Chapter 26 Elijah #2
“Wait,” I said. Even with Avery’s hand in mine, I was suddenly drowning. I looked imploringly at Wyatt’s dad, the closest person I had to a father besides Uncle Horatio. “Ward, would you mind… staying?”
Avery squeezed my hand.
His bushy red brows crept up his forehead, and then his expression softened. “Sure, son.”
He grabbed one of the metal chairs from an adjacent table and pulled it up to the end of ours. He sat down, his enormous body challenging the chair’s frame, and crossed his burly arms over his chest.
Ian and Joseph sat down on the bench across from Avery and me. Ian reached into his backpack and extracted the belladonna knife. He set it gingerly on the table.
Ward went eerily still.
“Ian, what is that?” Avery asked slowly.
Her brother looked at me expectantly.
“Dove, I believe this is the weapon that killed my mother.”
She blinked at me, her confusion growing. “And why does Ian have it?”
“I, uh, saw this knife in action recently,” Ian said, darting a furtive look at Ward, who caught on immediately and sent an exasperated look my way. “And it caused the, um, stab-ee to experience certain symptoms.” He paused, his expression turning grave. “Symptoms I recognized.”
Avery gasped.
“I asked Elijah if I could take the dagger and study it,” Ian went on. “And, obviously, I went to J for help. The reason we’re all sitting here is that J and I both believe, without a doubt, that Elijah’s mother’s murder and our mother’s murder are connected.”
My dove went rigid next to me, her horror palpable and bitter on my lips. The basilisk hissed angrily—at my distress and hers. My fangs lengthened and my vision slid into the sharpened colorless focus of my beast before I blinked it away.
“For the benefit of everyone at this table,” Joseph said, “let’s start at the beginning. We are all aware of what Avery’s beast is.”
“A magnificent animal,” Ward declared, and Avery softened slightly, her cheeks pinking.
My adorable, savage girl.
“Avery and Ian’s mother, Gwen, had a nearly identical beast,” Joseph went on.
“And like Avery, she kept it a secret. Gwen only shifted when we were in the remote wilderness or in emergency situations. Nineteen years ago, we had a rare wraith incursion in the small Colorado mountain town we lived in. The shifter population was minimal there, so we saw wraiths once a year or so and rarely above the power level of a small Ripper. But that night, Gwen and Rand got tangled with a Giant, and Gwen was injured enough that she shifted.”
An eerily familiar story. No wonder Avery’s fathers shoved her straight into the powerful embrace of the Guardians.
“We did not think anyone saw her. We were in the woods, and no one else in our community was out that night.” He sighed, the grief he still felt a visible weight on his shoulders.
“But I suppose we were wrong. Several weeks later, when Gwen and Rand were out walking in broad daylight, she was shot multiple times by human hunters in a supposed accident.”
Avery was silent. Her beast reached for mine. She was sorrowful, mourning her mother as I was sure she did nearly every day of her life.
“Naturally, Gwen tried to shift immediately after she was shot,” Joseph said.
“Even silver bullets would not have cut off access to a beast as powerful as hers, and we later found out the bullets were not silver. But she was unable to access her animal. Rand rushed her to the local healer—a latent man from a wolf family who was quite adept with his healing affinity.”
“But her body rejected the magic,” I finished for him in a low voice. “Aiden said he could feel it pushing back when he tried the same thing himself.”
Joseph nodded grimly.
“What?” Avery said. “You stabbed someone with this dagger, and Aiden tried to heal him? When did this happen?”
While you were using Wyatt for your pleasure, my love.
“Don’t worry about that, Dove.”
Ian looked at me. “And your mother’s story is similar enough, correct?”
I nodded. “She was murdered twenty years ago, about six months after my fathers were killed by wraiths, in an alleged mugging at a farmers’ market.
” Avery squeezed my hand again, and I found there wasn’t so much pain in retelling this story when her hand was in mine.
“She was stabbed with this dagger, which I only recovered last fall. My mom didn’t have a beast, but her body similarly rejected all magical attempts to heal her. ”
Joseph smiled encouragingly at me. “And her tox screen showed no substances poisonous to humans or shifters.”
It wasn’t a question. “Yes.”
“I took the liberty of contacting your uncle,” he explained. “I hope you don’t mind.”
I certainly did not mind. If my dreams came true, we’d all be one big happy family in the near future.
“Mom’s tox screen was the same,” Ian told the group. “But my family obviously suspected foul play, and Dad saved the bullets. Don’t worry,” he added at Avery’s stricken look, “we didn’t bring them here.”
Ward had been taking this all in like we were combatants on the battlefield and our enemy was afoot. The red sheen of a murderous bear glinted in his eyes. “So aside from the deliberate attacks and strange symptoms,” he said, “what makes you think these tragedies are connected?”
Ian gestured at the dagger. “Seeing this dagger in action, along with the belladonna flower carved into the hilt, gave me a bit of a lightbulb moment. There were clearly trace amounts of some kind of substance on the blade, given that it was still able to affect the, ah, person Elijah stabbed. Maybe the same was true of the bullets. So, I developed some theories and ran some tests. With my dad’s help, of course. ”
“What is it about the belladonna specifically?” I asked. I was kicking myself for not identifying the design earlier, but then again, I wouldn’t have known the first thing about what it could have possibly meant.
Joseph propped his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers in front of his face.
“Atropa belladonna is one of the more toxic plants on earth—to humans. Its roots, stalk, flowers, and berries all contain a compound that, when ingested, can cause maladies like blurred vision, tachycardia, rashes, hallucinations, delirium, all kinds of nasty stuff.”
“It also has a kind of mythical status in human lore,” Ian added. “Supposedly used by the Romans as biological weapons. Some theorize it was the poison Romeo and Juliet used to end their lives. A symbol of both the beautiful and deadly, that kind of thing.”
Like our mate, said the basilisk.
Yes, indeed. Pay attention, this is important.
“But the toxin wouldn’t necessarily be poisonous to shifters,” I said, following the natural logic. “The magic in our bodies makes us more resistant to such things.”
“Correct,” Joseph replied. “Ingesting belladonna toxin might give a shifter a stomachache, but that’s about the extent of it.
Still, it’s the closest thing we have to a controlled substance in our practice, mostly because the toxic effects can be worsened via lunar magic infusion, which would be fatal to humans.
We still exist in their world, after all, and we can’t have that kind of thing just laying around. ”
“But from what you’re saying,” Avery said, “there’s no way our mom or Elijah’s mom died from being poisoned with belladonna toxin. It couldn’t have killed them.”
“Right,” Ian replied. “And there was nothing in Mom or Elijah’s mother’s bloodwork to indicate poison, belladonna toxin or otherwise.”
“But it was the key to figuring this out?” I asked.
“The thing about the belladonna,” Joseph said, “is that, while it isn’t necessarily poisonous to us, it is one of the most magically potent plants known to shifterkind.
Under a Full Moon, it can absorb so much magic that it makes the plant incredibly unstable and nearly impossible to work with, even for those of us with a strong apothecary affinity. ”
“Very few of us mess with it,” Ian added. “It’s a pain in the ass, and all the potential uses for it are theoretical.”
“But some of those theories,” Joseph said, “posit powerful and frankly horrifying uses for super-charged belladonna extract, made from the plant’s roots, stalk, and leaves.
A shifter with extraordinary talent and control in this affinity could, in theory, use the magic-absorbing potential of the plant to create a substance that cloaks or conceals everything within it.
It could also, in theory, amplify the effects of the concealed substance. ”
Ward swore.
Ian looked at me, probably because it was too difficult for him to look at his sister, who was taking this all in with a bone-chilling calm that said she’d gone to her numb place. “What is the one substance that could both cut off access to our beast and make our bodies repel healing magic?”
I knew immediately. “Silver.”
Joseph smiled sadly. “Exactly. More specifically, colloidal silver that has been infused with a magic repelling spell, rather than a magic absorbing one, like what is used to create the anti-wraith wards around Proteus College.”
Ward frowned deeply. “But the presence of silver in the body would’ve been the first thing a shifter physician would’ve tested for, given the symptoms.”
“Exactly,” Joseph said. “They did, in both cases, and found nothing. For Gwen, they ruled her cause of death inconclusive but still an accident. For Elijah’s mother, there was some nonsense about her body giving up.
Her magical soul rejecting the will to live because of the loss of her bonded quad. ”
“She would never,” I hissed. I hated that bullshit the doctors concocted about my mother.
“Of course not,” Joseph said gently. “She had you.”
“The point of all of this,” Ian said, “is that the belladonna could be used, in theory, to create a poison that would deliver a small amount of colloidal silver into the blood and both amplify its effects on the body and conceal it so that it is completely untraceable.” He leaned forward, and the electric sheen of his beast gleamed in his eyes.
“And if you go into this knowing exactly what you’re looking for, you can reveal the presence of the belladonna.
Which we did, in trace amounts, on both the dagger and the bullets. ”
Avery sucked in a harsh breath.
I wrapped my arm around her and pulled her tight into my side. “I’m sorry, Dove,” I whispered, my lips pressed to her hair. “I’m so sorry this is happening.”
I’d had many months to come to terms with the hunt for this murderer. Avery was having to absorb right here, right now, that her mother did not die in a tragic accident—something she’d always suspected but hadn’t known for sure—and that we were looking for the same killer.
She snuggled tight against me, and it was a wonderful feeling, despite the circumstances. If she let me, I would share this and every other burden of hers until the end of time.
“Nothing to be sorry for, Elijah,” she said. “We’re all in this with you now.”
Ward glared at the mountains in the distance before he asked the table the million-dollar question.
“But why? Gwen was a powerful Prime female and a tiger to boot, and there are zealot-types out there that would target her for that. But Amara was a latent war widow. Why was she targeted? It makes no sense.”
Joseph blew out a resigned breath, and then he looked at me, sympathy and curiosity both clear in his gaze. “It might if Elijah’s mother was not actually latent.”