by Tasha Black
Van found himself laughing.
He held the door to the coffee shop open for her.
A rush of pumpkin spice assaulted them.
Van hated stupid things being put in coffee. It was just an excuse to gouge customers. And coffee already smelled so good. Why cover it up with a bunch of artificial chemicals masquerading as spices?
He scanned the shop, taking in the wooden floors, art prints and trendy clientele. There was a private table in the corner, and one seat had its back to the wall.
“Come on,” he took her arm and led her back to the table, pulling the chair opposite the wall out for her, so he’d be able to keep an eye on the place from the other seat. He’d had enough surprise visitors for one day.
When he leaned on the table to talk to her, he caught her examining his tattoos - a jumble of images he’d collected in his travels. They seemed random, but each one had a special meaning to him, and a few had some pretty good stories behind them.
“You should get one,” he said.
She looked at him quizzically.
“A tattoo,” he offered.
She wrinkled her nose at the thought.
“I see,” he said.
“No,” she said, “It’s not that. I just…”
“It’s cool,” he replied. “My life is basically one big series of bad choices, all stacked up, one on top of the other, ready to come tumbling down the next time the wind blows the wrong way. So I make it a habit never to judge anyone.”
“Oh,” she said softly.
When he smiled at her, she smiled back, and he heard her heartbeat pick up its pace.
“What would you like?” he asked, nodding toward the coffee counter.
“Iced pumpkin spice latte?” she asked, pulling a few bills out of her pocket. “Extra, extra sugar, please.”
“My treat,” he said, walking away before she could try to order, and trying not to resent her poor coffee judgment.
When he returned a few minutes later with his plain black coffee and her… whatever it was, she was gazing out the window, as dreamy as ever.
“You okay?” he asked, setting the creamy concoction in front of her.
“Oh, sure,” she smiled at the plastic cup like it was Christmas morning. “I thought about it once.”
“What’s that?”
“A tattoo,” she replied. “When I was in college. I had it all picked out and everything. But then I chickened out when I saw the needle.”
“Let me guess…”
He watched her fingers flutter over the straw, unwrapping it swiftly, then stabbing it into the coffee like it had offended her.
He held his breath for what was next. But, just as she parted her lips to draw it in, someone opened the coffee shop door and rushed up behind her. Van had been so absorbed in Dulcie, he almost hadn’t noticed.
Van’s inner dog lifted him to his feet, and he stepped forward to put himself between her and the intruder.
Chapter 4
Just as Dulcie was about to take a sip of pumpkin-y ambrosia, Van leapt to his feet, his gorgeous features marred with aggression. If she hadn’t known better she would have thought he was growling.
“Uh, hi, Dulcie,” came a voice from behind her.
Before Dulcie turned, she recognized the voice, and the scent. Axe body spray and death hung about him in equal measures.
She turned to greet Seth Cho. He stood there nervously, dark, close-cropped hair, thick rimmed glasses magnifying his inquisitive eyes, and a fearful look on his face.
Why would Van react so defensively to Seth?
She hurried to introduce them.
“Van, this is Seth from the coroner’s office. Seth, this is Van…” for the life of her, she couldn’t think of a single description beyond the hottie with bad credit who is also a personal trainer that bangs his clients. “…he’s my client,” she finished lamely.
Van seated himself again slowly, never taking his eyes off poor Seth. He indicated the chair beside him, but Seth shook his head.
“Dulcie,” Seth said. “I kind of need to talk to you. Privately.”
Great.
Seth always had some crazy theory about things down at the station. He was basically the only active member of Woodland Creek Library’s Mystery Menagerie besides Dulcie herself. Unlike Dulcie however, he didn’t stop at enjoying a good novel. He saw endless signs of mysteries and conspiracies being played out in his day-to-day work.
And since his work brought him into contact with every fresh corpse in Woodland Creek, he had no shortage of sparks for his overactive imagination. Being totally oblivious to the magical nature of the town only fueled the fire.
Dulcie glanced at Van as he sipped some coffee as dark as his eyes. She wasn’t really in the mood to entertain one of Seth’s half-baked theories.
“Seth, can I track you down later?” she asked hopefully.
“Dulcie, this is very important… life and death,” he said, significantly.
Saying no wasn’t one of Dulcie’s strong points. Being kind and polite was important to her, and the habits were so ingrained she found them hard to buck.
“Sure, Seth,” she said. “Van, would you excuse me for just a moment?”
Van leaned back in his seat, watching her with a bemused expression. He gestured with one hand, indicating that she should feel free to leave.
Dulcie wanted to groan. Could any guy be half this sexy? Her mind told her she’d be better off with timid Seth Cho than a guy like Van, who probably wasn’t really interested in her anyway. But her body had other ideas.
She strategically left her latte behind, so that Van would have to wait.
The door jingled as she and Seth exited. He trotted across the street to the line of trees next to the grocery store, and ducked behind one.
Dulcie gamely stepped behind the trees with him. The shade was pleasant, though she was pretty sure the grocery store crowd wouldn’t have spied on their conversation.
“Dulcie,” Seth said simply, gazing at her.
“Yes, Seth?”
“Isn’t that the guy who… you know?” he suggested, embarrassed to state plainly that Van slept around.
“He’s a client, Seth,” Dulcie explained, though she knew she would have been within her rights to tell him it was none of his business.
“Oh,” Seth nodded, though she could still sense a trace of concern on him. She didn’t like using her gift to read people she considered friends, but it wasn’t like she could just turn it off.
“So what’s up?” she asked, allowing just a trace of impatience to color her tone.
He shook his head slightly as if to clear it.
“Dulcie, there’s a body, he began. “Technically, it’s a heart attack. But that’s not the whole story.”
“Aren’t the detectives going to investigate it?” she asked.
“They’re too busy chasing down those missing people,” Seth said with some annoyance.
There had been a rash of missing people in Woodland Creek this fall. It was disturbing, though Dulcie was sure there was some explanation. She supposed it all came of living in a town that was practically on a fault line of magic and shifters.
“If it was a heart attack, how could there be something else?” she asked gently.
“It was his face. He was terrified, Dulcie,” Seth whispered. “I think he died of… fear.”
“Heart attacks are painful, Seth. Wouldn’t you be scared?” Dulcie reasoned. “You must have seen bodies that looked that way before.”
“Actually, the endorphins released at the time of death often leave a rather peaceful look,” he explained. “But there’s something else. There were paw prints near the corpse. Big ones.”
Oh boy.
There were two kinds of people in Woodland Creek, those who knew, and those who didn’t.
The town was located at the intersection of two ley-lines.
That meant that shifters like Van and magical beings were drawn here, wit
hout even understanding why.
They lived out their lives in Woodland Creek, trying to fit in with the human majority, but secure in one another’s company. Many of the gifted population of the town could sense the otherworldliness in their peers, but specific abilities and animals were a personal matter.
Dulcie had the dubious honor of being both an empath and a shifter. Though her shifting was… unimpressive at best. She seldom did it, though in childhood it was harder to control and she found herself shifting in dreams and waking up in her other skin, trembling and unable to shift back until her mother, a truly gifted empath, sensed her anguish and came to calm her.
Seth Cho was saddled with no such abilities. And as a result, he had no knowledge whatsoever of the teeming world of second selves and the web of magic spun around the town.
At times, Dulcie wondered how Seth could possibly live in Woodland Creek and suspect nothing. For heaven’s sake, he was the coroner. But she supposed most people wouldn’t assume their town was full of magic and shifters.
She also wondered why the town would risk having a coroner who didn’t know. But coroners weren’t paid well and had to have a med school degree - not exactly a dime a dozen find in rural Indiana. Seth seemed to be a good-hearted and guileless man. They likely had assumed he would be easily directed and that they would’t find anything untoward in his reports.
If only they had anticipated his interest in murder mystery novels. It was a good thing he hadn’t discovered paranormal romance yet.
“I don’t know, Seth, I mean aren’t there dogs and animals from the preserve around? I’ll bet they checked out the body after the fact,” Dulcie said.
“It was Rudolph Barrymore,” Seth said quietly.
Oh.
The Barrymores weren’t one of the founding families, but they had arrived when the ink on the covenants was still wet.
Seeing he had piqued her interest, Seth continued.
“Henry Barrymore is in town, and would love to talk with you. He wants you to come up to the house right now,” he said.
That was practically irresistible. Who wouldn’t want to see the Barrymore Mansion and meet the elusive Henry Barrymore?
Henry Barrymore was a reclusive, semi-obscure mystery novelist who wrote and published from his cabin on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario. They had just discussed his latest book, a locked-room mystery set in a coffee shop called Grounds for Murder, at last month’s Mystery Menagerie meeting.
He was also the last of the Barrymore line, which made him a very rich mystery novelist.
Except that Dulcie had Van, waiting for her at her own coffee shop.
Grounds for…sexiness?
She suppressed a groan. This was why she stuck to reading books.
“Okay, okay, just let me say good-bye to Van,” she said. “I’ll meet you up there.”
“Do you want me to walk you back?” Seth asked.
But she had already taken off across the street and down toward the cafe, red and yellow leaves swirling in her wake.
Chapter 5
Dulcie tried to remain calm as the whole town rocketed past. She clung to Van’s waist with all her might, doing her best not to imagine what would happen to him when they inevitably crashed his motorcycle. He’d given her his helmet.
Who would travel this way on purpose?
She thought longingly of the latte she’d left behind and her sensible old Saab parked in front of the real estate office. This would have been a blissful voyage under its trusty sunroof with that cup of sweet coffee beside her.
She had envisioned exactly that sort of drive to the Barrymore place, but when she told Van where she was going, he insisted on taking her.
Before she knew it, they pulled beneath the canopy of lumpy sycamores that led the way to the most beautiful homes in town. She sold one of them once in every blue moon. Generally, once you made it to this part of town, there was no place to go afterward but the cemetery.
The Barrymores’ driveway was long, wending its way around a murky pond full of stone mermaids, and up past the grape arbor to the front of the house.
At Halloween, this was one of the houses that would be skipped over. It was too spooky, and too far off the beaten path.
Much to Dulcie’s relief, Van parked the motorcycle in the grass just off the foot of the drive.
She handed him back his helmet and tried to make the best of a bad hair situation. If only she were the kind of girl who carried a giant purse, she could take care of this.
She looked up to find him studying her again with the same bemused expression he’d given her back at the office.
“Looks nice, very nice,” he murmured.
He leaned forward and she could smell the leather of his jacket.
Almost carelessly, he reached toward her, and ran his fingers through her hair.
His touch was electrifying. Dulcie tried not to close her eyes and lean into his hand. It wasn’t easy.
Van’s eyes narrowed and a halo of something dark presented itself to Dulcie. That was often the way her gift worked - not an exact reading, but a hint of mood or intention.
He pulled his hand away and his lip curled in a snarl.
Dulcie was confused, until Seth’s little blue car zipped up the drive.
Classic. At least a dog shifter could smell what was coming.
“Let’s go,” Dulcie said with the gamest smile she could muster.
“Wow,” Van murmured as they passed the pond.
It was admittedly a pretty creepy sight. Dulcie naturally remembered the pond as it had once been, a bit unkempt but basically very beautiful. Now the stone mermaids seemed to be gagging on the scum, and crawling out, not to sun themselves, but to beg for assistance.
“Mr. Barrymore was getting up there in years. He’s been very generous with the town,” she heard herself excuse the old gentleman.
Van nodded as they reached the arbor.
“Was he a big drinker?” he asked, indicating the fruit withered on the dormant vines and raising an eyebrow in a way that made Dulcie want to faint.
“I don’t think so,” Dulcie replied. “I’ve met Mr. Barrymore maybe three times in my life. Once was at an event where he donated the funds to rebuild the library. He’s been an old man with a white beard for as long as I can remember.”
“A generous old man,” Van added.
“Yes, he was. He was never one to make a big fuss, but I’m pretty sure he’s had a hand in about every project this town has ever begun.”
“That’s really nice,” Van said. “Where I come from, the rich people don’t exactly make a habit out of sharing.”
Dulcie thought about that.
They continued on in silence until they reached the top of the drive.
“You brought him?” Seth asked in a disappointed tone as soon as they were in sight.
“Van has experience with crime scenes,” she said diplomatically. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Van trying to hide a smile.
“Hmm. Well, it’s a pretty cool estate, eh, Dulce?” Seth asked, shortening her name and gracelessly yapping about the dead man’s estate when they were practically at the door.
Dulcie tried not to wince.
“It’s beautiful, Seth,” she said in a tone that implied that she remembered their purpose here.
Seth smiled, not taking the hint, and bounded up the rest of the steps, ringing the front bell before Dulcie and Van had made it to the porch.
The door creaked open. The gentleman behind it gave Seth a disapproving glance. He was older, not quite old enough to be her father, but closer to that than her own age. He looked like an English gentleman from one of those shows on PBS - impeccably groomed, white button down shirt, jacket, and a red cravat.
“Hi again, I brought back Dulcie, like I said I would, and her associate, Van. Guys, this is Mr. Barrymore’s…” Seth seemed to be trying to find a word that wasn’t butler or friend since he clearly didn’t know if the man was an emplo
yee or not.
“Companion,” the gentleman introduced himself unhelpfully. “Jack Wenderly.”
He didn’t have the British accent she’d half-expected.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Wenderly,” Dulcie said, giving him a warm smile. She reached out empathically, and got nothing aggressive from him.
He smiled back at last.
“Henry has been looking forward to meeting you, Miss Alette,” he said, leading them inside.
They entered a marble center hall overlooked by a large portrait of Rudolph Barrymore. His pale blue eyes gazed down kindly, his face framed by an unruly mane of white hair and long beard that not even the artist seemed able to tame.
Wenderly led them back to a vast dining room.
One side of the table was laden with crystal and silver that was probably worth more than Dulcie made in a year.
The other side of the table looked as if it had been hastily cleared. The tablecloth was pushed back and a laptop and a sheaf of papers had been placed directly on its polished mahogany surface.
A young man with rumpled blond hair sat behind the laptop. Like Wenderly, he was dressed nicely, but his tie was askew, and his shirt wrinkled.
Henry Barrymore.
He did not look like the picture on his book jacket. She was especially struck by his pale blue eyes. The recently deceased Rudolph Barrymore’s eyes had been precisely the same shade, but combined with Henry’s younger, more handsome face, and the square set of his action-hero jaw, they were positively striking.
“Miss Alette,” he said, standing and extending his hand. “I’m so glad you could come.”
“It’s nice to meet you Mr. Barrymore, please call me Dulcie,” she said, noting that his handshake was firm but not threatening. Nearly visible waves of anguish came off him, but Dulcie imagined he might be distraught about his great-uncle’s death.
“And I’m Henry, of course. Please have a seat,” he indicated the one beside him.
Dulcie sat immediately, and tried not to notice the cloud of jealousy shimmering on Van as he took the seat on the other side of her.
“This is a client of mine, his name is Van. He’s quite perceptive and I thought he might be able to help,” she heard herself say.
