Ribbing and Runes Read online

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  A Note from Nancy

  Also by Nancy Warren

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Can a secret runic message lead to murder?

  As Lucy and Rafe plan their wedding, everyone wants to get involved. The vampire knitting club are crafting the gown, William’s catering, the Miss Watts are making the cake. Everything’s under control. Or is it? Just as Lucy begins to believe there won’t be a hitch in their plans, she receives a curious wedding gift that leads to murder.

  Between hen parties, her parents arriving early, running a knitting shop and a murder, will Lucy make it down the aisle in one piece?

  Praise for the Vampire Knitting Club series

  "THE VAMPIRE KNITTING CLUB is a delightful paranormal cozy mystery perfectly set in a knitting shop in Oxford, England. With intrepid, late blooming, amateur sleuth, Lucy Swift, and a cast of truly unforgettable characters, this mystery delivers all the goods. It's clever and funny, with plot twists galore and one very savvy cat! I highly recommend this sparkling addition to the cozy mystery genre."

  Jenn McKinlay, NYT Bestselling Author

  “I’m a total addict to this series.” *****

  “Fresh, smart and funny” *****

  Chapter 1

  Planning a wedding is stressful at the best of times, but when the groom is a vampire who’s been around for more than half a millennium, the guest list gets complicated. However, Rafe and I had easily agreed that we wanted to keep the number of guests to a reasonable limit. We’d probably have opted for a low-key registry wedding if it hadn’t been for my mother. We’d visited my parents in Egypt to tell them the good news in person, and to my surprise, my archaeologist mother, who spent her life in chinos, work boots, and a field hat, went all mother-of-the-bride on me.

  “Oh, how I’ve dreamed of this day,” she’d said, misty-eyed. “My baby, finally getting married.”

  What was this “finally” business? I wasn’t even thirty yet.

  After that we traveled to New Zealand, where Rafe had a collection of rare manuscripts to evaluate, and we took some time to enjoy each other away from the prying eyes and busybodies who surrounded us at home. It was fantastic, and in three weeks of sightseeing and relaxing, of being treated like the most important woman in the world, I was more than ever certain I was doing the right thing. Because marrying a vampire comes with some issues, let’s face it.

  We arrived back in Oxford to find the members of the vampire knitting club were determined to knit or crochet my wedding dress, and William Thresher, Rafe’s butler and general manager of the estate, was already planning menus. Needless to say, a simple registry office wedding was pretty quickly off the table. We agreed to hold the wedding at Rafe’s manor house, which would soon be my home, too, and I started buying bridal magazines.

  I asked my cousin Violet to be a bridesmaid. Our friend Alice agreed to be the matron of honor. Jennifer, my best friend from Boston, was coming, as we’d been promising to be each other’s bridesmaids since we’d watched Friends together as kids. Lochlan Balfour, Rafe’s friend from Ireland, would stand up for Rafe.

  William would cater the event, and his sister Olivia was doing our flowers. The whole event was falling into place so easily, I got nervous.

  So far, so good. Then came my trickiest dilemma.

  What was I going to do about Gran? She was a vampire but too recently turned to appear in public. But how could I not invite my beloved grandmother to my wedding?

  It was a problem I couldn’t solve, and it was Gran herself who came up with the solution. “My love,” she said when I asked her what to do, “I can watch your wedding from the window.”

  There were so many rooms with windows in the estate that it would be simple to arrange the ceremony so Gran had a perfect view. I hugged her. “It won’t be the same as having you right there, but it’s a brilliant idea.”

  “I’ll be right beside you in spirit, as you know,” she replied.

  We didn’t put an announcement in the local paper or anything, as we wanted a private affair, but somehow word got out. To my delight, congratulations-on-your-engagement cards started arriving at the shop and Rafe’s home, as well as a few gifts.

  I think it would be fair to say that wedding fever gripped the vampire knitting club the minute they found out that Rafe and I were getting married.

  I was excited, too. Who wouldn’t be? I was marrying the love of my life and soon to be moving into what Rafe called a manor house and I would have called a castle, and, to be blunt, my money worries would be over. He was also brilliant, entertaining, occasionally funny, and a vampire. I appreciated that no relationship was perfect, but getting past the undead thing had been the biggest sticking point to us finally getting together.

  But now that I’d made the decision and had the emerald and diamond engagement ring on my finger to prove it, the vampires were all in.

  There’d been some initial fear that I might give up Cardinal Woolsey’s Knitting and Yarn Shop when I got married, but as soon as I reassured them that I wasn’t quitting my job, all worries were at an end.

  They had opinions on everything. Where we should honeymoon, whether I should keep the flat above the shop in case I ever needed to stay over in town, and even whether Nyx would be happier staying with them when I went home at night. Nyx was my black cat familiar. I appreciated that they were willing to let her stay in the labyrinthine tunnels underneath Oxford where some of the vampires had their lair, but I assured them that Nyx would be perfectly fine commuting along with me. She was my familiar, after all.

  But perhaps the most excited conversations were around what I was going to wear.

  It became pretty quickly apparent that I wasn’t going to go to a bridal boutique and pick a dress. The vampire knitting club fully intended to make my wedding gown. I’d never even known you could knit a wedding dress, but they showed me pictures of knitted and crocheted dresses that were absolutely gorgeous.

  I tended towards something with a higher neck, but Sylvia kept edging me toward something off the shoulder and low-cut.

  We were standing in my back room, where I ran classes and the vampire knitting club met. Sylvia, Gran, Clara, and Mabel had come in through the back way with more dress patterns. I was a little nervous, as only a curtain separated the back from the front of the shop, and I didn’t want to risk Gran being seen. It tended to upset customers when they discovered the supposedly dead former proprietor of the shop wandering around.

  However, there were no customers, and I kept an ear tuned for the bell so I could scurry out front if anyone came in. Violet was supposed to be serving in the shop, but she was on her tea break, and who knew when that would end?

  Sylvia showed me yet another hand-knitted gown with a plunging neckline. I finally said, “I don’t want anything low-cut.”

  Sylvia glanced at Gran and then at me, her gaze going to my cleavage. “It’s so much more practical, dear. For later.” She looked at me significantly.

  I’d never seen a look of embarrassment on Sylvia’s face, and I wasn’t positive I saw one now, but she definitely looked a little odd. Gran was looking down at the floor as though searching for dust bunnies
.

  “For after what?” I had no idea what these two were on about.

  “The wedding night,” she said, finally.

  I still wasn’t getting it. “What’s my neckline got to do with my wedding night?”

  I knew these two were old-fashioned, but they’d been born at the end of the nineteenth century, not the seventeenth.

  Finally, Sylvia almost shrieked, “For when he turns you.”

  I was so stunned, I stood there in silence for a second. “Turns me?”

  “Into one of us,” she said at last.

  I took a step backward. I didn’t mean to; it was instinct. “You think Rafe is going to turn me into a vampire on our wedding night?”

  “Yes,” she said, as though I were being thick. “It’s the logical thing to do. As part of the ceremony.”

  “Not any wedding ceremony I want to be part of.”

  I looked at my grandmother, and she finally lifted her gaze to mine. I wasn’t positive, but I thought she appeared relieved. Sylvia not so much. I tried to explain my position. “It’s not like we haven’t talked about it, and I love Rafe. You know I do. But I don’t want to be a vampire.”

  I didn’t want to hurt their feelings, but I liked food way too much and preferred to look in the mirror to put on my own makeup. Maybe I was looking at things through too human a perspective, but I didn’t want to have to worry about the sun any more than a fair-skinned person with concerns about the ozone layer would.

  “But then you’ll leave him all alone,” Clara said. She was sentimental and inclined to state the obvious.

  I nodded. It was, I admitted, the great sadness of my approaching nuptials. “I know. But he still wants to marry me, and he’s the one with the most to lose.” It would be great for me. I’d have a man who had the looks and strength of a thirty-five-year-old for my whole life. It would get weird as I got older and he didn’t, but we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.

  Gran took over the conversation then. “Well. Now that we’ve got that settled, there are more wedding gown choices available to you.”

  We finally settled on a crocheted gown that would be done with pure silk crochet thread. There were separate lace flowers that could be crocheted individually and then sewn on, as well as a beautiful shawl and a detachable train. This was important, because every single member of the vampire knitting club wanted to know that they had made a piece of my gown, so there had to be a lot of it.

  The only difficulty was that Rafe couldn’t see the gown before our big day, so we had to have extra meetings in secret. I suspected he knew what was going on, but he was a good sport, and if I told him he couldn’t come near or by my shop, he didn’t.

  “And what about filling the tradition of something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue?” Mabel asked. Before I could say a word, she eagerly said, “I’d be delighted to lend you something. Something to wear, perhaps.”

  I had to school my expression to remain calm and not gape at her in horror. I sometimes wore sweaters Mabel had crafted, out of kindness. She was a brilliant knitter but had the worst taste of anyone I’d ever known. The thought of wearing something of hers on my wedding day gave me a thrill of horror.

  I was pretty sure everyone else felt the same way. Gran said, “I’m so glad you brought that up, Mabel. I’ve been wanting to talk to Lucy about my own wedding dress.”

  We all turned to stare. “You still have your wedding dress?” I asked her. I wasn’t fabulous at math, but I thought she’d gotten married around 1960. I lived in her house now. I’d never come across an old wedding dress. I’d have remembered.

  She looked a bit superior as she said, “If you’d ever bothered to go up in the attic, you might be surprised what you’d find.”

  “There’s an attic?” I supposed I knew there must be one, but I hadn’t really thought about it, and I certainly hadn’t spent any time searching. Unless your ceiling leaked or you had vermin, did you ever need to go in the attic?

  She said, “There’s not much up there. But I did store a few special things. Including my wedding dress.”

  “But we’re going to crochet Lucy her wedding dress,” Sylvia said, sounding aggrieved.

  Gran nodded. “My dress is too old-fashioned, anyway, but I thought perhaps you might like the veil or the buttons are quite special. We had a very happy and a long marriage, your grandfather and I. It would make me very happy to think of you carrying the tradition forward.”

  Well, what could I say to that? The poor woman couldn’t even attend my ceremony since she’d be outed as a dead woman walking. The least I could do was wear a bit of her dress. Even if I wore the whole thing, it would still look a whole lot better than anything Mabel would come up with.

  Gran grew nostalgic. “Sometimes my wedding seems like yesterday. What a happy day that was.”

  “I bet.”

  She looked around at all of us. “Shall we go up and look now?”

  I had to wait for Violet to return, so Gran suggested that she and the three other vampires go upstairs and open up the attic, and then I could come as soon as my cousin returned.

  I didn’t want to miss anything. “Don’t have any fun without me,” I warned them.

  She glanced at me, and I supposed she was silently letting me know that I could have gone up to that attic any time since the house had come to me, if I’d been so interested.

  They went up to my flat, and Nyx, ever curious, decided to leave her usual snoozing spot in a basket of wool in my front window and follow the vampires upstairs. She was right. It was certainly more exciting up there than it was in the shop. I forced myself to do a quick tidy of the wools.

  The door opened. But it wasn’t my shop assistant or a customer. It was Theodore, another of the vampires and a great friend of mine. He’d once been a police officer and now ran a small business as a private investigator. He was from the pre-technology era and very thorough in his investigations. If you wanted someone followed discreetly, Theodore was your man. He had a baby face hiding a sharp brain. He was also an artist.

  He glanced around to make sure there was no one around and then said, “Lucy, I’ve an idea for your gift.”

  Clearly not a surprise present then. “Okay.” I probably sounded tentative, having just dealt with Mabel’s suggestion that I borrow some of her clothing for the wedding.

  He looked rather pleased with himself. “I’ve just come from the art supply store. Now, I’m not a great artist. But I did criminal sketches in my work with the police.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure what crime had to do with my wedding. Hopefully nothing. He was looking at me as though waiting for me to understand where he was going, and I totally didn’t, so I must have looked blank. He went on, “And I paint a lot of the sets for Cardinal College’s theater productions.”

  I nodded. I knew this. I’d even helped at their Midsummer Night’s Dream, though it had been more of a nightmare.

  “Well, I’m offering you my services as a way of recording your wedding. Since photographs would be incomplete.”

  I all but banged myself on the forehead with the palm of my hand. How had I never thought about this? When I’d dreamed of my wedding day, I’d imagined photographs would be involved. But I was going to look pretty stupid looking at a wedding album that contained me and what would appear to be an imaginary groom.

  I went forward and threw my arms around Theodore. “That is the best gift ever. Thank you so much.”

  He looked bashful. “Are you certain? We could hire proper portrait painters.”

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t want anything stiff or fancy and formal. I think you’d do a beautiful job. Thank you.”

  He was so pleased, he said, “I shall begin practicing right away. I may even go to Crosyer manor and sketch in some backgrounds so I can concentrate on the two of you on that happy day.” And then he headed with his bag of supplies into my back room, which led via a trapdoor down into the tunnels beneath Oxfor
d and to the apartments beneath.

  Violet came in soon after. She glanced around. “Why is it so quiet today?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Some days are like that, aren’t they?”

  “Well, perhaps I should leave early.” She glanced at me hopefully.

  I nipped that idea right in the bud. “I’m needed upstairs. Gran has her old wedding dress she wants me to see. Apparently, it’s been tucked away in the attic all these years.”

  “That’s nice,” she said, sounding mournful. “My grandmother has her wedding dress all tucked away in tissue, but I doubt I’ll ever wear it.”

  Not only was she taller and larger in scale than her grandmother, but I couldn’t imagine she’d want to wear a vintage dress. Violet was more the bohemian type. However, I didn’t think she cared what she wore. She wanted to get married. And, based on her experiences ever since I’d arrived in Oxford, her dating record was sketchy at best.

  “Have you been back on Witch Date?” I asked her.

  She shuddered. “Please, I’ve learned my lesson. No.”

  I didn’t want to bring up William, Rafe’s butler and estate manager, but I was fairly certain she had feelings for him. Sometimes I thought maybe William had them for her, too, but it was so hard to tell.

  As though changing the subject, I asked, “Have you helped William out with any catering gigs lately?”

  She rolled her eyes and then went behind the cash desk to put her purse away. “Please. The man’s obsessed with your wedding. He thinks of nothing else.”

  Well, that was good. For me at least.