Page 37 of The Vampire and the Case of the Malevolent Mermaid

We secured everything in the SUV and I retrieved my bag of biscuits. ‘Matilda, Matilda, Matilda.’ I summoned the hag and waited with bated breath to see if she would come.

Chapter 22

Matilda must have been close by because she rose from the earth only a few seconds later, smelling of loam and shaking off pebbles and mud. ‘Rabbit Girl,’ she greeted me happily.

‘Hey, Matilda.’ I thrust the bag of biscuits at her. She raised it and looked at it; it wasn’t her usual box and she wasn’t quite sure what to do.

She surprised me when she licked the bag. I tried not to laugh but carefully reached over and opened the ziplock for her. She sniffed, reached into it and popped a biscuit in her mouth. After that the feeding frenzy began.

I tucked the empty bag in my pocket when she handed it back to me; like the box, it had been shredded. I needed to start bringing her treats in wooden boxes or something she wouldn’t destroy. But even with the cost of the treats she was the cheapest help ever, especially compared to Liv who was sure to send us an unholy bill.

She patted her tummy. ‘Dwarves bring Matilda sweet treats too,’ she said. ‘Nice. Why Matilda bigger?’

Her tummywasnoticeably rounded these days. I didnotwant to be the one to tell the elemental that she was fat. ‘Erm, lots of sweet treats make you bigger,’ I admitted.

She brightened. ‘Matilda biggest hag ever!’

I opened my mouth and closed it. I had nothing.

Pleased with herself, she raised her pointed nose into the air. ‘Blood,’ she muttered a moment later.

I was impressed. With the deluge of rain, even I couldn’t smell blood anymore – and I was a vampire. ‘Yes, you’re right. We found a murdered man right here.’ I pointed down at where Donovan’s body had been.

‘Not man.’ She surprised me again; her nose was better than a dog’s.

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘He was a merman.’

She nodded. ‘Smell fishy.’ She crinkled her nose.

I wanted to laugh; I guessed she didn’t like fish. ‘Matilda, we’re looking for Kate and Essie in this area. Have you seen them? Smelled them?’

She shook her head. The movement seemed stiff and unnatural, like that was the way she knew we communicated and she was trying to emulate it. Her shoulders moved slightly with the gesture and clumps of mud fell off her.

‘Have you looked around here yet?’ I asked.

‘Matilda look but only find two dead girls. Their skulls.’

I swallowed hard. There might well be a reason why Cadence and Casiah’s spirits were anchored here. ‘Can you show us where you saw them?’

‘Matilda show.’ She sank into the earth before I could ask her to walk. I sighed.

Moments later, she and two skeletons rose to the surface on the other side of the metal logging equipment. After seven years in the earth the flesh was long gone, but some scraps of clothing and their rubber boots remained. There was enough for me to see the bodies’ small stature and a hint of green and purple: the girls’ sweatshirts.

Gunnar and I stared silently at them for a long time. It was hard to see those skeletons and know for certain that the girls had been dead for all this time. I looked at Matilda. ‘Thank you.’

She cocked her head; she could sense my emotions but didn’t fully understand them. ‘Bones Rabbit Girl family?’ she asked hesitantly. She understood missing and mourning family.

I shook my head. ‘No, it’s just that they were so young.’

I could tell from her scrunched-up face she didn’t understand why that would be upsetting. ‘Young things die,’ she said.

‘Yes, but these ones had help.’ I cleared my throat and shifted into business mode. ‘Matilda, was there anything else around the girls? Any objects that didn’t belong in the earth?’ Thomas’s brief notes had said both girls had their school bags and their phones when they went missing.

I wondered what had gone wrong that the twins had ended up dead and buried rather than shipped off to Anchorage. Perhaps they’d fought or had a bad reaction to whatever the kidnappers had drugged them with. Either way, it seemed likely the kidnappers would have disposed of their belongings as coldly as they had disposed of the girls themselves.

Matilda sank down into the earth once more; moments later she came back with a purple backpack and a smashed phone. She gavethe items to me. I hefted the dirt-covered backpack. ‘Thank you. Nothing else? Another one of these?’

She shook her head. ‘Not here.’

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