Free The Angel Stone: A Novel by Juliet Dark Page B

the woods that have been savaged and drained of blood as if by some kind of beast.”
    “Drained of blood?” I asked, feeling suddenly woozy. “Could it be one of your kind?”
    “No!” he growled, so fiercely I had to keep myself from bolting. “There are talon marks on the victims. My kind”—he held up his long, elegant hands and twirled them in the moonlight—“are monsters in many ways, but we do not have claws. But something
with
claws is roaming the woods and feeding on animals. I thought you should know since you live nearby.”
    He lifted his eyes to Honeysuckle House and then to the woods behind it. The moon, just risen above the tips of the trees, cast long, branching shadows across my back lawn. It looked as though the woods were advancing on my back door.
    “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll be careful. I’ve only been going into the woods to take the tunnels—”
    “You might want to reconsider that path,” Anton told me. “The blood-drained creatures we’ve found have been near the entrance to the tunnels, and we’ve found smears of blood that seem to vanish inside them, as if …”
    “As if what?” I asked when he paused.
    “As if these predators are clinging to the roofs of the tunnels like—”
    “Like bats,” I finished for him, remembering the stir of wings I often heard when I was inside the tunnel.
    “Yes,” Anton agreed reluctantly. “Giant bloodsucking bats.”

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Anton saw me to my door. I thanked him for letting me know about the creatures in the tunnels. “Have you told Frank and Soheila?” I asked.
    “Yes. They offered to convey the information to you, but I said I would tell you myself. I wanted to make sure you didn’t think that these creatures had anything to do with my kind.”
    “Liz always said you were a perfect gentleman, and you’ve behaved like one with me.”
    He smiled and then leaned down to whisper in my ear. I felt the brush of his lips like cool water on my cheek. “If I didn’t know your heart still belonged to another, I might not behave in such a
gentlemanly way
.”
    Then he was gone, vanished into the night as swiftly as … well, as a bat. I shook the image away and went inside my house. Anton had assured me that vampires could not turn into bats. That was a myth. But there were some batlike creatures living in the tunnels and killing animals. I’d have to talk to Frank and Soheila tomorrow about how to protect the campus from them. As if we didn’t have enough to worry about …
    I put on my warmest flannel nightgown and got into bed, but I knew it would be a long time before I could sleep, with the thought of those creatures in the woods, so I opened the old book Nicky had given me. A notecard marked the ballad of William Duffy. I opened it and read the note from Nicky.
    A good teacher is a door to other worlds
, she had written.
Thanks for opening so many doors for me
.
    Feeling grateful for Nicky’s kind words, I propped the notecard up on my night table and turned to the ballad of William Duffy. The story was much as Nicky had summarized it, until I reached the part where the fairy girl gave half her brooch to William Duffy as a token that she would return for him. Nicky hadn’t described the brooch, but Mary McGowan had.
    The brooch was made of two interlocking hearts. Where the two hearts overlapped was a stone. When she broke the brooch in half, the fairy girl kept the half with the stone
.
    The detail sparked a memory. I got out of bed and rummaged through my jewelry box until I found the silver brooch my mother had given to me. She’d explained that it was an heirloom from my father’s family, passed down through the generations, and was called a Luckenbooth brooch after the shop stalls in Edinburgh where they were once sold. Originally the brooch had been shaped with two interlocking hearts, but at some time it had been broken, leaving a loop where the other heart had overlapped. Could this brooch be the one