28. THE LIES OF OAKLEY RIDDLE
THE LIES OF OAKLEY RIDDLE
IT TOOK SOME TIME FOR THEM TO FINALLY BE ALONE WITH THE day’s findings.
Embry didn’t want to let Lazarus take himself and his water upstairs without a chaperone (her), so she chased him up the stairs, and then texted Dr. Goldman to confirm the next round of medications and tinctures he’d need before falling asleep.
By the time she’d returned downstairs, Rye had cleaned up the remains of their dinner and, in compliance with the tale he’d spun for Lazarus, popped a bag of popcorn, grabbed a couple of cold seltzers, and met Embry on the living room couch, the opening sequence of Home Alone paused on the screen.
Embry raised an eyebrow at him. She’d expected Pretty in Pink or The Breakfast Club when he’d mentioned John Hughes. Rye patted the seat next to him, pulled out his phone, and waved it at her. “I thought Home Alone’s hijinks might be loud enough that Lazarus wouldn’t be able to overhear us.”
“Good point.”
She sat down, but not where he was patting.
Instead, she planted herself a whole extra cushion away from him.
Embry wasn’t going to admit it to Rye because, well, she could barely admit it to herself, but she’d used way too much brainpower in the last several hours memorizing the parts of her body that had been in contact with his while they hid in the drama closet.
And the way Rye’s skin felt under hers when she kissed his palm.
The mental and physical space allowed by their afternoon of rest was helpful, but even the strongest of cleansing spells topped with a vat of bleach wasn’t going to scrub any of this from her mind.
Rye inspected the distance she’d carved between them.
He hit Play on the remote, picked up the bowl of popcorn, and plopped into the seat immediately next to her.
As if this were any of their previous movie nights.
“I don’t smell any more of curry than you do,” he said, “and we both need to see the evidence and hear each other over the on-screen chaos. Don’t be a brat. ”
A hot flash of embarrassment rolled over Embry as she met Rye’s familiar green eyes.
She was a brat. This was information they’d collected together.
That they needed to dissect together. Now wasn’t the time to deflect all their hard work simply because of what?
The weird sparkly feeling that fizzed in her chest. The patches of skin with new memories of Rye.
That sudden, almost involuntary urge to press her lips to the healed palm cupped in her hands.
Embry couldn’t deny this new, strange, physiological response.
But she could ignore it. At least for a little while—thank Goddess for all that theater training.
Not that her training undid the fact that Rye had been a participant in all those new moments, too.
No matter how good of an actress Embry was, she couldn’t control that. She’d just make the best of it.
So, she swallowed her response, drew her knees to her chest, and leaned Rye’s way until her shoulder bumped his. He did smell of curry, but also of soap, laundry detergent, and that bedeviled rosemary oil.
Embry carefully tilted her head up so, if Lazarus reappeared at the base of the stairs behind them, it would seem as if she were watching the movie, not glancing to the space between her left knee and his thigh, where his phone was propped, hidden.
The plan was for him to transfer everything from the retired device she’d used for her pics to a cloud he could access on his phone so they could review their handiwork together.
He tapped at it and his lock screen flashed to life—a professional snap of last year’s eight-man boat in action.
It was totally Rye to highlight a team sport in his phone’s personalization, and it also very much reminded her that her own lock screen was the last thing she wanted to see right now.
It was a snapshot from what was now a very different time: Embry and her senior Witch crew, goofing on the steps of the theater—Amethyst, Fairfax, Alistair, Balthazar, and Oakley, clustered around her like petals on a sunflower.
That was totally her. Or at least it used to be.
Cold, flat sadness flared in her half-full gut, discordant against the prickly flush of those ignored, runaway thoughts her brain started cooking up about the boy next door over the past several hours.
Her body in a tug-of-war, Embry grasped for the only shred of control in this situation.
“I want to start with the paperwork, if that’s okay with you. ”
“Fine by me,” Rye said, lowering his voice, making it just the right pitch so she could hear it but no one else would over the film.
As if on cue, a creak came from above. So, for several minutes, they just sat there, eating popcorn, drinking seltzer, not saying a thing. Then, when it seemed certain Lazarus wouldn’t appear, Rye simply unlocked his phone again, and asked, “Ready?”
Nodding, Embry drew in a deep breath and watched as he tapped, opening the cover page of the autopsy.
Immediately, something caught Embry’s eye. She reached for Rye’s phone, realized it looked as if she were going to cuff the solid meat of his thigh, and withdrew her hand as if she’d grazed a hot stove. “Please tell me if we zoom in that will say Oakley was seventeen not seventy.”
He zoomed in—there it was in black-and-white. Embry’s lips went numb as she read the words out loud just for added confirmation that her wrung-out mind wasn’t playing tricks on her.
“Tissue suggests vampire victim was bitten approximately seven decades ago at or around the age of sixteen or seventeen.” Embry nearly gasped. “That would make her around eighty-seven. Maybe even ninety or so depending on both educated guesses being accurate.”
Rye shifted beside her, running a thumb along his jaw, the Velcro purr still coming off his growing stubble. “I’m unsure what vampires consider the starting point on their age—is it their birth year or their bitten year?”
“I don’t know,” Embry admitted. “I didn’t research it because Oakley kept mentioning she wasn’t bitten, but, like, it says it right there, does it not?”
“It does. And the Table medical examiner lists several biological reasons to believe so.” He pointed these out. “Why?”
“She… Well, she insisted several times that she was a rare ‘born’ vampire. Not that she was made. Oakley told us she was seventeen and eventually she’d just stop aging and stay that way for three hundred years.” Then Embry added, “Ames can totally back me up on this.”
Rye shifted—sitting back into the cushions, recrossing his legs—thinking on this.
As he did so, his weight pulled Embry closer, and it was all she could do not to lay her head on his inviting shoulder.
As a grounding measure, she scooped up the phone—careful to avoid grazing his sweatpants—and began to read every word on the screen.
It was a page filling in as much information about the victim as the medical examiner or investigators knew.
“Why would Oakley lie about this?” Rye finally asked. “Wasn’t being the first vampire at the school in so many years enough?”
“I’m not sure. I just know she said it repeatedly.” Embry shrugged and regretted it immediately because the movement put her hand way too close to Rye’s. It should be illegal how her heart lurched without her permission.
Illegal.
“Wait…” She snapped her fingers. “It’s illegal to turn someone under the age of eighteen. Maybe she insisted she’d been born to cover for her parents.”
“That’s a possibility.”
Embry’s brain began whirring. “And now her name makes sense. Oakley! She told us she was named after Annie Oakley, and I thought that was weird, because Oakley wasn’t a witch.”
Rye’s brow furrowed. “So, you think Oakley kept her original name, even though it didn’t make sense culturally?”
“That’s exactly what I think.”
Rye hummed. “Well, that’s something to note that has a reasonable explanation, perhaps.
” Then he leaned over, ostensibly to get a closer look at what Embry was reading, but his head was bowed just enough now that a lock of soft, newly dry hair brushed her cheekbone.
Embry cleared her throat as he asked, “See anything else surprising?”
She straightened. “Um, actually, yeah.” Embry reread the information, zoomed in, then out, then back in. She hadn’t imagined it. “See the next of kin?”
Rye nodded.
“Her mother’s name is definitely not one I would’ve expected.”
“Why is that?”
“Because it says Hannah Crawford.”
When he didn’t react, Embry gave Rye the side eye, but even at this close distance, she could see he wasn’t being facetious. He didn’t know. She’d have to spell it out.
“Hannah Crawford,” she repeated, “and unless there are two vampires with that name, Oakley’s mother is the last vampire to attend Raven’s Head.”
Hannah Crawford had been the photographic inspiration for Oakley’s homecoming gown—Allegra had painstakingly designed the ruby-red dress based off 1940s black-and-white stills they’d found of the vampire.
Still, Rye didn’t seem as stunned by this revelation as she did. Instead, he was measured and stoic. “Why is that unexpected? It makes perfect sense that when picking a school Oakley gravitated toward her mother’s alma mater.”
“Because Oakley flat out told us she didn’t know her.
Ames did research on the history of vampires at Raven’s Head and found a bunch of information on Hannah—she was homecoming royalty and graduated at the top of the class before absconding to Europe to work covertly as a spy.
” And then, because this was Rye and one of the terrible things they had in common was their membership to the Dead Mother Club, she added, “I mean, if you knew that about your mom, wouldn’t you brag about it? I sure would.”
Rye’s eyes met hers, soft and kind and perhaps a touch sad, even though it’d been so long for both that it was the absence that hurt most, not missing the person, per se. He nodded, tight-lipped. “I would.”