“Ha … yeah. I guess so.” Harper’s smile is too bright. Too forced. Her eyes move too quickly when she looks down at the head she clutches to her chest before refocusing on her unexpected guest. “Thought I’d … you know”—she pats the top of the head—“throw my hat in the ring.”
She cringes at her own terrible joke, and Maya tilts her head as though she’s trying to work Harper out. But Harper Starling is dangerous. Perhaps more dangerous than I could have imagined that night when I lay on the road, struggling to stay conscious as she drove away from the lives she’d forever ruined. She could kill this woman easily, if she wanted to. Maya is diminutive, her frame nearly frail, long black braids trailing down her back all the way to her hips, the scent of orange and hibiscus a sweet halo around her.
But another realization seems to scuttle through my brain like an unwelcome intruder. As much as I need to protect Maya from Harper, I need to protect Harper from harm too, no matter how much of a danger she might be. I can’t let her be taken from me before I’ve gotten what I came all this way and waited so long for. And that thought is the one that forces me a step closer.
“Good thing the fake blood is water soluble,” I say. Maya turns to face me and I withdraw the severed hands from behind my back, brandishing them with nonchalance. “I’m Nolan. I’d shake your hand, but this stuff makes a bit of a mess. Hopefully it’ll be worth it for the style points at the race. I’m not sure my soapbox race car–building skills are really up to snuff, you know?”
Maya looks down at the hands and pushes her glasses up her nose with the end of her pen. “Did you get the blood from Craft-A-Corpse?”
“Sure did.”
She tilts her chin up and, for a moment, I wonder if I’ve caught myself in a lie. When I refocus on Harper, she doesn’t give me any clues. She paints a ridiculous picture, with a decapitated head clutched to her chest and her full lips pressed into a tense line and her eyes wide with alarm. She’s obviously a terrible person and completely unhinged. And I one hundred percent do not find her in any way adorable. Absolutely not.
“The Craft-A-Corpse blood can still stain,” Maya says, snapping me out of my efforts to kill any intrusive thoughts of Harper Starling’s attractiveness. I’m grateful for the distraction, and I make every effort to pin all my attention to the woman standing between me and my sworn enemy. I try to ignore that it feels a lot harder to do than it should. “I make a stain remover that’ll get it out. You can buy it from my shop on Main Street. Maya’s Magical Mixtures. And I sell better-quality fake blood too. It’s even edible—you can put it on cake, in drinks. Strawberry and raspberry flavors available. Drizzle it on the whipped cream in A Shipwrecked Bean’s chili hot chocolate and it’ll change your life.”
Maya pulls a business card from between the last pages of her book and walks forward to slide it into my shirt pocket, giving my chest a pat before she turns back to Harper. “Speaking of which, I need some strawberries. Got any?”
“Umm.” Harper clears her throat and tries to force a smile, but it ends up being more of a grimace, the tension climbing into her cheeks to keep the light from reaching her eyes. “Sure, help yourself.”
“Thanks.” With a nod to each of us, Maya pulls a cloth bag from her shoulder and walks away toward the gate along the garden’s back wall before disappearing into the vegetable garden.
Harper stares at me. I glare back. And then, to my surprise, she marches right up to me, not stopping until she’s inches from my face, the scents of death and citrus and aromatic herbs drifting from her skin.
“Leave,” she snarls.
“I’m not done building a corpse.”
“Go reconstruct it elsewhere. And take this with you.” She shoves the head into my chest, but I don’t pull it from her grasp.
“Hang on to it,” I say, pushing it back toward her with Jake’s severed hands. “Consider it a gift.”
“A parting gift? As in, you’re fucking off out of here, never to return?”
A smile creeps onto my lips, one Harper watches as it lights with a deadly vow. I feel her, like a current. A hum. A tingle in my flesh. My fingers tense around the wrists still clutched in my grip, leaving imprints on the cool skin. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I expect the threat to spook her. I want to sense the terror in her. To see it in the way her pupils narrow to a pinprick, or to catch it on a scent. But it isn’t there. I only hear defiance when she says, “Neither am I.”
“Good. Don’t waste your energy. Because you could leave Cape Carnage, but you’ll never escape me.”
“Harper?” Maya calls from the other side of the wall. “Do you have any of the Sweet Kiss strawberries this year?”
“Sure do. I’ll come give you a hand.”
I think I catch the slightest whisper of fear flicker across Harper’s face. But just as quickly as it appears, she buries it, hiding it behind a vicious smirk. She knows I won’t make a move with Maya here. But what she doesn’t know is that this is only the beginning. And I’m not here to rush my plans along.
I’m here to savor them.
“No matter where you go. No matter how long it takes,” I whisper. I lean a little closer. There’s only an inch or two of space between us. My glare fuses with hers and doesn’t let go. And Harper stares me down in reply. “If you run, I will find you. You can hide in the farthest reaches of the deepest hell, and I will still drag you out. Even the devil can’t save you from me.”
I drop the severed hands on the ground between us.
And then I turn and walk away.
RAKING FIREHarper
BALLMEAT GUY THINKS VERY LITTLE of me, that much is clear.
He thinks I’m weak. That I’ll run. That I’ll hide. That he can bully me into submission or intimidate me into whatever trap he plans on setting.
I don’t know what it is he wants from me yet, but he’s obviously unhinged and dangerous as fuck. But so am I. And this is my town. Every square inch of it is mine to look after.
Including the Capeside Inn.
I watch from the rocky hill next to the parking lot as Nolan leaves the lobby in a sweater and a loose pair of shorts. He keeps his hood up against the misty rain that rolls in from the sea. His gaze pans across his surroundings as he stretches. Maybe he senses he’s being watched, because he seems to hunt the landscape for clues. His focus passes over the bushes and boulders where I’m crouched, but he doesn’t notice me camouflaged in the shadows. Instead, he bends, straightening a brace around one knee before stretching that leg. A moment later, he’s putting his AirPods in, and then he’s off, heading in the direction of the town at a jog, a slight hitch in the step of the braced leg that seems to soften as he establishes a warm-up pace up the gradual incline.
I turn my attention to my target. The Capeside Inn. A dark thrill swirls in my chest.
I clamber down the hill, stopping at the edge of the parking lot, just in case he turns back. Despite the shitty sleep I had hiding beneath the desk of my guest room with a gun clutched to my chest, I feel fucking wide awake now. I keep my eyes on Nolan as he reaches the end of the street and then disappears from view over the crest of the hill. And then I run for the hotel.
When I enter the lobby, there’s a gentle snore from the office next to the reception desk. I slip beneath the folding counter and into Irene’s domain. When I lean into the office, she’s sitting in her reclining chair, her mouth gaping, a soap opera silently playing on a television that looks nearly as old as she is. Satisfied, I turn back to the reception desk, flipping to the last pages of her guest ledger, where I find exactly what I’m looking for.
