Page 42 of Autopsy of a Fairytale

“Isobel?” Eamon stood, but she held a palm out to halt him.

“I’m a detective,” she said. “I’ve lived for thirty-four years relying on facts and logic, so this—” she gestured between him and Alcina’s corpse “—is a lot for me to take in. I believe you. I have to.” She clutched her bruised chest as if to remind herself of the horrors. “You say you’ve been protecting me, but I’ll never forget the way your teeth carved into my skin. The pain and sleepless nights you inflicted on me.”

Eamon’s face fell as if she had knifed him in the gut. His genuine care for her was an excruciatingly different picture than the monster from her memory, and she felt dizzy trying to reconcile the beauty before her to the beast from her past.

“I realize you’re as much her victim as I am, but I need time.”

“I’ll give you all the time you need.”

“You tried to kill me. I’ve been afraid for months because of you.” Tears flooded her eyes with a vengeance. “You took something from me I can never get back. I fled my life and family because of you, and moving here brought Alcina hard on my heels. She destroyed so many lives, and now I’m the reason they’re dead. The reason Garrett is dead.” Bel ran her filthy fingers through her hair, and Eamon opened his mouth. She recognized by his expression that he was going to say this wasn’t her fault, so she cut him off before his beautiful voice fell from his lips. “Bajka will expect answers. Demand justice. What am I supposed to tell them? That a witch cursed you and then used magic to slaughter people just to trap me? They’ll lock me up and throw away the key for such a ridiculous tale. For God’s sake, I saw her use magic, I felt it, and I’m not even sure I believe it.” She was spiraling. Hyperventilating. The blood loss was making it difficult for her to stand.

“Isobel.” Eamon stepped forward and placed a broad palm on her chest, not over her heart, but on the right side where the scar ran down her breast. “Breathe,” he ordered, and instinctively, she obeyed. “Good girl.” He guided her breaths until she calmed.

“What am I supposed to do?” Bel sobbed. “What will I say to explain this?”

“I was just in her cabin.” Eamon peeled his hand from her skin as if letting her go caused him pain. “The kitchen is clean, but the rest of the house is littered with magical objects and evidence of her crimes.”

She met his gaze at his confession.The kitchen is clean.Her memory flashed to the nights when the nightmares stole her sleep. Vera had been cleaning her kitchen. Bel had assumed she was an insomniac with a passion for baking, but the only times she noticed her neighbor awake had been the nights of the murders. She hadn’t been prepping cookies. She had been washing away the evidence.

“It’s obvious she was stalking you,” Eamon continued. “Combined with this scene of self-defense, you’ll have no problem explaining her obsession with you.Woman kills to entrap the object of her fixation.” His voice mimicked a news headline.

“That will work, but… the magic? She became someone else. People saw a woman they believe was Vera. How do we explain Alcina? Or Vera’s decayed body when we find it?”

“There’s a reason I don’t allow my photo to be taken.” Eamon stepped closer, and Bel hated how the air burned electric between them. “It’s why I requested that Brett Lumen turn off his cameras. It’s difficult to explain why I don’t age, especially when there’s recorded proof. On the rare occasions where photography is necessary, I take… precautions. Ten minutes, and I can hide those precautions in Vera’s house. Even your Sheriff would believe the narrative.”

“You want to plant evidence?” Bel looked up at him in surprise, having to crane her neck at his towering height. The single photo of him she had found flashed in her memory, the reason for the differences between the image and the man suddenly making sense.

“Or we can tell him the truth.” Eamon leaned down, closing the distance between them, causing Bel’s breath to catch in her throat.

“Fine,” she growled, annoyed at how angry she was at him and how badly she wanted him to fold her into his powerful embrace. “If we’re going to do this, I need more than yourprecautions.”

“Ask the world, and it’s yours.” Eamon’s lips twitched in a smirk.

She rolled her eyes. “You’re wealthy and extremely fast, correct?”

“I am.”

“Good, because we’ve already wasted too much time.” Bel shuddered at what she was about to ask Eamon to do. It went against every conviction her detective’s heart clung to, but she saw no other way forward. “This is what I need from you.”

Cerberus did not leaveBel’s side as dawn approached. Light crept quickly through the trees, but Eamon was faster. A fact Bel was thankful for. Time would only tempt her to reconsider, and this was the only path she saw out of this chaos without sounding insane. But maybe she had lost her mind. Magic, witches, curses… beasts. She wanted to believe she hallucinated the whole thing, but her soul recognized the truth. An ancient darkness had followed her to this town, turning Bajka into its hunting grounds. There were unexplained evils in this world. Evils she had faced and survived. An evil that currently stalked through the trees toward her, a clean shirt in his fist.

Eamon paused before Bel, and she realized it was one of her tee shirts from her bedside dresser, ripped in ways it had not been the last time she saw it, and she chose to ignore the fact that she hadn’t given him her house keys. Eamon crouched before her, rubbing the fabric along the ground to coat it in dirt and grass stains. He then dragged a broad palm caringly over her ruined shirt before wiping her blood onto the new one.

“Lean forward,” he ordered, and when she obeyed, he ripped the shredded remains of her bloody top from her back before gently sliding the new one over her head. His movements were soft, worshipful, and if she hadn’t been in such intense pain, she would have blushed that he saw her in only a bra. When he smoothed the tee shirt over her stomach, she realized the rips he created lined up with her injuries, the small hints of crimson making more sense with her healed cuts than the soaked shirt. She was glad he thought of it for her. Griffin would have taken one look at the blood oozing from her clothing and known something about their story didn’t add up. The sheer volume of blood that had spilled from her chest should have killed her, but her current bruising and gouges weren’t life-threatening.

“I’ll be here the whole time,” Eamon said, his hand still pressed possessively against her stomach, and Bel wasn’t sure if it was the blood loss or the relief of survival, but his promise comforted her. He should scare her. She should hate him, and in a way she did, but she also felt dangerous threads stitching their souls together.

Bel nodded, unable to voice her emotions with words, and Eamon handed her the phone. She unlocked it and found the Sheriff’s name, sucking in a lungful of air as she hit the call button.

“Emerson?” It was early, but Griffin answered on the second ring.

“Sheriff.” She let the breath escape. “I’ve been attacked.”

* * *

The forest wasa flurry of activity as Griffin led an army of officers and techs to her rescue. Lina arrived at the same time as the deputies, seizing control of Alcina Magus’ body, and as the EMTs examined Bel, the Sheriff took her statement with panic stiffening his every muscle.

Bel and Eamon gave the same story. Alcina, posing as Vera, had attacked Bel in the woods while she was walking Cerberus. The dog protected her until the commotion alerted Eamon, who was going for his customary early morning run. He came to their aid, but the altercation resulted in Alcina’s death. Between the injuries coloring Bel’s chest a disgusting purple, the blood staining her dog’s fur, and the disturbance in the forest floor, it was obvious the killing had been in self-defense. Having already lost three officers, Griffin was more than happy to thank Eamon for saving Bel’s life even if her insistence that Eamon was innocent confused him. She had been convinced he was the murderer, but when she explained how Alcina was masquerading as Vera, he understood as she did that Mr. Stone was merely a man in the wrong places at the wrong times. Bel told him of the woman’s confession, and though most of it still baffled the Sheriff, understanding dawned in his eyes. No one, not even his own deputies, suspected the elderly Vera. A wolf in sheep’s clothing until it was too late.

---