Chapter Twenty-Eight
CASIMIR
We walk down into the dining room where Cyrus is asleep on top of a pile of paperwork and Ezio is flat out on the ground, making me question if I’ve stumbled onto a homicide, but alas, he’s still alive.
Cyrus, hearing us, jerks awake. “Ah… uh…” Then he looks down at Ezio but doesn’t seem at all confused about why he’s on the floor.
“Is there a reason for this?” Julian asks.
“There is,” Ezio says as he opens his hand and presents to me… a pen cap. It looks like the cap that goes on the pen Cyrus is currently holding.
“Soooo… you reached down to grab the cap and just collapsed there?” Julian is confused, which means he hasn’t been around Ezio long enough. Nothing Ezio does ever makes sense. Hell, I figured that out within five minutes of knowing him.
“When Cyrus fell asleep, his pen dropped, and as I rolled across the floor to fetch it, I was hit with inspiration,” Ezio declares.
“Which was?” I ask.
Ezio slowly sits up. “The man who jumped at the apartment was there for a reason. We’ve searched the apartment complex for other vampires who live in the area and came up with nothing, but you know what we didn’t look into?
Werewolves. Because why would we think the vampires and werewolves would do shit together?
But wasn’t that our own brains thinking that they couldn’t get along?
Upon looking into it, there is a werewolf who lives there, whose name is Keats. ”
“Keats?” Julian asks in surprise. “So you think Grady, the vampire who jumped, was meeting with Keats?”
“Where does Keats go when he shifts for the full moon?” Cyrus asks.
“I would have to double-check, but I believe the bar,” Julian answers. “I honestly don’t know much about him.”
“So if Keats happened to bite the woman Ivo cared for… Keats could have asked Grady to deal with her, which is why they were meeting at the apartment,” Ezio says.
“After she died, maybe Ivo tracked down who bit her, but found Grady there and proceeded to have him killed by tossing him off the roof and having Yorick stake him.”
“Ezio, it creeps me out when you try to use your brain,” I announce.
Ezio’s eyes show me his displeasure at this statement. “What the fuck? I was being an amazing detective, and I get berated for that as well?”
“Ignore Casimir, this is good,” Julian soothes. “Let me see if we can bring Keats here.”
“It still doesn’t answer everything, so maybe he’ll have some answers for us,” Cyrus says. “If we agree that everyone who was killed was involved, what about the two vampires who were staked to a tree? Not only those two but the guy who killed himself with the bomb?”
“Which we assume he did at Ivo’s command,” Julian adds.
“He probably knew the two and was forced to kill them before becoming a setup to kill whoever found the bodies. It seems like Ivo kind of stopped caring whether or not people were involved at that point and started killing indiscriminately. Or maybe he thought all of them were involved?”
“Possibly. Let’s see what Keats says,” Cyrus responds.
After Julian finishes a brief call with his father, he turns to Cyrus. “You were bitten. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m just glad it wasn’t on a full moon,” he says with a laugh. “It’s really not that bad.”
Julian doesn’t look reassured, but I haven’t seen the wound to tell him one way or the other. He’s acted fine since he arrived, though, so I can’t fathom it’s too bad.
Ezio taps the pen cap against the table.
“I’m still stumped on something, though.
Ivo acted like the werewolves killed her, but if they bit her…
she didn’t die. At least, the medical examiner didn’t write off her death as having been mauled by an animal.
And we can’t forget she was found dead in the vampires’ freezer.
Like… that’s why I feel like she had to have been attacked on the full moon, but if she was, that was hell, two weeks before you stumbled on the freezer, right? ”
“I saw her body. She’d definitely died shortly before her body was found,” Cyrus says. “Maybe the wolves were involved in some other way?”
“Why did they become fixated on you, Cyrus? Why would Ivo make the wolves target you?” I ask.
Cyrus shrugs as he leans back in his chair.
“I… I don’t know. I guess it could have been because of my relationship with you guys.
Maybe he knew I’d be easy to get to, unlike the rest of you who were hanging together.
Or maybe he thought it would draw someone to me.
I mean, he did have them text Julian to come in.
” He sighs as he rubs his head. “I’m really hungry.
Do you have food here or should I call a delivery? ”
“I’ll get you something,” Julian says as he heads toward the kitchen while I’m left thinking about this mess.
Not too much later, the doorbell rings and I head over, planning on dealing with Terrance or Keats, but who I find instead is Willow.
“Come in,” I say, not wanting to get close to the door as it’s opened since it’s still light out.
She’s alone as she steps inside and looks around. I can tell she’s looking for Julian, who she’s likely concerned about after the attack this morning.
“I… I need to talk to you guys,” she says.
Julian peeks into the front room with Ezio and Cyrus behind him. He looks over at her in surprise, telling me she hadn’t informed him she was heading here. “Willow? I didn’t know you were coming. Did you come with my dad and Keats?”
“No… I… I heard you were asking for Keats. You think he has something to do with this?”
“We don’t know that. We just noticed Keats lived in the same apartment where the vampire, Grady, jumped off. Grady had been meeting someone there. We assumed it was Yorick… but Yorick could have been there to finish him off,” Julian explains.
She’s looking quite anxious now, and when I glance over at Cyrus, I notice I’m not the only one picking up on this. Julian seems oblivious because he sees Willow as his friend and doesn’t expect her to have done something wrong.
“Were you the one who did it?” I ask.
Willow immediately looks away, giving me all the answers I need.
“So instead of confessing at any point so we could fix this, you just pretended it never happened and thought you could sweep the deaths under the rug?” I ask.
“What…?” Julian hesitates. “But…”
She looks so fucking guilty that I’m surprised she made it this long without breaking.
“It… it all spiraled out of fucking control,” she says.
“It’s not all my fault. I was… I was hooking up with Keats.
It was just… some foolish bullshit, okay?
On the full moon, Keats generally goes to the bar, and Olive and I will either go to the bar or stay in our basement.
But Keats and I fucked up. We were at his apartment where we had gotten drunk and lost track of time, so I told Olive I was staying home.
Since Olive was at the bar, Keats could stay in her crate since we obviously couldn’t stay in his apartment and my place was closer than the bar.
We got into the Lyft and there was a vampire driving it.
It was just our luck, but we couldn’t wait for another one, and he didn’t seem too bad.
I never assumed anything would happen with it, you know?
I just… I thought we’d get home, and everything would be fine. ”
Willow takes a deep breath before resuming.
“The driver was Grady. He really didn’t act weird with us or anything…
until someone hit the car. I thought back on it again and again, but it was clearly a calculated attack…
not against us, but against Grady. We just…
we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was a group of vampires who we later realized were the ones who attacked Julian.
A human woman was with them, and it was like she was in charge of them or something.
She told them what to do and they had no hesitation when it came to listening.
I think I remember someone calling her Joanna, but I could be wrong.
“She told them to kill us, but I don’t think she realized what we were…
or maybe she didn’t give a shit. But we’d wasted so much time with the accident that the full moon was already out.
Keats shifted first. He just… he couldn’t control himself.
I tried running. I knew I had to get somewhere, but the vampires grabbed me and threw me back into the street.
I ran for the car, thinking I could lock myself in at least…
or call someone or do something, but the moment I got into the car, I lost control.
I don’t… I don’t remember anything after that.
I just… when I woke up, I was in the middle of a field and that woman was lying there. ”
Willow bites her lip before continuing. “Honestly, I don’t know if Keats bit her or I did.
I wanted to help her… I tried to help her, but she fought me, screamed at me about how we ruined her life…
like she didn’t think about how she’d sent the vampires to kill us .
And when I heard a noise, I went to Keats because I didn’t want to deal with her alone and thought he could help me find a phone or get some help for her.
When we returned, she was gone. I didn’t know what to do.
We sat on it all day before deciding that we needed to tell Terrance…
but when it turned dark, Grady arrived at our place with a couple other vampires and begged us not to say anything.
He told us that… that we’d killed a couple of the vampires, and that if we went to someone about this, the pact between the weres and vampires would be destroyed.
He said that it’d be best to just let him handle it.
He’d… he’d insist that the woman move elsewhere and that would be that; no one would ever hear of it again. ”
“You should have come to me,” Cyrus says.
“Or me,” I add.