Now that we were no longer alone in the woods, the adrenaline of the last few hours leached out of my body, leaving my tired and a bit shaky. I had a hard time staying awake, even with the soft sounds of talking and crying from Jen’s family. The pack leader let out two short, piercing whistles and one long one. A wolf padded silently up to his side.

The pack leader addressed Lily this time and asked, “Are we outside your range? I don’t want one of my trackers to suddenly turn into a hungry, naked man who needs a nap.”

“You’re in the clear. I made sure that I’m not contaminating any part of the scene. I don’t want to hinder the investigation.” Lily didn’t sound tired, and I was slightly jealous.

“While you’re over there, can you take a look at whose body we don’t know? Maybe you all will find something we’ve missed,” I said. We needed help, and Chris wasn’t going to ask for it. Not that he was one of our investigating team. He was Lily’s vampire boyfriend, not a fellow guardian.

“It’s the one next to your girl. I couldn’t identify it either,” Chris volunteered.

Asshole, I thought. No one asked you. But he tried to help. One of the many benefits of all the wolves being there was that, for the first time, the forest felt safe. I hadn’t been as scared since we met Wang. But there had always been a prickle on my skin.

But now, in the company of a dozen-plus grieving werewolves, I felt very far from alone. There was no way there was so much as a bunny within five hundred yards of us that the wolves didn’t know about or smell. I sat down at the base of a tree by Lily, leaned my head back, and promptly started to doze off. When I snapped awake a short while later, I was horrified to discover that I had been drooling.

Great. Not only had I been drooling on myself but in public. I had also managed to do so in front of a bunch of people with decent night vision. My only comfort was that they probably didn’t give a fuck what I did and just wanted to take the body of their baby sister home. The pack leader and Chris were having a heated conversation over the second body. The wolf that had been selected to be the bloodhound made slow rings around the scene of the crime with his nose to the ground. He kept coming back to one spot, stopping, then making a larger ring. When I thought about it, I realized that he must be coming back to the spot where the guy sat and watched. I knew the vodnik had said it, but it was still strange to watch the wolf confirm it. Finally, his circles got very large.

He stood on the little wooden bridge and woofed one time. The pack leader waved his hand to show that he had heard, and the wolf moved off. I almost fell asleep again when Chris and the pack leader came back over.

“It’s a hag,” said the pack leader.

“Probably,” said Chris.

“What kind?” asked Lily. “Sea? Demon? Witch?”

“Ah, well, to be honest, we can’t tell,” Chris said.

“One of the two for sure,” the pack leader said.

“I can take the body for you and ask around,” Chris said.

“No, but thank you. All hags belong to the witches, so we’ll bring it—her, the hag—to them. If you can carry it to Harper’s car, that would be great,” Lily said as if she asked the guys to move a couch instead of a person for her. I really, really, really did not want to drive home with a dead body in the trunk of the car—scratch that. I was okay with there never being a dead body in the trunk of my car, ever.

“You’re sure Chris can’t take it?” I asked, “He probably has a better place to put it.”

“Now, Harper, don’t worry. I’m sure the Safe can fix us up a deep freeze or something,” Lily said. “Come on. We’ve got to get you home.”

I couldn’t argue with going home or about the fact the café would find somewhere to put the body. I followed Lily to the car. On the way there, we gave Jen a silent hug. Chris followed quite a bit of a way behind us, carrying the body bags containing Samantha and the hag.

In the parking lot, I popped my trunk while Lily stood, watching. Chris lowered the hag inside. He had to bend the bag to get it to fit. It made a sort of sick-sucking sound. Chris put the other bag in his trunk.

The wolf sat in a parking stall. I went over to them and asked them a few questions to give Lily and Chris some privacy. “Is this where he parked?”

The wolf made one exaggerated nod for yes.

“Can you follow the trail beyond here?” I was hopeful.

They shook their head no and crushed any hope I had left for an easy resolution.

“If you smell him again, will you recognize his scent?”

The wolf nodded again and growled this time. But the growl didn’t worry me. I understood at who it was directed and what it meant, without words.

“Thank you. I appreciate your help. I’m sorry again for your loss. Alice was awesome.” I struggled for a moment with the urge to pat his head comfortingly as a stand-in for the hug I would have given the creature if it had been on its human legs.

The wolf whined once and lay down in the parking lot with its front paws crossed. I went over to where Chris and Lily said their goodbyes. When they finally finished, I got into the car with Lily and headed back to the Safe Harbor Café. Lily drove this time.

As soon as I got into the car, I knew it was safe to fall asleep, but I suddenly felt wide awake. I watched the dark forest pass by outside the car window. We drove in silence, and I felt my mind wander to the women. Who was the hag, and what type of hag was she? I couldn’t stop myself from wondering what the last moments of their lives had been like.

I doubted that they would have been aware when they had been strangled. Overpowering an adult male human would be nothing for an adult female werewolf. I couldn’t imagine that any but the strongest human with the best training could hold their own against Alice. It wasn’t that she had been some fabulous brawler or very strong. She had just been a nice normal grade-school teacher and werewolf. I also couldn’t imagine how he would have incapacitated her. Most drugs didn’t work on wolves. Those that did didn’t last very long. I’d never heard of a vampire trying to take drugs or needing them. The dryad should have been protected by her tree.

I fell asleep, wondering if they had been afraid when they died or if it was a peaceful death. I had strange dreams of running through a forest looking for Lily, and when she woke me to tell me that we were back at the Safe Harbor Café, I woke with a startle and had a very hard time calming down.

Lily had pulled the car around to the back of the Safe Harbor Café. Its chrome piping went all the way around. There wasn’t normally a door back here, but I figured there soon would be. I hoped that the café would make us a second deep freeze so I wouldn’t have to keep the hag next to the ice cream in the small deep freeze in the kitchen.

The back of the café swirled and shifted as it changed form to meet our needs. There was a sort of vortex, and the building rearranged itself to make a door where there had just been a wall before. Lily popped the trunk, and I got out of the car. We wrestled the body out of the trunk where Chris had wedged it. I couldn’t tell if I was holding the head or the feet. I tried not to think about it.

We left the trunk open and lugged the body to the back door. The door swung open without us touching it. It opened into a basement I had never entered before. It had exposed stone walls and dirt floors. The giant, white deep freeze didn’t plug in anywhere. It sat in the center of the room. The room didn’t belong to our little diner at all. I wondered if it was leftover from one of its earlier incarnations. The Safe Harbor Café wasn’t the first facade or name the spirit had used as a guardhouse.

The freezer popped open. There was a trash bag in the corner filled with something. I didn’t know what it was and was very sure that I didn’t want to know. On the count of three, Lily and I lifted the body into the freezer. We went out the door we had come through. There weren’t any stairs back into the restaurant anyway. I said goodbye and thank you to the café. I hugged Lily goodbye before heading back to my car to go home for the night.

The next morning, I texted Lily to see if she would call the head witch, Ashley, about the hag and if she had heard of any updates from Chris or Jen. I wasn’t sure what our next step would be, so I went into the Safe Harbor Café and started on lunch prep. I was hopeful Ashley would be able to cast a spell that would magically lead us directly to the killer. If she couldn’t do that, I figured we would have to look at what Samantha, Alice, and the dryad had in common. I couldn’t think of anything off the top of my head. But there had to be some way they were all connected. Maybe they looked alike or had taken the same pottery class or something. There must have been some common thread that had brought them to the attention of the killer.

I chopped veggies and told the café my wildest theories about the case. Since it was a diner, it couldn’t laugh at me for being stupid when I suggested it was a government conspiracy or serial killer. Maybe someone was big game hunting us. The café didn’t give me any new information. It did materialize a bark phone so that I could call Amara and tell her that we had found Vasiliki. I put off calling her so long that the café materialized the phone in front of me three different times before I finally got up the nerve to make the call. She didn’t cry, which was a relief. I’m not sure that I could have dealt with her tears without crying. I asked her, but she couldn’t think of anything unusual about Vasiliki that would have brought her to the attention of the killer.

Lily texted me to say that Chris and Jen didn’t have any new information for her. She did let me know that Ashley would be there between lunch and dinner to look at the body. I served lunch to a family of leprechauns and a few witches. A couple of people called to complain that we hadn’t been open the night before. I explained where we had been, and they were mostly apologetic. No one reported any more missing women. But we wouldn’t have to go too long without a break in the case.