1 Witchy Business (14 page)

Niall calmly walked over to the Gabriel Metsu, carefully lifted the framed canvas and set it down on a side table. Underneath the space where the larger and deeper Metsu had hung, the little framed Escher woodcut block of the letter A nestled neatly against the wall.

Extreme annoyance surged through me. Mostly at myself…that I hadn’t guessed where he would have hidden it. That he had hidden the Escher woodcut block underneath a work that was all about paintings within paintings was obviously Niall’s idea of a joke. I certainly wasn’t laughing.

“You hid your own artwork and reported it missing to both the police and your insurers,” I said. I wanted it to be clear. I wanted
something
between us to be clear. Niall hung the Escher where it belonged and then replaced the Metsu again, all without saying a word.

“Well, Niall?” I prompted.

“How did you guess?” Niall asked, turning back to me. His question wasn’t resentful, and it wasn’t defensive. It was merely curiosity, tinged with something that sounded like admiration. It was the kind of tone I might have expected if I had just beaten him at chess, not caught him in the middle of an insurance fraud.

“How? I investigated.” I was sure the slight edge to my voice didn’t escape him. “What did you think I would do?”

“You’re quietly angry,” he said in a smooth, gentle voice. I couldn’t feel any potential for violence coming off him, the way I sometimes did when my work ended up catching people committing insurance fraud. He seemed almost amused by the whole thing.

“I think I have a good reason, don’t you?”

Niall sighed. “I didn’t want to bilk the insurance company. You have to believe that.”

I looked straight at him. “Make me believe it.”

“I would save you, if our positions were reversed.”

“I know you would.” And I did. Yet, I still needed to know so much about all this. Why he had done something so…
stupid
, for a start. Was it just the money? If there was one thing Niall didn’t look like he needed, that was it.

“Was it so easy for you to figure out?” he asked.

“Things felt off-kilter from the start, with no one seeing anything, hearing anything, nor admitting anything. In a theft that is not an inside job, there is always something. This was too perfect. When I couldn’t see how it could be done, I knew that there had to be more to it. And I knew you were hiding something.”

Niall looked at me as though trying to gauge me. “You knew all along?”

I let him go on thinking that. Maybe it would finally take him down a peg. “I didn’t hear anything about any big thefts through my informant, either. Nothing of Escher’s appeared on the local black market.”

 Niall raised one perfect eyebrow. “There’s an artwork fencing operation in Edinburgh?”

“
Under
Edinburgh.”

“Under it? Wait a minute, your contact is a goblin?”

I laughed. “I take the coven’s tolerance directive to a grand new level. She would have told me if the Escher surfaced. So…” I took a breath and let it out. “No artwork. No evidence. No way to steal it. Your staff are all too loyal to take it. It had to be you.”

“And yet, you came here anyway and broke in,” Niall observed.

I shrugged. “Everything I’d discovered about the security showed that no one could just walk in off the street to steal an artwork from your home. Even with a keycard for the door lock, entrance to this room does not automatically mean that a piece of artwork can be stolen. Not easily and maybe not at all. I had to prove that, though.”

Niall stared at me. The intensity of that look made me squirm. There was nowhere to hide from it. Why did I suddenly feel like the one who had done something wrong?

“That isn’t an answer, Elle,” he said. “Why come here?”

Because I had to be sure. Because I wanted to understand. I didn’t say either one though. I came here to get answers, not to give them.

“Why did you do it, Niall? Why did you go through the motions of this elaborate…
ruse
? Was it just for the money? Or because you could? Just to see if you could get away with it?”

“Do you really believe that?” Niall countered. He sounded almost amused. “You still didn’t answer my question. Why break in, Elle? You could have just rung the doorbell. I would have swept you in here and told you anything you wanted. You could have confronted me about the Escher over coffee.”

I shook my head. That wasn’t good enough. “I had to be certain, Niall. I didn’t want just the answers that you wanted to tell me. I wanted to know the truth.”

Niall gestured to the room around him. “You have the truth. And so do I. You answered your own question, Elle. Why did I do this? I lied to you because I had to know all about you.”

About me? This was about
me?
No, that didn’t make sense. That…“Tell me everything.”

Niall’s eyes locked onto mine. “I needed to find a way to be around you. A way to see if you were everything I believed you were. Everything I hoped you were.”

“So, you just casually committed insurance fraud?”

Niall shrugged. How could he make even that movement look so elegant?

“I would have never accepted the claim payment, of course,” he said. “If it got to the point where they sent me one, I would have told them I had misplaced it in the house and found it, or some other plausible excuse. I wasn’t going to steal from the insurance company. That was far from my intent.”

Strangely enough, I believed him. Niall Sampson was manipulative, capable of lying, but not a thief. I knew thieves, from Siobhan, all the way up to the kind of art thieves who might steal from a collection like this. Niall wasn’t one of them.

“So, you set all this up to meet me? Was any of it genuine?”

Niall cocked his head to one side. “Everything we felt was. Look, Elle, you know as well as I do that if I had just approached you in a nonprofessional setting, your coven would have told you to run from me. You might even have listened. You would have seen a warlock not joined to a coven, a pariah. If they told you to avoid me, you would have.”

I perked up. There was a ring of truth in what he said. “I’m listening.”

“With an investigation to finish, you had a professional reason to stay in my proximity without much interference from your coven. You weren’t about to abandon the case. I guessed that from the moment I first heard about you.”

Where would that have been? How long ago had he decided to do this? Had he spent time researching me before making this move?

“You made things so complicated and confusing, mixing the professional with the personal,” I said.

“I know, but I needed time, Elle. Time to get to know you. Time to see if you were everything I thought you were. If my insurers had not called you in to investigate the theft, I would have had to hire you privately to recover the Escher.”

“I might not have taken it,” I said. Although I suspected the truth was that if Niall Sampson had shown up on my doorstep, I would have done whatever he asked. “I do take private jobs, but rarely, because I tend to get stiffed on my fee.”

“Really?”

“I’m a heck of a witch, but a very bad debt collector. It’s not like I have the power to turn a nonpaying client into a frog and set them on a lily pad. And they know I would never sue.”

“No?”

“No.” I shuddered. “And have all the details come out in public? Would
you
want the world to know what you are, Niall?”

Niall moved over to his recently “recovered” piece. “We are all more than we seem, Elle.”

I laughed at that, just a little. “Yes, you told me. The whole time, you were playing me. All of this was contrived just to meet me.”

Niall moved closer to me. “You say that as if you are not worth it.”

I forced myself to stand there. “You tricked me.”

He reached out to touch my face. “That’s because the truth would have set you running, and I don’t want you running from me, Elle.”

I took a careful step back. Images of me running brought only one thought. “You’re hunting me. I know what you are, Niall.”

“Do you?” Niall didn’t move to close the distance between us, but it was obvious that he wanted to. Or maybe I wanted him to. It was hard to be certain right then. “What am I, Elle? Tell me.”

“Vampire.” I let the word hang there, and I couldn’t hold back the anger this time. He’d tricked me. He’d tricked me about the missing Escher and quite possibly about everything he’d felt for me. He’d tricked me about what he was. “You’re a vampire.”

“That’s the word they use,” Niall said, gently.

He didn’t even deny it. I bit my lip, trying to work out if I should run. If I should hit him. “I thought…I thought you were like me.”

Niall’s expression grew serious. “I
am
like you, Elle. That’s the point.”

“You aren’t. You’re—”

“Vampire is just a word. The coven’s word. One they told you to make you flee from me. But look at what I
am
, Elle.” He stood there with his arms wide as though I could discover the truth of what he was just by looking. “Look at what you are. They call you an enchantress? Then I must be an enchanter. And if I am a vampire…”

“What?” I stood there as I tried to take in what he’d just said. I couldn’t. How could anyone take in something like that so easily? “You’re lying.”

“We are alike in every way, Elle,” Niall said softly. “You are an Enchantress. I am an Enchanter. You’ve felt it. Have you ever met another so close to what you are?”

I shook my head, feeling the tension running through me. I took a deep breath and let it out. “They said you were a vampire and that you would weave your way into my confidence. That you would try to use me.”

Niall stepped close again. “What did they tell you about vampires? What did the coven tell you? That vampires manipulate emotional energy? That they can take it? Did they tell you that I draw power from others? How is that different from what you do every day?”

“Me? I don’t do that.”

“Don’t you?”

I shook my head, not willing to believe it. Not willing to trust it. “No…I…”

“How is it different, Elle?” This time, the question cut through me.

“I don’t hurt people,” I shot back, thinking of everything Rebecca had said. I couldn’t be that. I
wouldn’t
be that. “I don’t kill people.”

“And you think that I do?” Niall asked. He sounded almost saddened by that, but he still reached out to put his hands on my arms. “I could kill with the power that I have. So could you. Any witch worth her salt, even a five year old, can kill. But that doesn’t mean that we have to. The problem is that you don’t do half of the other things you could do, either. The good things.”

“I do good things!”

“You could do so much more.” Niall’s expression was distant for a moment, as though imagining it. “The coven taught you to be afraid of your own power. They hid your potential from you by telling you that you had no power. They taught you to hide from yourself. They made it so you don’t even dare to stand in a room full of strangers with your shields down for fear of what might happen. I could hate the coven for that. Just a little. That they could claim to protect you and then hurt you like that.
Limit
you like that.”

I couldn’t keep from remembering us in the nightclub. Remembering the moment when he’d kissed me. Remembering all that I let in that night. Not just him, but everyone in the room. Remembering how it had felt to feel everyone there at once.