people obsessed with it like the ring from Tolkien. That seemed too simplistic, though. Diosa was no worse for the wear for having hers, as far as I knew.
A light snoring started up next to me. I watched Leandra for a moment, pushing down the instincts that made her skin look good enough to sink my fangs into. Touching the gem had distracted her, or else she would have bothered me again about feeding.
There was someone here who had answers—Nora. And I was sick of harvesting crops and feeling like an idiot about making no progress.
First thing tomorrow, I was going to march up to Nora and demand answers.