“No problem.” I clasped hands with him. The low hum of his magic made my fingertips tingle. “Elf?” His grip went limp. “You’re using a third-tier glamour.” A quality one at that. “Those ears must be hard to cover.”

The fingers of his opposite hand smoothed over the rounded top of one ear as if searching for a point. He dropped his hands and shoved them into his pockets to give them somewhere to go. Or maybe just to keep them away from me. “They warned me you had unusual talents.”

I massaged the base of my neck, fingers slipping down into my shirt collar like a warning label was a physical tag I could hide. “Unusual is one word for it.”

Plenty of fae were unique. I wasn’t special. Just different.

His smile conveyed the exact right amount of empathy. It made me wonder if he practiced the expression in a mirror before work each day. “The body is this way if you’d like to take a look.”

Like wasn’t the word I would have used. I wasn’t in Villanow because I wanted to be. I was here because the method of death called to me, a perverse obsession I had as much control over as taking my next breath.

Comeaux eyed me expectantly, and I realized I hadn’t answered him yet. “Sure.” I tossed him the key fob to my rental. “Do me a favor and hold on to that.”

After tucking the hunk of plastic into his pocket with an amused twitch of his lips, he led me past eight unmarked black SUVs overflowing the cramped parking area at the trailhead. We hiked for a while until a crater emerged from among the trees. It must have spanned three miles across. A more generous soul might have called it a dead lake, but that sounded morbid given the circumstances. Morbid or not, the empty bed was as dry as the grass crunching under my feet. Thanks to the summer draught, only the deepest portion of the bowl retained any water.

Sweat trickled down my nape despite the cool weight of my jacket. Water, no matter how fresh, always carried the underlying scents of decomposition. Rotting fish corpses. Molding leaves. Urine. Feces. Ponds were swimming pools for bacteria, and my sinuses burned when I caught that first whiff of decay, stinging my nasal passages like I had inhaled a gallon of saltwater.

Seagulls cried.

Waves crashed.

Lori gurgled as her head vanished beneath the swell of white foam.

“Are you all right?” He squinted in the same direction as me. “That’s where she was found, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“Yeah.” Throat tight, I ripped my gaze from the water. “I figured.”