Page 9 of Fang Fatale

Something distant and melodic that might be a wind chime.

Or the world's most offbeat cult rehearsing choir practice.

For six days I've lived beneath the crushing weight of panic.

Now, wrapped inside Dandy's wards, I feel it slowly receding, like a tide finally deciding to go home.

The cottage settles around me.

Quiet.

Patient.

Mine.

The crooked painting still hangs exactly where I left it.

I stand and study it for a long moment.

For twenty-three years, I would've straightened it.

Adjusted it.

Asked someone else if it looked right.

Tonight...

I leave it exactly where it is.

Maybe home isn't the place where everything is perfect.

Maybe it's the first place you're finally allowed to leave something crooked.

I switch off the lamp.

Outside, the forest hums softly around the Button Cottage.

For the first time in a very long time...

Tomorrow feels like it belongs to me.

CHAPTER 3

ALARIC

I’ve been smelling her for three days.

That reads differently written out. Let me clarify: for this entirely legal, above-board, impeccably tasteful assignment, I’ve spent the last seventy-two hours combing the slouching grid of Blackthorn Township and the first ring of the Forbidden Forest, cataloguing every whiff of human female for a client I barely remember, but whose check will buy six months of freedom—and the dubious luxury of my Cask of Amontillado-chic bachelor pad above the mortuary.

I don’t normally take missing person gigs. Waste of my talents, not to mention my time. There’s always a song and dance: the flyers, the heartbroken spouse, the best friend who calls every hour like stirring the pot with an ever-thinner spoon will somehow make the soup less tragic. Still, the man who placed the order came by personal referral—my favorite kind of leech.

Leland Brooks.

Third-generation real estate, zero percent body fat, voice like a prize-winning carrot.

Thistlebrook money is a different animal from Blackthorn money—cleaner on the surface, worse underneath. The kind of money whose charitable donations always seem to land in the same column as favors owed. When Leland says jump, even the town’s ghosts ask how high before they resume haunting your rental listing.

Per his request, the mark is a woman named Birdie Longfellow, last known location: somewhere in or around Blackthorn, population three thousand and change, depending on whether you count the dead. I always do.