‘You didn’t touch the ledgers?’
She looked hurt. ‘You know I wouldn’t, Cam.’
Lachlan picked up on the unease in his voice. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, squeezing Cam’s arm.
Queasiness rose in Cam’s chest. ‘I think someone’s been in here. Looking for something.’
He pointed to the bookcase. On the lowest shelf, where the most recent ledgers were, the line of salt was broken in front of his parents’ ledger.
Cam pulled it out and quickly flicked through. No pages missing, as far as he could tell.
‘Has anything been stolen?’ Meredith glanced nervously about the room. ‘Not that I’m sure you could tell. I’ve told you about cleaning this place up, Cam.’
Ignoring her, he moved to the window. It looked out on a long, narrow stretch of overgrown garden, once populated by neat rows of cabbages and canes of peas. The intruder had been careful, but flakes of paint betrayed where the frame had scraped against the sill, and a spidery crack in one corner revealed a point of impact.
‘The window’s been forced,’ he said grimly. It opened with little effort: the lock having been snapped clean away from the frame.
Meredith inhaled sharply. ‘I was only here yesterday.’
‘Could’ve been a day or two ago.’ Cam trod cautiously through the room, looking for any clue as to what the trespasser had wanted. If he’d been burgled, it was certainly a verycarefulburglar. Despite what Meredith might think of the disarray, Cam had a decent enough memory of which piles he’d placed where, and the fact that none of them had been knocked over was an interesting feature in itself.
He noticed Lachlan worrying at his lower lip, hands fidgeting restlessly in front of him. Their eyes met and Lachlan blushed, an anxious frown pulling at his mouth.
‘I think maybe I know what they wanted,’ he said wretchedly, tearing his eyes away from Cam. ‘And maybe even who it was. Or what.’
Cam’s fists clenched with concern. ‘What is it?’ he asked softly.
Lachlan pulled a scrap of yellow paper from his trouser pocket. ‘Do you recognise this?’
It looked like a crumpled post-it note. Cam saw his own untidy, waterlogged handwriting:
Meredith. If needed, find me at The Lucky Teapot by Loch Ness. Off Wade’s Road, south of Dores.
‘I left that on the fridge,’ Cam said, scratching his neck.
‘And I found it by the loch,’ Lachlan replied quietly. ‘After you and Bryce fought with the werewolf. I went back to look around, on my way out of the water this morning. And I found this in the snow.’
Cam took the paper, more confused than ever. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Lachlan sighed, pinching at his wrists. ‘I thought you’d get distracted. I know what you’re like.’ Before Cam could protest, Lachlan ploughed on. ‘You wouldn’t be able to leave it alone if you thought the werewolf had come for you. That you’d brought it with you, somehow.’
‘But if it put people in danger—’
‘That’s exactly it!’ Lachlan seized him by the arms, grip achingly tight. ‘I think you consider yourself a poor witch, but your sense of duty to the job seems unwavering.’
‘That’s—’
Lachlan refused his protest. ‘How much of your own life do you put aside in order to deal with whatever it is that calls you away from me at all hours? I’ve got this awful nightmare of you going up in smoke because of this werewolf, Cam. I can’t… I couldn’t let you…’
Meredith covered her mouth with one hand, clearly fighting back tears. Cam gently pried out of Lachlan’s hold and ran a hand through his hair, processing the implications of all this. The note did fall strangely into place—Cam had known it was too much of a coincidence that the werewolf had shown up by the Teapot after knocking him off his bike.
It would have been a narrow window for the beast to enter his home. Cam had left early on the morning of New Year’s Eve, with a long day’s work investigating a pair of suspicious standing stones on the Isle of Skye ahead of him. Assuming the creature was travelling on foot, it might’ve missed him by only a few hours.
But why break into his house at all? To find him? Was it looking forhim,Cam Walker… or any witch that might happen to be in residence? Perhaps when they’d collided on the road it simply hadn’t known who he was.
Would it have killed him, if it had?
‘It could have killed me any time since then. And it knew my name,’ Cam muttered to himself, causing a look of alarm to shoot across Meredith’s face. ‘And why is a werewolf even in Scotland, in the first place? Weren’t they all driven out?’
