Page 10 of Fang Fatale

Twenty-three years old.

"Academically promising, emotionally average," according to her transcript.

Brown hair. A face I’d call pretty enough to stick in memory.

There’s a headshot attached, one of those passport-style abominations with the mottled blue background and a smile that knows the camera is a loaded gun.

I have not seen her.

But I know her smell.

It’s not wholly human, not after a few days here. Blackthorn does something to people. Everyone leaves with a little more woodland in their posture, a layer of lichen in their laugh. Even so, she’s been clever—doubly so if she’s got someone helping her with the right wards.

The first day, I thought I’d catch her at the general store. Everyone goes to the general store, even if it’s half taxidermy, half dubious candle boutique. By the second day, I realized she wasn’t shopping at all. No cash withdrawals. No Wi-Fi pings. Not even a suspicious post office run.

By the third day, I stopped counting on the predictable holes in the net.

She’d gone properly, professionally missing.

Which is how I find myself, pre-dawn, shoulder-deep in a bramble thicket outside the Button Cottage, backpack full of side-hustle gadgets, burning my last cigarette and contemplating the merits of simply walking up and knocking.

If I could cross the ward barrier, this could end tonight.

Unfortunately, I can see the cottage, but I can’t reach it. Every time I creep too close, the path bends beneath my feet and deposits me back beside the same smug fencepost.

There are worse plans.

There are also better ones, and the local police chief would far prefer I use those.

Cassian isn’t just the chief. He’s also my friend and, once, the subject of an ill-advised arm-wrestling bet that nearly cost us both the annual axe-apple diving contest and our dental work.

He does not like it when I draw attention.

He especially does not like it when I accuse random townsfolk of being international fugitives in disguise, which is why last month’s incident with Mrs. Blood’s "yoga instructor nephew" still stings.

So: subtle it is.

Which, in this case, means literal loitering at the edge of town, hoping to catch a glimpse—or, failing that, a fresh scent.

I lean against the split-rail fence and listen to the morning shake itself awake: the woodpecker on the church steeple, the grumpy crow in the parking lot, the unearthly expanse of silence that means the town’s witches are having a lie-in.

Then a flash of hot pink, so violently saturated it warps the visible spectrum, comes skipping down the gravel path toward Button Cottage, a paper bag swinging from one wrist and a cloud of citrus and static electricity radiating in every direction.

Dandy.

Dandelion Zephyr, the town’s second-most-unruly witch, is not a morning person. She is a person for all times and places except the hour before ten, when her brain is still locked in a time zone several planets to the left of here.

But the person in the Birdie file was, by all reports, a late riser too, so what’s Dandy doing out here at six fifty-eight carrying what looks and smells like garlic bread and bad intentions?

I’m about to peel myself away from the fencepost and take a closer look when two things happen simultaneously:

One, the sky opens up in a brief New England-style downpour.

Two, Dandy disappears.

I mean that literally.

One moment she’s there.