Chapter 5 #2
Raj blew out a breath. “I thought we arrested the rest of them during that whole debacle with the Culhua?”
“We did,” Hart grumbled. “Or, at least, we fucking thought so.”
Mason snorted. “People—especially rich people—can still exert influence from prison,” he remarked.
“Fucking hell,” Hart muttered.
Raj let out a low rumble.
“The Ordo were involved with—” He broke off, his eyes back on me.
“Yes,” Ward answered, although I wasn’t entirely certain what the question had been asking. “The Ordo were involved in Tranquil Brook.”
Oh. I swallowed. I suppose I should have thought of it myself, given the fact that the necklace had been used to drain magic—and that’s what the Ordo had been trying to do to us at Tranquil Brook.
“Fucking fucksticks,” Hart muttered, running a hand over his braid. “So we’re back to this shit? Draining people of magic and leaving them for dead?”
I shuddered. “That’s what the killer wanted to do,” I confirmed, and everyone else fell silent watching me. It was strange to have all their attention focused on me. “But that was something he was keeping from Dagget.” I looked up. “But if Dagget was still Ordo, why would he have to do that?”
“We don’t actually know that this Dagget is the same person,” Raj said coolly. “Or even bears any relation to the one from the Ordo. The name Garraway doesn’t appear on any of the associated lists, so perhaps the name Dagget is a coincidence.”
Ward snorted. “Coincidence, my ass,” he muttered.
I couldn’t help but agree—if it had just been the mention of a name, I might have believed it, but not in combination with magic siphoning.
“There’s more than one organization that drains magic,” Raj replied, his voice grim and tight. “And I’m sure that particular practice wasn’t exclusive to the two we know about, either.”
“Gee, Tony, thanks for that little fucking ray of sunshine,” Hart snarked.
Raj rolled his eyes. “I am trying to be realistic,” he replied dryly. “And also to raise all possibilities so that we don’t make assumptions that lead us in the wrong direction.”
“Seriously, though, Tony. You really think this is a different fucking Dagget?”
Raj sighed. “I think it’s more likely that this is a brother or son or nephew than that we’re dealing with an imprisoned warlock,” he replied coolly.
I could tell from their expressions that Ward, Mason, and Hart were less confident in that than Raj was.
“Why?” I asked. Everyone turned to look at me, and Raj raised both dark eyebrows.
“Why do I think that’s more likely?”
I nodded, and found myself holding his gaze, wanting to find something in his expression that would…
I don’t know. Reassure me? Convince me that he was telling the truth?
I hadn’t really studied his face before.
Not that I didn’t know what he looked like, obviously, but I hadn’t really looked at him.
He had an oval face that looked sharper because of the stubble beneath his cheekbones and the carefully trimmed goatee around his mouth.
Thick, dark brows arched in the center and winged out a little on the sides, giving him a slightly severe, if quizzical, neutral expression.
His nose was long and narrow, cheekbones wide, but not particularly sharp.
All of this was topped by thick, wavy black hair that framed the rest of his face.
When he didn’t answer, I forced myself to look away, both self-conscious at the fact that I’d stared at him for so long and worried that he might think I was questioning or challenging him.
Raj cleared his throat. “Well, let’s just say that I know what is being done to make sure Roderick Dagget is unable to practice any sort of malicious magic.”
“You’re certain?” Mason was the one who asked the question.
“Let’s call it… ninety percent,” came the reply. “I don’t like absolute certainty.” But I noticed that Raj didn’t flinch as he met Mason’s gaze. It wasn’t something most people could do.
Mason grunted a little with a nod, seeming to accept this.
“So what if it is his nephew or some shit,” Ward put in, his voice still clearly agitated. “How does that mean anything different? We know the Ordo is a fucked up family tradition for these people.”
“That’s one way to put it, sonny,” came the contribution of the other of the company’s resident ghosts—Archie Lagarde.
I saw Hart twitch slightly. I knew he wasn’t terribly fond of ghosts, period, and that Archie in particular also often irritated him.
“The other way to put it is that being a shithead is inherited.”
Raj huffed, and I realized that the sound meant he was amused—he just didn’t want other people to know. Or maybe he just didn’t want Archie to know.
The only thing I didn’t like about Archie was that he liked to pester me about learning necromancy—as a death witch, I had the capacity to learn, if I wanted to, at least according to him.
I very much did not, but Archie wanted to teach me, I guess.
I’d heard enough of his conversations with Ward to know that he’d been pestering the warlock to let him teach Jackson, too, but Ward had given that one a hard no until Jackson was a legal adult and able to decide for himself what he wanted to do.
I was already a legal adult, and while I knew that Ward—and Mason—didn’t approve of necromancy, no one was going to forbid me from learning it, if that’s what I wanted to do. It wasn’t. Not that I knew all that much about it, but the idea of reanimating corpses really didn’t appeal to me. At all.
Seeing and hearing ghosts was more than enough dead people in my life.
I didn’t want to seek them out and I definitely didn’t want to learn how to do anything else with them, either, although Ward and Beck both thought I should learn how to banish in case I needed the ability in a pinch.
My plan was to avoid ever putting myself in a situation where I might need that particular skill set.
Of course, my plan had also been to avoid ever having to use my psychic abilities, either, and that wasn’t working so well at the moment.
I took another drink of my cocoa, pulling my legs up a little tighter against my chest.
“You okay, kid?” Hart asked.
“Fine,” I replied.
“That’s a load of bullshit, peewee, and everybody knows it.”
I glared at him. I didn’t ask for your opinion, I told him privately. I also hated that he called me peewee, especially since I had a good five inches on him, not that it mattered when you were dead and could float.
Rayn should be allowed to make his own decisions about how to use his abilities, Sylvia put in, shimmering into existence so that Ward, Archie, and I—although not anyone else—could see and hear her.
Ward’s lips pressed together, but he didn’t say anything out loud, although I could imagine he was both agreeing and arguing with both of the ghosts. Agreeing that I wasn’t fine, but also that I was the one who got to make the decisions about what I was and wasn’t going to agree to do.
“Rayn can decide for himself what he is and isn’t capable of contributing,” Mason said out loud, and both Ward and I glanced over at him, then shared a look between us.
Sometimes I wondered if maybe there wasn’t more to Mason’s gifts than he let on.
He claimed to be sensitive, and I knew he knew when Archie or Sylvia was around, but he supposedly couldn’t hear or see them without Ward’s supporting magic.
But it was a little disturbing how similar to Sylvia’s argument his had been.
At the moment, he was looking at Archie, who was visible and audible to everyone in the room. “You don’t want a death witch pushing his limits too far,” Archie argued. “It’s not pretty when that backfires.”
“No shit,” came Ward’s sharp reply. “We’re well aware of that.”
I jumped when a hand touched my arm.
“Are you alright?” Raj asked me softly.
I stared at the brown of his fingers against my sleeve, then looked up to meet his mild expression and nodded.
I wasn’t alright in the existential sense, but I wasn’t about to lose control or pass out or throw up, and that was the metric I’d decided was most appropriate at the moment.
I hadn’t been alright in a more traditional sense in a very, very long time, and I didn’t expect that I was suddenly going to start being so any time soon.
At that precise moment, I was a more surprised that he was touching me than anything else. It was the second time that day, and he didn’t seem to think anything of it, despite the fact that nobody else ever seemed to want to touch me, even though they often casually touched each other all the time.
“It’s your choice, Rayn,” Raj said softly, speaking just to me, despite the fact that everyone else in the room had been loudly discussing the same topic. “What you do or don’t want to do—at any moment. You can say yes today and no tomorrow and yes again the day after that.”
His gold brown eyes were studying me, reading my features, trying to determine something from them, although I wasn’t quite sure what.
I nodded. “I know.”
“I don’t want you to push yourself too far,” he said, then. “You made yourself sick today. That’s not how I want your help.”
I sucked in a breath. “I didn’t know I’d get sick,” I admitted. “Not until I came out of it.”
“You got sick? Sick how?” Ward demanded. “Rayn, that’s pushing too far.”
“Ward,” Mason said, and there was a note of warning in his voice.
“He shouldn’t be making himself sick,” the warlock argued.
Mason just raised his eyebrows.
Ward turned pink. “Shut up,” he said.
“I didn’t say a word,” Mason replied mildly. Then the big orc looked over at me and winked.
I gaped at him.
“We all have to find our limits somehow,” he said mildly. “And while I don’t like the idea that anyone even connected to someone in the Ordo is involved in this, it’s up to Rayn how far he wants to push himself.” He smirked at me. “Just take out the trash if you puke in it.”
It was my turn to blush. “Sorry.”
Mason blinked a couple times. “You actually threw up?” he asked me, surprised.
“Y-yes?” I’d assumed that was why he’d said that.