Free Night of the Raven by Jenna Ryan Page A

left?”
    “I had business,” he said stiffly.
    “Business with a man who arrested you and whose butt you should have but didn’t put in a sling?” She aimed an I-told-you-so smile at McVey. “See? Males get preferential treatment over females.”
    “We were talking poison, Red.” McVey opened the bag and sniffed the coffee beans, a sight that did nothing to quiet her still-jumping nerves. “We should stay on topic.”
    “That being someone—undoubtedly Willy Sparks—wants me to know how easy it would be for him to kill me. And a strong dose of psychological terror never hurts, either.”
    Her uncle stood. “What do you propose to do about this, Chief McVey?”
    “What I can.” McVey picked up and tapped Amara’s phone. “Sparks is a pro. It’ll take more than a lucky guess to identify him. No one outside the family has a description, and no one within it will talk. You talk, you suffer. I understand Jimmy has a long-standing policy in that regard.”
    “The Night of the Raven is coming up fast.” Amara paced off her jitters. “People are already arriving for the event.”
    “I told my late sister’s nephew he could reopen Blume House to guests for the duration.” The look her uncle shot McVey had challenge written all over it. “What will you do about that?”
    McVey glanced from the phone to her uncle and back. “I could suggest the name of the place be changed to the Hotel California and hope that that alone would cause the out-of-towners to turn tail. But more realistically, I’ll run incoming names and license plates, see what comes up.”
    “That won’t—”
    “He can’t arrest people for being strangers,” Amara interrupted her uncle. “And he can’t treat every stranger as if he or she were a criminal.”
    “Hit man,” Lazarus corrected.
    “Yes, thank you, I was trying not to use that phrase. The best idea—” she looked at McVey “—is for me to leave.”
    “Been down that road, Red. Even if you could slip away—unlikely in my opinion—Willy won’t be happy, and neither will some of your relatives.”
    Because he hadn’t raised his head to speak, Amara grabbed a handful of his hair and did it for him. “Fine. Give me a viable alternative.”
    “Joe Blume.” He held up her phone. “The message you received was sent from Two Toes Joe’s cell.”
    Amara released him because...well, mostly because his eyes and mouth were even more riveting today than they had been last night, and she really didn’t need to be quite as aware of that as she suddenly was.
    “So Willy Sparks is a thief as well as a murderer,” her uncle said. “Is that your point?”
    Amara held McVey’s gaze. “I think his point is simply an expansion of what he said before. Not only is Willy Sparks here, but he’s already connected some of the dots. If I leave the area, I’ll still die. I just won’t be the only member of my family to do it.”
    * * *
    T HEY CLIMBED UP to the attic, where the overview of the north woods tended to be impressive. Although Amara had hoped her uncle wouldn’t follow them, he pushed through the trapdoor a few seconds behind her.
    He wouldn’t have it in him to “feel” the room, she thought, certainly not the way she’d felt it as a child. Family history books claimed Sarah had come here to hone her craft. Whether she’d done so alone or not had never been determined. Unfortunately much of Sarah’s life remained a mystery, even today.
    She’d conjured things, Amara knew that much. The air smelled faintly of herbs and even the must of three centuries couldn’t erase lingering traces of woodsmoke.
    She ran her fingers over a stack of dusty trunks. “Antiques hunters would see this place as a treasure trove.”
    McVey pushed aside an enormous cobweb on his way to the cupola. “Spiders, mice and birds sure as hell do.”
    “Spiders, right. Forgot about those.” Amara twitched away a shiver. “I was phobic as a kid.” She nodded. “Ladder’s there, McVey.