Chapter 10
She was exhausted. Her youngest had refused to eat her breakfast with silverware, picking up pieces of cut-up pancake and syrup with her fingers.
Fingers that then gripped her hand as she’d pulled the protesting child to the minivan—running late, as usual, because it was so hard to get four kids up and dressed and ready to go—to drop off the other kids off at school.
And then they’d come to see the dark-haired man about her father’s will, since her step-mother was claiming that there wasn’t one.
Except she knew that her father wouldn’t have done that to her or her sister.
And definitely not to his grandchildren, even if he hadn’t understood why she’d married Hiro—complaining that her great-grandfather had gone to war with Japan, so why would she want to marry someone from there.
She’d tried ignoring the comments, but they’d gotten to her, even if Hiro pretended not to hear them.
Hiro loved her. And he was good to her. He wanted to hire someone to help her around the house—cleaning, taking the kids to school, that sort of thing—but she felt like it was her job at a stay-at-home-mom to take care of those things.
Besides, hiring help was expensive, and they were already trying to be careful about the budget.
That’s why she wanted to talk to this Campion person—if she was right, then her dad must have left them something. Maybe then she could actually get some of the projects around the house done.
She sat in the waiting area, trying to make a grocery list, grimacing a little as syrup from Kennedy’s hand made the pen sticky in her own. She’d borrowed it from the cup on the front desk and reminded herself to return it before she left.
I practically threw the pen into the trash, frustrated. I’d been trying for the better part of the last week to get my abilities under control so that they would stop ambushing me—so that I could use them or not use them at will.
I wasn’t having very much luck.
The woman whose memory I’d triggered had spoken to Ward this morning—and seemed to have been satisfied with the outcome of the séance. I hoped her father hadn’t been as much of a bigot as she’d worried. I hoped she got the money she needed so that she could take care of her kids.
I was just finishing up the paperwork for her case, when a younger woman came in through the door, a bit windblown, her stylishly cut dark brown hair catching on the edges of a pale purple mask.
She was younger than me, or looked it, anyway, although I could tell right away that there was power in her.
Not as much as Ward or Mason, or even me, but it was there.
People with power make me nervous.
I swallowed before greeting her after pulling on my mask. “Hello, welcome to Beyond the Veil. What can I do for you?”
“I need help,” she said, her voice that kind of harsh people get when they’re scared or nervous. That wasn’t surprising. A lot of people get nervous when they come in to Beyond the Veil. “My parents just died.”
“And you want to set up a séance to talk to them,” I guessed. That’s why people came here, especially after family members died. I was about to click on the booking icon, but she spoke again.
“Ugh. God, no. They were terrible people.” She sounded vehement.
It was also not what people usually said, and I didn’t know what to say back to her, now that we were off script. “So what do you want?” I asked. I probably shouldn’t have said it that way, but she didn’t seem to mind.
“I need to know if the brother they never told me about is alive or dead.”
“Okay.” We could do that. If he was dead, Ward would find him. If not, Hart might agree to do us a favor and run a search among the living. He sometimes did, especially if Ward or Mason asked him. “Do you have a name?” It would be a lot easier if she did.
“Rayn Alverno.”
I stared at her.
At Violette. My baby sister. Because it had to be her. She was the right age, and, now that I looked at her, I could see how much she looked like the mother I barely remembered.
“Well? Aren’t you going to write it down?”
I shook my head.
“Why not?” She sounded both hurt and insulted.
“It’s me,” I blurted.
“What’s you?” Now she just sounded impatient. Annoyed. I was used to that.
“Rayn?” Ward’s voice, slightly muffled by his mask.
Her eyes, a lightish grey-green, not like mine, but like our mother’s, widened.
“Holy shit.”
I nodded.
Ward rolled up to us. “Can I help you?” he asked politely.
Violette shook her head and just pointed at me.
Ward turned to look at me. “Rayn?”
“Me,” I said again. “She was looking for me.”
“Why?”
I swallowed, uncertain what to do with the emotions that were swirling around inside me. “She’s my sister,” I whispered.
Ward’s grey eyes went wide, and he turned to look at her again. “Ms. Alverno?”
She blinked. “Yeah?”
“I—”
“Ward is the one who got me out of Tranquil Brook,” I told her.
“Is that where they locked you up?” Violette asked.
I nodded.
“Was it—” Her voice broke a little, and she had to start again. “Was it bad?”
Ward’s hand on my arm stopped me from answering. He did that when telling the truth wasn’t a good idea, although I didn’t always understand why. I did now. “It wasn’t the right place for Rayn to be,” he said.
It wasn’t a lie, but it definitely wasn’t the truth, either.
“So it was bad.” She sounded sad, but her eyes bored into me, looking for an answer.
I nodded.
“Figures.” She sounded glum.
“Would you like to have some time to talk… privately?” Ward asked gently. “We have a sitting room you can use.”
The room used to be Hart’s office, before he moved to the FBI.
Mason had come up with the idea to turn it into a sitting-type area with comfy chairs and a table with boxes of tissues for when people were upset by séances or his research.
It was a lot less awkward than having them weeping openly in the lobby.
Violette hadn’t taken her eyes off me. “Um. Yeah. Thanks. I—” She swallowed again. “I came here to find him, but I didn’t expect to… well, find him.”
The muscles around Ward’s eyes relaxed, telling me that he’d softened towards my sister. That he didn’t think she was here for some sort of nefarious purpose. That she really wanted to find me. “Ms. Alverno—” he began.
“Vi. Please.”
The corners of his eyes turned up as he smiled.
“Vi. Your brother went through a lot—including contracting Arcana and becoming a touch-psychic while at Tranquil Brook.” There was a hard edge to his voice the way there always was when he talked about the asylum.
Most people couldn’t hear it, but I could.
“A touch-psychic?” she asked, her grey-green eyes wide.
“That’s right,” he said gently.
“I know things about things when I touch them,” I explained. “Objects, not people.”
Those grey-green eyes widened again. Then she did what people tend to do when they find out I’m a touch-psychic and pulled something out of her purse, which she held out to me.
It was a heavy gold ring, a heavy central stone of onyx carved with the profile of a mountain and bordered with tiny diamonds.
But I didn’t need to touch it.
“That’s Uncle Dean’s,” I whispered, and I felt Ward’s hand come to rest on my arm again. I was glad I knew what it was, because I didn’t want to touch it. I never wanted to know how that man’s thought process worked. Never.
“You didn’t even take it,” Violette breathed.
“I didn’t have to,” I replied. “I recognize it.”
“Recognize?”
“He wore it all the time. Except when he took it off because it would leave a mark.”
Beside me, Ward sucked in a breath.
“A mark on what?” Violette asked, confused.
“Me,” I answered, almost swallowing the word.
“Oh.” She looked crushed. I didn’t know what to do about that.
“How about we take this in the other room?” Ward suggested, and I let him lead us into Hart’s old office. I hadn’t minded the room when it belonged to Hart—he’d been with us just long enough that things had started to feel like him, blended thoughts and feelings that just felt like Hart.
But they’d taken that furniture out, and now the room was mostly just full of sadness and weight.
I’m sure it was much more comfortable for people than being exposed in front of the huge windows, but the people who came in here were grieving—sometimes having just found out something horrible about a loved one.
And it painted darkness on every surface in the room.
Even if these memories, too, were blending together so that I was less likely to have one take control of me, at least after a few days had passed.
I settled on the very edge of one of the chairs, careful not to let my hands touch it, even though I was wearing gloves. Across from me, Violette sat just as awkwardly in another chair and stared at me.
“When did you get out?” she asked, finally.
I could answer that one. “Four years ago.”
“Did you—” She stopped, then tried again. “Did they have school, where you were?”
I shook my head. “I got my GED last year, and I’ve been taking online college courses. But no, no school at Tranquil Brook.”
She toyed with a bracelet on one wrist. It looked expensive. “They never visited you, did they?”
“Who?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I knew.
“Our parents.”
“No.”
She nodded, having expected that answer just as I’d known who she meant.
“I found out you existed at the reading of the will,” she told me.
“They’d left money to keep our son in his current state and condition, but they didn’t say what that meant,” she said, her tone disgusted.
“I had to get the lawyer to do some digging to even find your name. But when he contacted the place, they said you were in no condition for visitors or conversation.”
I blinked, a chill running down my spine. “When was this?”
She shrugged. “A couple weeks ago.”
I frowned. “But Tranquil Brook was shut down four years ago,” I protested. “They couldn’t have—” I went cold.
Sylvia!
I’m here, sunshine. What’s wrong?