The cabin is nestled in the middle of Inger Park, and Harvest is annoyed with herself for not realizing that Henry Faulkner was heading toward it before he died.

Then again, for as long as she’s lived on the island, this section of Inger Park was off-limits due to its proximity to the caves. The snow has stopped and the sun is just peeking out over the tips of the pine trees. The air is cold, the edges of the circular clearing still hiding from the morning light. The cabin itself casts a long shadow, stretching forward as if to consume Harvest and Quinn as they stand in front of it.

It was somewhat of a surprise to get the phone call from Lottie. She started by apologizing for butting into their investigation, but truthfully, they wouldn’t be standing in front of Rowena Little’s current home without her assistance—and Lottie’s step-sister, who only divulged Rowena’s personal information after Quinn impressed upon her the severity of the situation. He still found himself agreeing to give a talk at Career Day though.

Rowena Little (now Wilkins) lives in a cozy cabin surrounded by pine trees. There is smoke rising up through the chimney and a wreath on the front door. Its wood slats are pleasingly worn and weather-beaten, a beacon amidst the frozen landscape that surrounds it. The curtains are closed, but Harvest can tell that they are a floral lace, yellow-tinged with age, which only makes it look more homey. A crookedly carved sign rests by the mailbox: Little Cabin.

“Was it always called Little Cabin?” asks Quinn, glancing inside the mailbox, which is empty.

“If it was, no one called it that when I was growing up. Dad didn’t even know it was owned by the Littles.”

And indeed, it technically hadn’t been owned by them, but by Rowena’s great-great aunt, who was actually a Cleary. It passed to Rowena’s mother when she died, who informally renamed it Little Cabin, after her married name.

Harvest blinks into her second-sight. Despite the fact that Harvest isn’t familiar with Rowena’s aura, she feels she can reasonably assume that it shouldn’t be a solid block of darkness, so cold it makes her chest hurt.

This is pain, she thinks, rushing up the front steps. “Something’s wrong,” she says.

Quinn is right behind her, and he doesn’t stop to knock. With barely a grimace, he turns the door handle and the metal snaps instantly with his strength. Only then does he knock on the door, pausing to listen for a moment before walking into the house.

Harvest pushes past him, her second-sight still fogging her vision. She barely takes in her surroundings, but follows the trail down the hall, Quinn right behind her.

They find Rowena in the back room, half in the chair, as if she had fallen out of it and had tried to pull herself back up. She is a shifter by birth, and her body is stuck between her two forms, limbs shortened and covered in inky black fur, her spine curved unnaturally for a human, but halfway-feline. There is blood crusted around her mouth.

Harvest rushes to her immediately, placing a hand on her arm as she says, “It’s okay. We’re here to help you, Rowena.”

Rowena’s eyes open, and she blinks at Harvest. She opens her mouth to say something, but no sound comes out, just a raspy ghost of a word. Harvest looks up at Quinn, whose attention is on the small desk beside the chair. When he looks up, his face is grim.

“We’re too late,” he says, motioning toward the half written letter on the desk.

Harvest shakes her head, reaching for her phone. “I’m calling Aunt Bea.”

Quinn’s hand is cold when it covers her own, forcing her to stop frantically scrolling through her contacts. “Angel was right. There’s nothing we can do to stop it now,” he says.

Rowena’s breath becomes ragged, and a few words manage to escape her lips. “It’s…” she begins, but whatever strength she mustered fails her soon after. Instead, she reaches out and motions toward Quinn. Quinn kneels down and grasps her hand like an old friend. He helps Rowena sit up so that she is braced against the chair with his hand supporting the back of her neck.

“You can go get Aunt Bea and—” says Harvest.

“No,” he says, eyes still trained on Rowena. He moves so that his fingers press against the pulse point in her neck. They rest lightly against the skin, a direct line to her heart. Rowena’s breathing settles a second later, the wrinkles in her forehead smoothing into something resembling peace.

“You need to leave, Harvest,” he says, softly. He finally wrenches his gaze from Rowena. “Leave. Wait for me outside.”

“No, I’m not leaving her. We can call Hazel, or maybe Aunt Trixie. She might know —”

“That’s not what she wants,” he says.

“What do you mean?” She glances between Quinn’s face and his left hand, intertwined with Rowena’s now, her grip white-knuckled as if she’s drowning and Quinn is the only thing keeping her afloat.

“It works both ways, sometimes,” he says, glancing back at Rowena. “You need to leave.”

“Is that an order, sir?” she asks.

“No,” he says. He shakes his head. “Harvest, I don’t want—”

“I’m staying with her.”

Quinn shakes his head again and turns away from Harvest, focusing fully on Rowena. He readjusts so that both of his hands are pressed against Rowena’s neck, like a doctor checking for illness. But what Harvest suspects he’s really doing is altering Rowena’s mental state.

It works both ways.

She knows vampires can compel others, but is there another side to it? Can Rowena compel Quinn? Unlikely, she thinks. But perhaps Rowena can communicate with Quinn through the same bond he makes when he touches her skin? The compulsion that vampires use is a variation of thought-control, a type of psychic connection. She wonders what Rowena is telling him. Is she showing him what happened? Is she asking him to take away the pain?

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Harvest hopes he’s at least taking her away from the cold, frozen floor of the cabin and to a place that holds far better memories. A second later, there is a tiny movement—just a twist of Quinn’s wrists really. The noise of a spinal cord severing is brief and impossibly loud.

And then, Rowena Little is dead.

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I’m so sorry we lied.

It’s the first sentence in Rowena Little’s confession letter, and it’s the one that Quinn can’t stop thinking about as he silently makes his way through the winding darkness of the caves, Harvest in front of him.

It’s what Rowena saw in her last few hours alive: the same darkness, the same cold stone. It’s what he saw when he looked into her mind. She was crying out to be released from it, knew that the curse had come for her, and there was no turning back.

Because that’s what it felt like: mischief gone wrong, magic turned on its wielder, a soldier cut by their own blade. A curse.

He hadn’t wanted to end her life—not like that—but the fear in her voice, and the words, “Help me end it,” echoing in his head…

His ring burns into his skin, reminding him of his misdeeds. It’s not the first time he’s broken the terms of his agreement with the Bureau. He knows he will receive a summons to the Council when he gets back to the mainland.

But he has other things to worry about right now: finding Maisie Myer’s remains.

They are deep inside the unnamed cave in the middle of Inger Park. Rowena’s letter was surprisingly specific: We left her down the trail to the right, three turns down. Please give her peace.

Ahead of Harvest, Theodore pauses, his hand pressed against the stone. Despite Rowena’s details, Quinn asked Theodore to come, knowing that his particular brand of magic—the magic that keeps the Rosenbloom Estate green all year long—means they will be more likely to find Maisie without having to disturb the remains too much in their searching. “He can talk to the earth,” Harvest explained to him.

“Here,” says Theodore, feeling the rough ridges of the cave wall, damp with iridescent fungi. “It’s native to the island. Feeds off of decaying mischief. There’s tons of it by the cemetery. Her remains are here.”

Quinn moves past Harvest and kneels down. Years of rubble and debris have settled, but there is still a noticeable hole, a small nook cut into the cave by the first inhabitants of the island centuries ago.

Quinn grabs onto the rock and breaks off a chunk to peer into the damp dark. He doesn’t need a flashlight to see the mound of fabric, to know that it is shaped like a body. Still, he reaches out and pulls back the corner, to reveal the pearly white sheen of bone, impossibly bright in the darkness.

Behind him, Harvest angles her flashlight into the hole and leans closer to see. He can feel her sadness, like a wave of cold water at his back.

----------------------------------------

The ferry is approaching, but instead of watching it, her attention is on Quinn.

“Hazel talked to Maisie’s sister. Leon had mailed her Maisie’s locket. In the letter, he said that he found it in the attic. He had blocked out all of his memory of that night but the locket brought it all back—including what had really happened.”

Although they may never know the full truth, they are able to piece some of it together between Leon’s letter to Maisie’s sister and Rowena’s last written words. Leon’s letter confesses that the party hadn’t taken place at the beach, as they previously claimed. Instead, they had snuck into the caves. Leon isn’t too specific about what happened next, but he mentions an argument, a shove in the dark. Harvest can almost hear the crack of a skull hitting the rock as she ponders Leon’s words.

Rowena’s letter fills in the rest: they panicked and hid her body. Leon, in particular, was frantic and made them swear to the bonfire story. They even spent an hour on the beach, cluttering the spot with empty beer cans, fashioning an alibi for themselves.

Leon had no idea when he confessed to his crime that he would activate something far worse than guilt. Rowena is the one who pieced it together: the promise they made was stronger than mere words, turning through their blood as a curse.

A promise sealed with spilled blood can only be broken by death, she wrote. When Leon Cruz confessed, he broke the terms of their promise, forfeiting the lives of those involved.

Rowena Little’s body will be transported back to the mainland to undergo a full post-mortem. Quinn is sure it will show the signs of the same cause of death: an unidentified pathogen in the blood. Both Rowena and Angel called it a curse. Quinn called it foolish.

“It was always going to end this way,” he says.

“I still think—”

“There was nothing we could do,” he interrupts, not unkindly.

She nods, but her expression is strained, her eyes watery. She wants to believe him, though she hasn’t quite gotten there yet.

He watches the emotions flicker beneath her caramel eyes, while he absentmindedly twists the ring on his pinky finger. Her gaze flickers down to his hand, and her eyebrows knit together.

“What happened?” she asks, reaching out to get a closer look at the red welt that surrounds his finger, where the ring meets skin.

“Allergic reaction,” he says lightly, before shoving his hand in his pocket. “When will you be back in the office?”

“I’m staying one more night, but I’m sure I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The ferry docks, and Harvest waits for Quinn to move. Instead, he frowns down at her. He opens his mouth to say something, his eyes searching her expression. She feels closed off, suddenly. Far away from him. Like he left her back in the damp dark of the unnamed caves in Inger Park. She almost wants to grab his hand, just to pull herself back to him, his eyes as golden as sunshine.

And then she’s there again, smiling at him and bumping his side with her elbow. “You better get going or the ferry will leave without you,” she says with a laugh.

He considers her for a beat and then nods. Almost without thought he leans down and presses a kiss to her cheek. “Merry Christmas,” he says.

And then he is gone and the ferry is being pushed away from the dock. Harvest watches as it makes its way to the mainland, thinking about the red welt on Quinn’s finger. She knew his ring had mischief in it, but she has never seen such an injury—especially on a vampire, whose healing capabilities mean that their bodies don’t suffer ailments or injuries for long.

Unless the work of a powerful artifact or curse is at play.

It reminds her of the fact that she doesn’t know why he wears a spelled ring with the Bureau crest engraved upon it. It reminds her of the fact that she doesn’t know why he was forced to swear an oath to the Bureau almost two hundred years ago, something she knows they do only for particularly unique situations. Or perhaps when someone can benefit them, such as Hazel and her abilities to create magical tools and weapons.

But Hazel doesn’t wear a ring.

So, why does he?

The ferry is a speck on the horizon now, but, still, she stands and watches the sea.

She thinks about Rowena’s last moments. It all happened so fast. She knows there was little they could do, but the death feels so heavy in her chest. She presses a finger to the corner of her eye, blinking back a confusing mixture of sadness and grief for someone she hadn’t even known. She feels as if she stopped looking for some vital object too soon, as if she abandoned Rowena too easily.

We should have tried harder, she thinks. There was no time to think properly, to separate herself from the cold fear of seeing Rowena collapsed and coughing up blood. She trusted Quinn to make a decision.

She’s not sure he made the right one.

With a deep breath, she slips her phone out of her pocket. The sea breeze is gentle now that the snow has ceased. It’ll be a warm day, the ground already wet with melting snow. She brushes her hair behind her ear as she navigates to the unanswered message that has remained at the back of her thoughts.

She thinks, again, about Quinn—about his hand brushing against her cheek and how surprisingly warm his touch had been against the frigid winter air that had seeped into her skin.

But it wasn’t just him that was warm. It was the mischief embedded in his ring, etched with a lion and crowned by three rubies, a vessel for a spell.

She types out a message, reads it twice for errors, and then hits send.