Grave Dance (Alex Craft, #2)(16)
The phone chirped in my hand, letting me know it had powered on. I glanced at it, then hesitated and reached out with my ability to sense magic. Neither fae carried any charms. Caleb was one of those very rare fae who could manipulate the Aetheric, and his skin tingled in my senses with residual magic from a ward he’d been crafting recently, but Malik didn’t have a trace of residual magic on him. And he certainly didn’t have a trace of the spel s I’d felt in the feet or the construct. Of course, that didn’t mean he wasn’t involved; it just meant he wasn’t carrying any charms. Stil , if Caleb was wil ing to indebt himself . . . I lowered the phone, letting the screen fal asleep again.
“I’m listening,” I said, turning to close the door. Then I stopped, my gaze stuck on the porch.
“Al?” I could hear the frown in Caleb’s voice. “Alex, what is it?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I just stood there, shock reverberating down my spine. Outside my door, in the very center of the landing, was a dagger.
Caleb sprinted across the room. When he saw the dagger he cursed in one of the fast, fluid languages of the fae. I couldn’t understand the words, but from the tone I could tel he was pissed and maybe a little freaked. Or maybe I was projecting. Caleb shoved his hand against the doorjamb to check the house wards, but I doubted he’d find anything. The dagger had been driven into the wood in the middle of the smal landing. Caleb’s wards didn’t reach that far. I swal owed, glancing at Malik—who watched with curiosity but hadn’t moved.
The reassuring weight of the phone stil fil ed my hand. I flicked the screen lock off and opened the phone app. I got as far as dialing the nine when Caleb plucked the phone from my trembling fingers.
“Don’t do anything hasty,” he said, his voice low.
“Don’t do anything hasty,” he said, his voice low.
“Ha sty? Hasty? You brought the fae who’s been threatening me into the house and now there’s a dagger driven into the middle of my porch. I think I’m already behind on cal ing the police. And don’t tel me this isn’t connected.”
I made a wide, sweeping gesture to include both Malik and the dagger protruding from one of the porch beams, the blade embedded deep enough that the ornate hilt touched the wood. It pinned a scrap of paper to the porch. A note?
From where I stood, stil inside the house, the yel owing parchment looked old, the edges curling and torn. The entire display looked surreal, almost innocuous, beside the saucer of milk I fil ed nightly for our resident gargoyle, but fear gripped my chest, made my breath harden in my lungs.
Someone had come to my home, to my door, and driven the dagger into my porch. And I had a good idea who.
Caleb tucked my phone into his back pocket and turned to face Malik. “What do you know about this?”
The gangly fae cocked his head to the side, one bushy eyebrow lifting as he shuffled forward. I stumbled back, out of arm’s length, and the fae hesitated. He blinked at me, as if surprised by my fear and not pleased at being the cause.
We stared at each other for a moment, and when he stepped toward the door again, I held my ground.
He peered around the doorframe and after a single glance shrugged. “It’s not mine.”
“It has to—” I stopped. No, it didn’t have to be his. He hadn’t said he didn’t put the dagger there, only that it didn’t belong to him.
Caleb obviously came to the same conclusion. “Do you know anything about the dagger or how it ended up here?”
Malik blinked his large, dark eyes, surprise at Caleb’s clarification obvious on his face. Then the surprise hardened to anger and he straightened to his ful height, his head inches from the ceiling. He tugged at the hem of his unseasonable coat, making whatever was inside clatter.
Caleb met the tal er fae’s gaze. “If you want her help, Caleb met the tal er fae’s gaze. “If you want her help, you’re going to have to be straight with her. I told you that before we came here. Now what do you know about that dagger?”
Malik glanced at me, the conflict in his features clear, but after a moment he let out his breath and his knees bent again, his posture slumping. “I’ve never seen that dagger before and I have no knowledge of how it came to protrude from your porch.” The clear and indisputable statement seemed to pain him, his thin lips cutting downward as he spoke.
Well, no wiggle room in that statement. But if he didn’t drive the dagger into my porch, who did? I turned back to the open doorway.
PC, noticing the open door for the first time, darted out from under the bed. I intercepted him, scooping him into my arms and clutching his warm gray body tight. “Outside later,” I told him, whispering the words into the soft white hair on the top of his head.
“Do you think it’s a threat or a warning?” Caleb asked, pul ing my phone back out of his pocket. Apparently now that Malik wasn’t the main suspect he would let me cal the police. “Or it could be a trap,” he said, frowning.
A trap? By the same person who’d sent the construct?
Only one way to know for sure. I took the phone from him, but I hesitated before dialing and reached with my senses.
Unfortunately, the same wards that protected me from outside interference locked my own magic inside the house. To sense spel s on the dagger I would have to leave the safety of the wards, which if this was a trap, didn’t sound like a great plan. Except . . . From my spot in the doorway, I studied the intricate hilt.