City of Magic: The Complete Series by Helen Harper (book club recommendations TXT) 📕

You’re too curious and too nosy not to have rifled through their papers and paid attention to their procedures when you were cleaning for them. Anyway, I know you’ll have already calculated the odds in your head.’ He leaned towards me. ‘From what I know of you, you’ll be spot on.’

‘Three to one,’ I told him. ‘It’s not looking good for him.’

Monroe nodded. ‘But it is looking good for us.’

I could only agree. As long as Philip the vampire had scratches on his skin, we could prove we had our man. I hoped so. It would be great to think that Monroe and I had solved a murder in a mere morning. It would certainly deter anyone else from thinking about doing something similar – and it wouldn’t lead to further misery and accusations for the rest of the vampires.

‘Shall we knock?’ I asked.

Monroe shrugged. ‘Sure.’ He walked up to the front door but it wasn’t a fist he raised to it. He threw out a powerful kick, splintering the wood and causing the door to crash open. He turned and grinned. ‘Knock, knock.’

I rolled my eyes, but secretly I was pleased to see that Monroe was acting more like the wolf that I knew. Yes, he was mercurial and still suffering badly but it was good to know that the old, arrogant Monroe lurked behind those blue eyes.

If we’d been expecting Philip to storm down the hallway at the sound of our intrusion, we were disappointed. The only response that greeted Monroe’s battering ram of an entrance was silence. In theory that should have been a good thing but it filled me with foreboding.

‘How good is your magic these days?’ Monroe asked as we continued to hover on the porch. ‘Can you use it to tell whether anyone is inside?’

I pursed my lips. ‘Potentially, but I don’t want to over-use it.’ I told him about my fears that I might cause more magic to flood the atmosphere and lead to further problems across the city.

‘There’s only one of you,’ he pointed out. ‘There were loads of faeries here for decades who caused the magic build-up.’

‘All the same,’ I said, ‘I’m still uneasy about it. I’ll use magic when it’s the best option but when we can go down the old-fashioned route…’

‘In that case,’ he replied, ‘ladies first.’ He gestured at the door.

I smiled and walked past him into the house.

At first nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary. True, the place felt empty but that didn’t mean our potential killer wasn’t curled up in bed somewhere upstairs until the sun went down. Ignoring the ground floor for now, I tiptoed upwards. The stairs were creaky but there was still no sign of anyone living and breathing. And yes, no matter what some werewolves might think, vampires are both living and breathing.

It wasn’t a grand place. Upstairs there was a small bathroom, filled with all manner of masculine accoutrements from shaving cream to anti-perspirant. Our Philip took care of his appearance, if nothing else. There were two bedrooms, one that didn’t appear lived in and one which was clearly where he slept. The bed was neatly made with the duvet smoothed over.

There was an open book on the nightstand. I picked it up and examined it: William Butler Yeats. So ol’ Philip really was a poetic soul. Although if I dredged through my memories, there were more facts to consider. I’d once gambled on a national competition where people could vote on their favourite poet. It didn’t take much to work out that Kipling would be the winner – Brits are a predictable bunch – but I took my research seriously. Even though Yeats was Irish rather than British, I’d given him the attention his poetry deserved. From what I could recall, Yeats was an interesting man. He’d been part of a secret society that conducted ritual magic. I tapped my mouth thoughtfully. Maybe Fangy Phil just enjoyed the poems – or maybe there was more to it than iambic pentameter.

I glanced at the scrap of paper he’d been using as a bookmark. It was an outline drawing of a man with a swirly pattern where his head was. A few words were scribbled underneath it: Therapy For Survivors. Well, Valerie certainly hadn’t survived.

From downstairs, Monroe called up. ‘He’s not there, is he?’ There was an odd note to his voice.

‘No,’ I shouted. I turned on my heel and clattered down the stairs to join him.

Monroe was standing in the living room. I paused at the doorway, sweeping my gaze around. Well, shit.

It looked like a whirlwind had torn through the place. Chairs and tables were upended. One painting was hanging haphazardly off the wall and two others were on the floor. There was broken glass, scattered papers and splattered blood. A considerable amount of splattered blood. I let out a low whistle.

‘What do things look like upstairs?’ Monroe asked.

I gazed at him grimly. ‘Philip is a neat guy. Everything has a place. It’s clean and tidy and…’ I waved a hand around the devastation in the living room ‘…not like this.’

Monroe turned slowly, examining the room with a critical eye. ‘Is it possible,’ he enquired, ‘that after a struggle he killed Valerie here and then took her dead body back to the Travotel to leave it there?’

‘It seems unlikely. What would be the point?’

He glanced at me. ‘To make her death appear to be an accident.’

‘Her body was drained of all its blood,’ I said, still feeling somewhat ill at the thought. ‘That was no accident.’

‘Something happened here, though,’ Monroe said. ‘Something violent.’

I swallowed and nodded. ‘Could someone have got here ahead of us? Some bright spark might have worked out Philip’s culpability and come here to take their revenge.’

Monroe frowned and crouched down, his fingertips touching one of the blood splatters. ‘This isn’t very fresh,’ he said. ‘Whatever happened here, it was at least a day ago. Most of the blood is already dry.’ He flipped over