There were a few seconds of quiet as we all digested this. “Okay, I get that,” I said finally, “but at the same time, hiding the belladonna attack doesn’t seem feasible long-term. We could make up a story for a night or two, but there’s all the practical stuff with the coffee shop—schedules, deliveries, paydays—plus, if one of the vampires from somewhere else in the state walks in with a problem and doesn’t find her here, there will be hell to pay.”
“And whoever did this may be motivated to stir up more shit,” Lily added. “They could either go public with Maven’s absence or come after her again.”
My phone buzzed on the counter. I automatically started to get up, but Quinn waved me down at the same time Simon darted for the phone. Rolling my eyes, I held out my free hand for him to pass it to me. I glanced at the caller ID—St. Julien Hotel—and hit “Ignore.” “Emil?” Simon asked. He’d taken a peek at the screen, too.
I nodded. “I’ll call him back.”
Quinn looked at me with a question on his face, but I just shook my head. I hadn’t even had a chance to tell him about my birth father yet, but obviously the attack on Maven was a hell of a lot more important than my personal identity crisis. I’d tell him later.
The boxers I was wearing didn’t have pockets, so I set the phone on the table in front of me. When I looked up, though, Simon was staring at me. “What?” I asked.
He shook himself, and then said haltingly, “No offense, Lex, but it does seem like a pretty big coincidence that your biological father arrived in town right before Maven was poisoned.”
“Wait, what?” Lily exclaimed. Quinn raised his eyebrows at me, which for him was pretty much the same as Lily’s outburst.
I gave them a brief explanation of Emil’s visit that morning. Lily was obviously bursting to discuss it further, but I turned back to Simon. “I agree that the timing seems fishy. But the poisoning started weeks ago,” I pointed out. “Emil just flew in yesterday. Besides, I can’t see any reason for him to go after Maven or the vampires.”
“Neither can I,” he conceded.
“Where were we?” I asked, glancing at Quinn. He looked thoughtful.
“The way I see it, two things need to happen.” He looked at Simon. “I need you to work on the belladonna. Figure out if there’s some shortcut to waking Maven. Failing that, see if you can predict how long it’ll take her to snap out of it if we continue with the transfusions. And test the darts we found to see if they tell you anything about the makeup of the poison. Anything that might help us figure out who did it.”
Simon nodded, brightening. “I can do that.”
“I can help,” Lily chimed in. “I might not know much about evolution, but I know biology as well as Si does.”
“Well, maybe not as well,” Simon said under his breath. Lily just rolled her eyes at him.
“What about us?” I asked Quinn.
“We’re going to figure out who did this and kill them. And we’re going to do it really, really fast.”
The best way to trace the belladonna, Quinn explained, would be to figure out who was dealing in the area. He gave Lily and Simon a sidelong look. “I’m not accusing you guys of anything, but you know most of the witches in the state, and the herbs are witch magic.”
“Fetters,” Simon corrected.
“Hmm?”
“The big three—wolfberry, belladonna, and mandragora,” he explained. “We call them the fetters of magic. And they’re not witch magic. The witches were just the first to discover their uses.”
“Okay,” Quinn said, “But historically, the majority of people who work with the, uh, fetters, are witches, right?”
“Only because we had to,” Lily said, a little snappish. “No one would goddamn help us, and then you-all started treating us like we were drug lords.”
I blinked, surprised. We had suddenly jumped into a very old argument about how vampires hadn’t stepped in to save witches during the Inquisition. If we got into this debate, we might never leave it.
“No one has ever treated you like a drug lord, Lily—” Quinn began, but I poked my free hand out of Simon’s comforter and waved at them to stop.
“Guys, enough. Quinn knows you have nothing to do with the herbs, right, Quinn?” His jaw was a little set, but he nodded. I turned to Simon and Lily. “But if you absolutely had to acquire some belladonna, what would you do? Who would you go to?”
The Pellars exchanged a look, and then Simon shrugged. “Billy Atwood, probably,” he said. “But he’s . . . um, dead.”
That was a nice way to put it. Atwood was the witch I had sort of killed in order to save Simon’s life. “Atwood dealt belladonna?” I asked.
Lily finally tore her glare away from Quinn. “Atwood dealt everything. But there was never much of a market for the fetters in Colorado, since my mother made peace with Maven.”
“Okay, so who would take over Atwood’s business?” I asked. The Pellars shrugged, clueless. “What about the Atwood farm? You said he was the last descendent, but there must have been a cousin or distant uncle or something who would inherit.”
I couldn’t quite interpret the look that passed between the two Pellars—God, I missed sibling insta-communication—but it was Simon who spoke. “Ardie Atwood,” he said softly.