Page 52 of The Vampire and the Case of the Hellacious Hag

‘True.’

‘They could have murdered him anywhere.’

I grimaced – that was what worried me. Without the head or a forensic examination of the body, we had little evidence to point to what had happened. I didn’t even know if the victim was dead before the marks were made on him. I hadn’t noticed any bruising to indicate he’d been slashed before he died, but I hadn’t been able to look at the body too closely. And who had the head?Ifthe dwarfhaddied here … the only one who would meticulously take the blood too was a dwarf.

‘Do you think the dwarves are involved in this?’ I asked Sidnee.

‘What?’ Sidnee was genuinely taken aback. ‘They think it’s the hag.’

‘Do they? Or are they just acting like they do?’ My phone rang, interrupting us: Connor. I swiped to answer. ‘Hi, you okay?’

‘We’ve got an issue.’ His tone was grim.

‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

‘You’re not going to like it one bit,’ he warned me.

I braced myself. ‘Hit me.’

‘Apparently there was an offer on the mine this fall.’

‘Anoffer? Someone tried to buy it? Was it up for sale?’

‘No, it wasn’t for sale and apparently none of the other owners were informed. Liv and Calliope knew nothing about it. You’ll need to check with Thomas.’

‘He’s on site with me – I’ll ask him.’

‘According to Goren Flankson, the dwarf I interviewed, the dwarven council handled it on their own.’

‘Surely they couldn’t accept an offer without a majority agreement?’ I asked.

‘The council has a controlling interest in the mine, though they have to inform the other owners and have a vote followed by their written agreement to the sale.’

‘So the dwarves turned down the offer?’

‘They did.’ He paused. ‘It gets worse. One of the people they met who was representing the anonymous buyer was a local water shifter.’

My stomach lurched. ‘Do we know who it was?’

‘We do. Chris Jubatus.’

My mind racing, I froze for several moments until I realised I was staring at the phone. I choked out, ‘Chris Jubatus? Selkie, and Sidnee’s drug-dealing bastard of an ex-boyfriend?’

Oh shit. Cogs started turning. Chris had tried to buy the mine. He had no money of his own; we’d frozen his assets when he’d rolled out of town so I knew exactly howmuch he had. He wasn’t trying to buy it for himself, and he wasn’t representing Calliope because she already had a share in the mine. No, he’d been trying to buy the mine under the radar for the MIB … and now we had armed men crawling around it and several deaths. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

Sidnee had stopped moving when I’d spat out her ex's name and she was staring at me, wide-eyed.

‘The one and the same,’ Connor confirmed.

‘This changes everything,’ I said tightly. ‘I was thinking some dwarves had been responsible for the deaths to try and frame the hag, but now I think the MIB is trying to scare away the dwarves. They didn’t have any luck buying it, so now they’re trying to get it through any means necessary.’

I bit my thumb. ‘Maybe Helmud saw something – he wasn’t supposed to be in that part of the mine.’ His was the one body we actually had. ‘We should get toxicology to check for fisheye.’

‘Henderson was human,’ Connor pointed out.

‘Exactly. We have no idea what fisheye does to humans. What if it’s as deadly to them as to us? There has to be a reason why the MIB have been so selective in using it, otherwise, they’d have sprayed it across all known supernat towns.’

‘You might be right,’ Connor said grimly.

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