I called Pete, since Meri didn’t have a cell phone, and asked if she could help in the knitting shop. She agreed and sounded quite pleased at the prospect. Jennifer helped me open up. That didn’t take long, so we stood there chatting until Meri arrived. With her was my mother.
She fussed over Jennifer and wanted to know about all the happenings at home. When customers began to arrive, I suggested they go next door and have coffee at Elderflower. They both seemed happy to go out for coffee. Mom said, loud enough that I could hear, “And Jennifer, you can help me plan the hen party.”
I’d already regaled Jen with my horror over Mom’s determination to have a hen party and my equal determination not to have one, so she sent me a laughing glance over my mother’s shoulder.
“I’m counting on you,” I said, hoping she could hear me.
Jen didn’t come back, so I assumed she’d gone sightseeing.
Meri and I worked well together and were enjoying a successful day when Rafe came in later that afternoon looking grave. “Lucy, can I speak to you in private?”
Meri was comfortable enough that I had no problem leaving her alone for a while.
Once we were upstairs, Rafe said, “Where’s Violet?”
“She called in ‘sick.’” I put the word “sick” in air quotes. “I think she’s having a poor Violet day. I’m not sure she wants to be single anymore, and it’s hard to watch people you care about getting married. She’s been so grumpy lately that it was almost a relief for her not to be here today.”
He digested this. “Well, no reason for her to take her troubles out on you.”
And that was an opinion I could totally get behind. “But you didn’t come here to talk about Violet.”
“No.” He walked up and down, looked out the window as though the almost nonexistent traffic on Harrington Street fascinated him. “You’re not going to like what I have to tell you,” he said.
Before he could get further, Nyx came running down the stairs. She must have been sleeping on my bed upstairs and heard his voice. I thought I got pretty excited when Rafe turned up, but my passion was nothing compared with that of my cat. She was supposed to be my familiar, but she seemed to forget that whenever the handsome vampire was around. She meowed piteously, which I translated loosely to, “Love me, love me, love me.”
He picked her up, and she immediately began to purr like a chainsaw. She glanced at me with her green-gold eyes as though daring me to be jealous.
Rafe said, “You’d better sit down.” And then he joined me, sitting by my side. Nyx immediately curled up on his lap, purring loudly. “I had the material in your rune box analyzed.”
I didn’t like the tone of his voice. “Okay.”
“You have to understand, some of the top scientists in all the world practice here in Oxford. I don’t think there can be any question.”
I was really getting nervous now. “Spit it out, Rafe.”
“If you had so much as tasted what was in that box, it would have killed you.”
I hadn’t been expecting good news, but getting death as a wedding present? I hadn’t seen that one coming.
I asked the obvious question. “Are you sure?”
“Believe me, I had them test it a second time. The ingredients are altogether curious. But it’s the arsenic that would have killed you.”
I was stunned. “Who would do such a thing? Who hates me that much?”
He took my hand. “That’s a question that’s puzzling me, too. Think, Lucy. Have you upset someone?”
“No. Not that I can think of.”
I looked down at Nyx, who was so possessive about Rafe, and wondered if someone had tried to get rid of me in hopes of winning my fiancé when I was gone. “What about you? Could there be someone so infatuated with you that they would get rid of me rather than see you married and unavailable?”
He looked at me the way my mother used to when she caught me reading a Harlequin romance. “Really, Lucy.”
“What? It’s possible.”
And then he just said, “No.”
Which was rather comforting.
I said, “I think I know where this came from. Rafe, this is witch business. Do you have proof that the stuff in that box was laced with arsenic?”
He nodded and withdrew a piece of paper from his inner pocket. “This is the breakdown of ingredients that were identified. A couple of them puzzled even the top chemists. They’re still trying to identify them. But I only care about the poison.”
I nodded. We both knew there were substances that mere mortals knew nothing about. But I didn’t like that somebody had tried to kill me with an old standby like arsenic.
The downstairs door opened and closed, and I heard footsteps on the stairs. There were very few people who would come up to my flat unannounced, so I suspected immediately it was my grandmother. Sure enough, Gran came into the room. But instead of looking like my comfortable Gran, she looked shaken and pale, even for her.
“Oh, Lucy, the most terrible thing happened,” my grandmother said.
Sylvia followed her, looking grim and somehow guilty. “Oh, Rafe. You’re here.” She sounded as though she wished he weren’t.
“What happened?” I asked them.
They came all the way into the lounge, and Gran said, “I’m sorry, dear. I didn’t know Rafe was here.”
He said, “Would you like me to leave?”
“No,” I answered before they could. I had a sneaking suspicion I might need him, depending on why these two were looking guilty and upset. “That’s okay. What’s going on?”
Gran squeezed her hands together. “I couldn’t sleep, you see. It’s the excitement over the wedding. And there’s so much to do. I just popped out to get some seed pear—” She glanced at Rafe. “Some things, and I bumped smack into Mrs. Darlington.”
Now I saw
