Page 88 of The Vampire and the Case of the Baleful Banshee

We reached the teens. ‘I know this is all very scary, but I think your parents were acting under the influence of the gems. They’ll need some time to be –’ I searched for the right word, ‘de-programmed. Liv Fox has summoned someone that you can stay with until we work out something more permanent. Okay?’

The girl was holding her brother’s hand. She nodded slowly. ‘I know it doesn’t look like it, but I swear my mom is a good person.’

I returned her nod. ‘Hopefully she’ll recover and become the woman she was before.’

‘God, I hope so.’ She gave a sob. ‘She was so fucking scary.’

Both kids started to cry and I wanted to pull them into a hug; I didn’t because I’d been pivotal in arresting their parents and in those circumstances I didn’t imagine hugs would be all that welcome.

The fire engines had arrived at the bottom of the street to tackle the blaze and behind them was another car. It turned up the hill, carefully skirting the trucks as the firemen did their thing, then stopped on the road. I squinted to see if I knew the driver: it was Anissa, a shaman I’d met once before. She got out of the car and beckoned to the kids.

‘Nissa!’ the girl cried. The kids ran to the tired-looking woman who gave them warm smiles.

‘Come on. Let’s get you somewhere comfy. It’s been a long day.’ She wrapped an arm around them and looked back at me. I smiled and waved; she returned the smile and nodded.

Liv had the adult Wintersteens in her car and there wasn’t space for all of us to ride together. Evidently Connor had had the same thought because he pulled out his phone and said, ‘I need a car at Vogler’s address. Bring two bags of blood.’ He hung up.

‘You forget your Ps and Qs?’ I teased.

‘I think Margrave would faint if I said please and thank you to him.’ His smile faded. ‘I would have said please and thank you to Juan,’ he admitted, sadness in his eyes. I touched his arm in sympathy – and that’s when I saw it.

‘Oh my God! What happened?’ The sleeve of his flannel shirt was gone and his arm was red and covered in blisters. He’d been burned – he’d been burned by me. When he’d touched me, when I’d been busy being a goddess of flame…

‘Me,’ I whispered. ‘I happened. You must be in agony! I’m so sorry!’

He shrugged. ‘It’s not so bad. I’ve had far worse. It’s nothing a little blood won’t fix.’

‘I burned you!’ I looked at him with horror. Burning Virginia and Jim haunted me, but this was at another level. I’d hurt Connor.

He fixed me with his blue eyes. ‘You didn’t do it on purpose. You were lost and I knew our bond could bring you back. I knew it would hurt to touch you, Bunny, and I did it anyway. I needed to touch you to call on our bond and shock you out of the trance you were in. I don’t regret it – I’d do it again.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I repeated.

‘Yes,’ he sent me a lopsided smile. ‘So you’ve already said. It’s okay. There’s nothing to be sorry for.’

I suddenly realised that I was still holding the gemstones. Giving them to Liv whilst she had the Wintersteens in her car didn’t seem like a good idea. ‘What do we do with these? I can’t have them! They almost got a hold of me like they did Elsa.’ I thrust the box at Connor.

‘We’ll get them back where they belong – powering the barrier,’ he said grimly.

He was right. Getting the barrier back to full strength was our priority. The only problem was that I was running on empty.

Chapter 56

Gunnar came over and slung an arm around me. ‘Alright, Bugs?’

I gave him a flat stare but smiled despite myself. He’d jumped out of a window with me, so he got a pass today on calling me silly names. The cheeky grin he was sporting showed he knew it, too.

‘What are we going to do with them?’ I asked Gunnar, pointing to the Wintersteens. ‘It doesn’t seem fair to punish them when they were so far under the influence of the gems.’

‘Yet one or both of them killed Aoife and attacked Nora. Justice has to be served.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed unhappily. ‘But then two kids won’t have parents.’

He looked at me with gentle kindness. ‘I also have compassion, as will the council when they go to trial. We’ll see what they say in the interview. We have to trust the system, that there will be empathy and mercy. This is one of the reasons why we are different from ped law. We have more than the usual mitigating factors.’

I understood but I still felt awful. This wasn’t as cut and dried as my other cases. Ginny might have been influenced by her brain tumour, and Jim by his love for her; Chris had his military loyalty and maybe the desire to make money. I could see their motivation and that they needed to be held responsible for their actions – they had made choices. This case felt different. Elsa’s behaviour had been influenced by an outside force. Although I could find a tiny bit of compassion for the others, all I felt for Elsa was compassion.

Gunnar was right: I needed to sit back and let the system do its things. The gems’ influence had to be part of the Wintersteens’ defence. I hoped that, away from the gems, they would come back to their senses, back to themselves. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be far for Mr Wintersteen to travel because I wasn’t sure he’d been influenced by the gems as much as a need to protect his family and his wife – and wasn’t that admirable? Though admittedly he could have done things differently. If he’d alerted Liv to his concerns for his wife… Shoulda, woulda, coulda.

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