37. HARD EVIDENCE
HARD EVIDENCE
“HEY, THERE’S SOMETHING I WANT YOU GUYS TO SEE,” RYE SAID to Embry, Ames, and Fairfax as they piled into Embry’s room after the meeting adjourned, milking the time they had before Ames and Fairfax were required to return to the dorm for the night for curfew.
“That’s a terrifying prospect, considering you aren’t carrying anything in your hands and your phone is literally the only thing I can see you have in your pockets,” Ames sassed back, folding her arms over her chest. “If you start undressing, I’m leaving out that window.”
Ironically, Ames pointed to the very window Rye had arrived at just a few nights ago.
“Babe, I can assure you from my time on crew with Knighton that you might want to stick around if what he wants to show us is himself,” Fairfax told her. “It’s worth a gander—his insistence of being the personification of shabby chic is just a cover to avoid well-deserved objectification.”
Embry did not need this clarification.
Rye sighed, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes. “I’m not undressing, guys—minds out of the gutter and pointed back at the very real prospect that your sorcerer buddy is trying to frame all of us for vampire murder, starting with Embry.”
He thrust a hand at her for emphasis. And Embry’s eyes shot to her running shoes because her body had betrayed her the second there was any discussion of Rye disrobing. She didn’t need to check the nearby vanity mirror to know she was blushing. Profusely.
“Ryszard, my dear.” Ames sighed. “Have you considered that we’re stressed out enough to take literally any bait to get our minds off what a fucking cluster bus this is?”
“Gutter balls all around,” Fairfax agreed, not even screwing up his face to turn the term gutter balls into an obvious double entendre.
“I even read fifty pages ahead in War and Peace last night in my attempt to forget that Embry had been perp-walked out of the dorm by Inspector Brown. If reading ahead of assignment pace on War and Peace isn’t the ultimate attempt at disassociating, I don’t know what is. ”
“Knighton, what do you want to show us?” Embry blurted, yanking the conversational steering wheel and giving herself something to do—shutting the door—while furiously hoping the heat in her cheeks would recede. She’d already applied her blush, and it would be noticeable.
That’s when Rye surprised Embry by rolling up the corner of the cloud-fluffy area rug that sat under her queen-size bed, revealing a blast from the past: a loose board.
A loose board, which, when removed, revealed a secret compartment.
A secret compartment where the pair used to hide video evidence of the one-act plays they’d written after particularly inspiring movie nights in their early teens.
The “plays” would always halt after a few scenes because invariably Embry and Rye would get in an argument over their very different notions of artistic vision or because one of them had the audacity, ahem, to try an illegal love spell out on a squirrel.
Then they eventually stopped altogether.
After that, Embry rearranged her room, got her new glorious rug, and completely forgot about the hidey-hole under the floorboard.
But apparently Rye had never forgotten.
It was all still there—his dad’s old camcorder with the micro tapes that he’d snuck out of the house without his aunt noticing; a handful of notebooks dotted with stickers and Embry’s flowery hand; even a few flat, dusty bags of microwave popcorn, long expired.
Embry’s heart lurched as the memories flooded back, and her body did, too, her hand scrabbling for the knob she’d just turned, catching it and holding on for dear life. Her shoulder blades hit the doorframe, her breath shallow as her head suddenly spun with a new truth.
That Embry, that twelve-, thirteen-year-old girl, had loved spending time with Rye Knighton more than anyone else.
It was a thrill when they’d made something together, recording take after take on that old camcorder.
It was a thrill when they’d started squabbling and the whole thing had fallen apart until the next day.
It was a thrill when Rye would appear at her front door, hands in pockets, pre-crew shoulders thin and bunched, sheepishly asking if she had plans…
and if not, he had an idea for something they could make or something they could watch together to get some ideas.
Even when the camcorder was retired, the movie nights stayed.
Especially in the dead of winter and the middle of summers when their boarding school friends would flock home.
“You had a whole-ass, main-character-in-a-YA-novel under-the-floorboards hidey-hole and you never told me?” Ames asked, whirling rather dramatically on her BFF. “I know you’re going through hell right now, but just for future reference, this is absolutely something a best friend should know.”
Guilt twisted Embry’s stomach as she realized her best friend at the time the compartment was created knew, because he’d made it with her.
Embry reached for a snatch of levity and fell short as Rye said, “We can argue about that later.” He didn’t look up, rummaging around. “Right now, we need to talk about this.”
Dramatic timing a thing of beauty, Rye sat back, revealing the item in his grasp: Oakley’s ratty backpack.
It was as decrepit as ever, even wrapped in a protective bubble of magic.
“You grabbed it!” Embry squealed, her mind and body suddenly righting itself so hard her nose stung as if it’d filled with seawater. She pushed off the doorframe and nearly ran at Rye, elated. “How did you get it out without them noticing?”
Rye pushed himself to standing, making the same sheepish face he had as a much younger boy on her doorstep.
He shrugged. “I cast the same spell you cast on me on it, wrapped it in protective magic to guard against any magical contamination, and snuck out with it, all while Headmaster Martinelli was reading you the riot act.”
“Hold on. Wait.” Ames tossed up both hands. “You were there? With Em? I literally saw her room before Martinelli made us all go back to ours, and she was the only person in it.”
“I may have perfected an invisibility spell.” Embry shrugged, trying to be nonchalant, but totally grinning like a fiend. “We used it to get in, it wore off, and I cast it on Rye again right as Valentina came running when I screamed.”
Ames whirled on Rye. “Ryszard, you saw Balthazar with your own eyes, framing Em?”
“That is correct.”
Now Fairfax did his own whirling on Rye. “And why didn’t we learn this just now when we were discussing Balthazar’s assault on Embry and the coven at large?”
“I didn’t want anyone to know Rye was there with me,” Embry answered, sitting on the end of her bed and hauling Ames down next to her.
“I didn’t want him to get in trouble, and, honestly, Brown and Martinelli didn’t take Rye seriously when he insisted that I didn’t follow Oakley after our confrontation and instead went straight to my dorm room.
They seem to be of the opinion that Rye and Daddy have no credibility when it comes to defending me.
So, I made the snap decision to take Rye out of the equation when my scream worked as expected. ”
Ames narrowed her eyes. “And why did you scream?”
Embry had thought this was obvious. “Because I needed someone to see that Balthazar was with me, and it seemed like sacrificing myself to whatever punishment I’d receive for breaking in would be worth it to be caught with him.
” Everyone knew how admin came running for the occasional screamer.
“But then he stopped time without breaking a sweat and hopped out the window—apparently it’s true that sorcerers are incredibly powerful because they can draw from their dark well or whatever”—as expected, almost everyone’s eyes went really wide at this news—“and I was caught, red-handed, by myself with the dress and stain remover he’d planted—”
“And the backpack, which they didn’t notice but we now have,” Rye finished.
“Wait.” Fairfax tossed a hand toward the bag, now held aloft by Rye, “why’d you take the backpack but not the incriminating dress?”
“Because the bright red dress was too noticeable to make vanish with that many eyeballs around. The backpack was in shadow, deeper in the closet,” Rye said.
“Plus, I’m hoping that even though it’s now out of the chain of custody, we can use it to learn something about Balthazar, and maybe Oakley, that will be useful. ”
Embry quickly explained the things they’d learned from the autopsy—that Oakley had been made, not born; that her mother’s name was listed as Hannah Crawford (cue Ames gasping, “But she said she didn’t even know her!
”); and about the corsage on her wrist but not in the video or in Rye’s photos. But the backpack was another story.
“And the backpack is important because it carried the dress?” Fairfax guessed.
“Well, it likely did that, yes, but what we really want to know is if it can answer other questions.” But even as she was saying it, Embry realized she needed to answer one they might not even know they had about Oakley—and Hiram Woodcross.
As soon as she explained that the vampire’s magical essence was no longer present and that apparently Hiram was a known magic thief who stole from colonial vampires, the mood in the room fell like a lead balloon. To say she was met with surprise was an understatement.
“Seriously?” Ames’s arched eyebrow was the kind that could draw blood. “I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that nobody was going to tell us that during our Coven Ascension mentoring sessions.”
“Not a good look,” Embry concurred. “Especially when it’s being used as circumstantial evidence against your great-great-great-great-great—a lot of greats—granddaughter and her coven all these years later.”
Wasn’t that the truth? Bad actions had a way of tainting those who had the audacity to come later.