A warning he certainly appreciated. He drew in a long, salt-laden breath and let it leak out again. “She told you that?”

“Mm.”

“Well.” He squeezed her fingers back. “Then I think you have your answer on whether she’s really your friend. That’s not the sort of thing she’d say to someone who wasn’t.”

But expecting him and Casek Wearne to ever claim the same would require more than elbow-magic. It would require an outright miracle.

18

Mamm-wynn?”

“Mrs. Tremayne? Where are you, dearover?”

Libby blinked awake, staring for a long moment at the unfamiliar wall across from her before the words combined with the image and reminded her of where she was—the Tremayne house, and given the angle of light coming through the window, she hadn’t been sleeping in this borrowed bed for more than four or five hours.

She sat up, rubbing her eyes. Still gritty. They’d spent an hour last night talking to the constable. The man from the cave hadn’t been spotted anywhere, but they’d determined that no threats lurked in the nearby houses, at least. Then they’d spent another hour waiting for Casek to bring Mabena, talking over why Beth would be trying to scare anyone with ghost stories—and deciding it must be to keep them away from wherever she was, or where she suspected a treasure was buried. Wondering what had been delivered to her before she left the cottage, what she knew that they didn’t. What she might have already found. When finally Casek had delivered Mabena to them, it had been with a few short words, saying the doctor had stitched up a sizable gash on her head, given her some aspirin for the pain, and that sleep would prove the best healer.

They’d tucked her into Beth’s room, and then Libby had been shown here, to a guest chamber. It was charming and pretty in blues and whites that whispered of the ocean. And its lovely walls didn’t reveal anything now about the whereabouts of the Tremayne matriarch, who had wandered off again.

Libby pushed herself out of bed and quickly changed into the fresh clothes waiting for her, trying to grasp the wisps of a dream as she did so. Something about trees . . . curling bark . . . strange plants . . . with fairies darting among them. The images were too elusive for her to pull back into her mind though. Best to focus on Mamm-wynn.

From what Oliver had told her, his grandmother had taken to escaping Mrs. Dawe several times a week, but she usually only went out to watch the ocean or to the Abbey Gardens. If they were calling for her with that note of panic, it could well mean they’d already checked those places and come up empty.

Not really caring that her braid was frazzled from sleep, she opened the door, charged into the hallway, and barreled straight into Oliver.