Monday morning finds Harvest at work as the sun rises, her to-do list already half-way to being completed. It’s a marvel how reconciling with someone you care about can make everything feel easier. She feels like she can breathe for the first time in four months.

  While she waits for Quinn to arrive at the office, she compiles Emily Iverson’s background check into one folder and makes a few notes here and there, adding sticky tabs to the pages that seem most important.

  It’s just past nine o’clock when Harvest’s phone dings with a message from Quinn.

  Heading to PM.

  The fact that he didn’t invite her stings, but before she can wallow in rejection, another message dings, also from Quinn. Good morning, by the way. It was nice seeing you yesterday. Let’s do it more often.

  She checks the time and then hurriedly closes the file folder, leaving it on Quinn’s desk. An hour gives her just enough time to catch a bus to Tabitha’s Diner and grab an order of pancakes and coffee to-go. She can at least do something useful with her time.

  When she arrives back at the Bureau, she finds Hazel in the Magi-Tech lab and knocks on the glass pane of the door, holding up a cup of coffee and a styrofoam box.

  Hazel lets her into the lab with narrowed eyes. “You’re trying to bribe me with caffeine and…a breakfast taco?” she guesses.

  Harvest feigns offense. “They’re pancakes.”

  “Then I suppose you can come inside. Just keep the pancakes to the desk,” she says, standing to the side and motioning toward the table shoved against the far wall. “The rest of the lab is a pancake-free zone.”

  “Noted,” says Harvest, sitting down in the nearest swivel chair.

  “So,” says Hazel, sitting down beside her. “What is the bribe for?”

  Harvest shrugs. “Can’t I just bring my sister pancakes?”

  “No,” she says with a grin, reaching for a syrup packet.

  “The Gardens security camera footage.”

  Hazel grimaces at the request, before taking a sip of coffee. “There’s nothing to see.”

  “What about the Professor’s laptop?” Harvest glances at the laptop where it sits on the center worktable. A quartz USB stick is plugged into one of its ports and a series of very complicated and important-looking sequences of numbers, characters, and letters are scrolling up the screen.

  “I’m running a modified revealing spell through the quartz in the USB stick,” says Hazel, in between bites of blueberry pancake. “I should have something later today.” She gives her sister a sideways look. “Am I really this easy to bribe?”

  “Yes.” Harvest takes a sip of coffee. “Can we watch some of the footage?”

  “Don’t trust me?” she mumbles around a mouthful of pancake, but she is already reaching for her mouse. She navigates to the file and clicks play. “I’ve watched it once on fast forward but nothing stuck out to me, so I’ve been going through in real time, to see if I can catch anything.”

  Harvest scoots her chair closer to the desk, leaning over to peer at the screen.“What exactly are we looking for?”

  “Movements. Glitches. Small hiccups in the feed. Anything that might point toward interference, magic or otherwise. I’m hoping to catch a glimpse of someone arriving at least.” She points to the screen as a figure walks into view. “That’s the guard arriving for her shift. She’s walking past the welcome center and to a side door, right next to the loading dock.” She clicks on another file and the loading dock flickers into view as the guard, Emily Iverson, walks up to the door and waves her badge at the reader. A second later, she opens the door and disappears.

  “And we’ve confirmed this is Emily?”

  “Yep. I sent over a still to the garden manager and the other guard, Haskins. They said it was clearly her. Right height, right hair color.”

  “And there’s nothing after this?”

  Hazel shakes her head as she swallows a sip of coffee. “Not until the next guard—the one who found the body—arrives at five.”

  Harvest watches the black-and-white trees swaying in the breeze for a few seconds before glancing at Hazel. “You remember that time mom took us there? I would have been about six? You were eight.”

  “Yeah,” says Hazel, taking a sip of her coffee. “It was all fun and games until you wandered off and she freaked out.”

  Harvest frowns. “I don’t remember that.”

  “You were young,” Hazel says with a shrug. “Mom looked away for just a second. I think I distracted her, trying to share some random fact that I’d just learned about birds or something. When she turned around again, you had just…gone. We found you under the jacaranda tree, sleeping in the dirt. Mom always said it was okay, because nothing bad happened, but I always felt like she was still upset about it. Blamed me for distracting her. Her and dad argued about it that night.”

  “I’m sorry.” Her frown deepens as she shakes her head. “I don’t remember that at all.”

  Hazel opens her mouth to say something, but her attention snags on the footage, where a light by the door has flicked on. She taps the trackpad to pause the footage. “That’s weird.” She rewinds the video a few seconds back, and hits play again. She points. “That light. It clicks on and then clicks off a minute later.”

  “Motion activated?” wonders Harvest, leaning closer.

  “Yeah, but why did it click on in the first place? No one’s there.”

  “Maybe the sensor is sensitive. It looks windy, maybe a stray leaf or something?”

  “Maybe,” mumbles Hazel.

  She’s still staring at the screen when a loud beep resounds through the lab and the footage is momentarily forgotten as she makes her way to Professor Jones’s laptop. “We’re in,” she says, clicking away.

  “Come find me if you figure out what’s up with the light,” says Harvest, standing.

  “Sure.” Hazel waves distractedly in the direction of her sister, but her eyes stay trained on the laptop as she opens file folders and rifles through the calendar app.

  Harvest leaves the lab, checking her phone. Quinn’s “Here” pops up on her screen as she turns the corner into the main SCD office.

  “Blunt force trauma to the back of the head,” he says when he sees her. He’s sitting on the edge of his desk with arms folded across his broad chest. “She was pushed backward and fell against something, like the corner of a table. There were also signs of injuries to her neck. Hudson thinks her attacker tried to strangle her first, but when she fought back, the attacker probably shoved her.”

  “So it’s definitely murder?” she says, handing Angel and Wild the coffees she bought for them, which were being stored on her desk with a simple warming spell.

  Quinn pouts but Harvest bumps his arm. “There’s spiced blood in the fridge for you. In the styrofoam Tabitha’s cup.”

  This mollifies him enough that he gives her a wink before pushing away from his desk. He stands in front of the whiteboard. “I want to focus on finding the original crime scene. We’re looking for a corner of a table or a desk. If she hit her head, there would have been blood and even accounting for industrial strength cleaners, I would have smelled something at the house and at the sister’s house.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  “There was no evidence of a struggle at the Gardens,” says Harvest, “but Hazel spotted an anomaly in the camera footage of the staff entrance. She’s also going through Professor Jones’s laptop right now.”

  “The only place left is the school,” says Wild with a frown. His crimson wings flutter slightly as he leans forward. “And Olive implied that Professor Jones spent most of her time at work.”

  “There was an awfully large desk in the middle of that room,” says Angel, eyebrow arched, “and a very persistent Dean that wanted the office cleaned out as soon as possible.”

  "Actually," says Harvest, head tilted to the side as she recalls the conversation with Dean St. James. "The Dean didn't seem to know where Adam was. But Adam said the Dean had told him to pack up the office."

  "So Adam lied?" asks Angel with a frown.

  "Or the Dean lied," suggests Wild.

  “You sealed it all up before you left Saturday, right?” asks Quinn.

  Harvest nods. “Should we send a Magi-Tech team over?”

  “Not yet,” replies Quinn, head cocked to the side as he looks at the whiteboard. “If the Dean or the TA are involved, I don’t want to tip them off about anything, until we get something solid.” He considers the board for a beat longer and then turns to face his team. “Harvest and I will go take a look at the school. Can you two go back to Emily Iverson’s house? No one’s seen or heard from her in days, and I’m positive she’s involved somehow.”

  Mondays are a busy day on campus and with finals right around the corner, most students shuffle about with heads down and shoulders bowed under the weight of their backpacks or arms full of books. For a brief moment, Harvest envies their singular focus, but the thought of grades and exams and sitting through a lecture two or three times a week quickly erases this feeling. In truth, she really only misses how light and carefree it felt to be a witch in her twenties. Thirty came with a weight of adulthood she hadn’t realized was so heavy.

  “Did you go to school?” asks Harvest, as she slips on a pair of white cotton gloves. She and Quinn are in Professor Jones’s office. Quinn commented on the sharp lemon scent of industrial strength cleaner when they entered, a smell that hadn’t even registered to Harvest when she was here last. He couldn’t be sure if the cleaner was hiding blood though. It’s been too many days since Professor Jones’s murder, and the air in the room has shifted too many times with half-packed boxes, a twenty-something TA, and two Bureau agents.

  The office is exactly as it was when she and Angel left Saturday, the door sealed with an unbroken Bureau sticker when they arrived. She’s sure Professor Jones was more organized and can only assume that the sheer illogical mess her office is in now is a result of Adam’s packing.

  Quinn laughs as he opens a box and peers inside. “School wasn’t an option for a kid like me.”

  “And what kind of kid was that?” she asks, leaning down to swab the corner of the desk. She makes a mental note to take some swabs of the bookcase, too, noting that it’s just a little taller than the desk. The professor was about the same height as her and she could easily see herself standing by the desk and being pushed to the side, falling against the corner of the bookcase as it juts out from the wall.

  “The kind that was born on the wrong side of the tracks,” he says with a huff.

  “So there were tracks when you were born?” she says, as if she knows, off the top of her head, when tracks were invented. She slips the swab into a glass vial and stores it in an evidence bag.

  He smirks, pulling a book off the shelf and flipping through distractedly. “It’s a figure of speech.”

  “I don’t know why you and Dominic are so shady about your age,” she says, turning toward the bookcase.

  He looks up, eyebrow arched. “He hasn’t told you anything?”

  “Not a word.” She’s leaning over to swab the corner of the bookcase and she glances at him over her shoulder. “I have it narrowed down though.”

  “Oh? Do tell.”

  She straightens, absentmindedly blowing a strand of wayward hair out of her eyes as she places the second swab in a glass vial. “Sometime before the Renaissance but definitely after the Iron Age.”

  He tilts his head to the side and the late-morning light slants through the window, catching his eyes like sparks in a fire. “And what did Dominic say when you told him this?”

  “I didn’t tell him.” She shrugs. “And anyway, I think you both lived through the Roman Empire. He was watching a show the other night and switched it off.”

  “Maybe it was boring.”

  “Or maybe they got something wrong and he was annoyed.”

  He makes a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat and continues flipping through the book. “I think I found her day planner.”

  “Anything interesting down for Thursday?” she asks, moving closer to read over his shoulder.

  “Normal things, I suppose. She had two lecture classes that day. A meeting with Ezra—but we knew that.”

  “Maybe there’s something further back?”

  He nods and slips the notebook into a box. “We can take some of these back to the office. Have Angel look through them.”

  “They’ll love that,” says Harvest, earnestly. To be honest, she would love that, too. It’s one of her favorite parts of the job—sifting through evidence to find the relevant pieces of the puzzle. She realizes, however, that she enjoys this more—standing next to Quinn, sorting through the case together. They share a look before she bumps his side with her elbow and continues swabbing for blood splatter.

  Hours later, they end up with three boxes of materials to bring back to the Bureau, including one box of filled evidence bags for Magi-Tech to process. Harvest can easily carry one box, herself, and with a wistful sign, Quinn lifts two, scowling at the last one. “We’ll come back for it,” he says, nudging the door open with the toe of his shoe.

  She follows him outside and to his car. The day has passed by quickly and the sun is already beginning its descent toward the horizon, the afternoon light hazy and golden. Class must be in session because while the parking lot is full, there are few students milling about. Quinn pops the trunk with a click of his key fob. She’s leaning in to place the box inside when there is a shout, followed by the sound of glass shattering.

  Before Harvest can even straighten up to turn around, Quinn is intervening in a physical altercation a few cars down. She hastily makes her way over, reaching for her badge, though she isn’t sure what she would be able to do. The two men who are fighting are bigger than her. She swaps her badge for the lipstick tube taser, somewhat excited at the prospect of using it for the first time.

  She doesn’t get a chance to, however. For one, because Quinn’s voice is surprisingly commanding when he wants it to be and the two men are already separating, and two, because she recognizes one of them: Craig Jones. With a sinking feeling she looks at the other man, and sighs at the sight of Ezra with a ball of flame in his hand and blood dripping from his nose.

  As Quinn drags Craig away and shoves him down on a park bench, she swaps the taser for a tissue and makes her way to Ezra, who’s staunching the bleeding from his nose with the back of his hand. He stands by his car, glass from the driver’s side window scattered around him. A baseball bat lies, forgotten, on the ground. He lets the flame in his palm disperse into the air with a sigh when he sees her.

  “Hey Harv.”

  “Do I even want to know?” she mumbles. She presses the tissue to Ezra’s nose and he leans forward with a sharp intake of breath, his eyes watery.

  “Didn’t expect to see you here,” he says after a few beats of silence, his voice muffled and nasally.

  “Forget about the brutal death of your colleague so soon?”

  She can’t see his full expression but the eyebrow lift is unmistakable. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

  She doesn’t respond—she does know that’s not what he meant, but she doesn’t feel like giving Ezra the opening he needs to get back into her life. She focuses instead on dabbing at his nose, and when it seems like the blood has stopped flowing, she hands him the tissue and steps back.

  His smile is lopsided and annoyingly casual. “I think I got some blood on your shoes,” he says after a few moments of silence. His voice is still nasally.

  “It’s okay,” she says, tersely. “Why did you hit him back?”

  “It was that or burn his eyebrows off.”

  She lifts an eyebrow. “Just his eyebrows?” They both know it’s a rhetorical question. She shakes her head. “Why did he attack you?”

  “Is that an official question, Agent?”

  “Yes.”

  He sighs. “He said something about me sleeping with his wife.”

  “And were you?” she asks, arms folded across her chest.

  “No.” When her expression remains unmoved, he lowers his chin to his chest and seems to steady himself. He looks up. “I haven’t been completely honest with you.”

  She waits, jaw clenched.

  “I think she was selling drugs to her students.”

  This is not what she was expecting, and she struggles, for a brief moment, with keeping her expression impassive.“Why did you think that?”

  “I teach basics, but I oversee some of the advanced students who are taking an independent study tract. Within the past year, I’ve had three of those students exhibit behaviour changes that I believe is due to heavy drug use. All three of those students were also Aila’s students. I went to her with my concerns and she brushed them off. It made me wonder if…well, if she was involved.”

  “And was she?”

  “She claimed she wasn’t, but she also didn’t seem all that surprised.”

  “Did you bring these concerns up with the Administration? The Dean?”

  “I had no proof.” He shakes his head, eyes darting to Quinn who has just approached them. “And anyway, I didn’t want her to lose her job. She was a good teacher. Hard, but she knew her stuff.”

  She observes him for a moment and then says, “Do you want to press charges against Craig Jones?”

  “No, he’s just a grieving husband looking for a reason why his wife is dead. My nose will heal.” He looks at the smashed window of his car. “And Zach can fix up the window for free.”

  Harvest nods, recalling that Ezra’s brother is a mechanic. “If you change your mind,” she says, handing him a business card—the one with her work number.

  He takes the card, fiddling with the corner as he looks between her and Quinn, taking in, no doubt, the closeness with which they are standing and Quinn’s hand hovering over her lower back.

  “So, Harv,” he says, with a cruel tilt to his smile that she knows all too well, “how long did it take for him to get you into his bed?”

  “Fuck off, Ezra,” she says before turning on her heel and walking away.