Chapter 17 Sex Magic #2
“We will,” she says with more force than I’m used to from her. “We’ve already requested footage from the bank’s ATM.”
I feel the color draining from my face. Arla protected me once. Can she do it again? Like her or not, I need her right now.
“And the background checks are nearly finished. Just plugging a few holes, filling a few blanks. Know what I mean? It’s only a matter of time, really.”
I force myself to smile up at her. Background checks?
I can think of an enormous hole in mine that anyone with more than a little curiosity will notice, starting about ten years ago, before I switched to the name Clark.
If they find out my real name, they’ll find everything else that goes with it—the misdemeanor assault and drug-possession charges when I was fresh out of the system, the sketchy foster care family before that, articles and news reports on the mystery fire at Solidago, my questionable family history and my grandfather’s wealth and reputation, maybe even my hospital records—declared dead.
“Well, good luck or whatever.” I smile primly to hide the terror.
She reaches out and lays a well-meaning hand on my shoulder. “Jude, if there’s anything you decide you want to talk to me about—anything at all—my office door is always open.”
I shift away from her touch. “Thank you, Jessica.”
“I mean it,” she says before turning and walking away. “Anything at all.”
I FIND brENNAN, hair a mess, looking utterly pleased with himself in a wide, white bed at the Four Seasons after giving the receptionist Aaron’s name.
I snuck out for lunch early while Aaron was preoccupied so I could get to Brennan before he pulled any more magic rabbits from his fucking hat.
He opened the door thinking I was room service bringing orange juice and waffles, and upon seeing me, rolled his eyes and threw himself back onto the bed.
I notice even his underwear and T-shirt are black. “Do you dress like Arla’s watching all the time?”
“Ha ha,” he says flatly, sitting up. “Why are you here?”
“You know why,” I tell him. “Aaron is a fount of information after a good orgasm. Apparently, so are you.”
He pulls on his pants and stands up to button them, putting some half-melted ice from the bucket into a glass and then running the tap from the bathroom sink.
He stands there, clinking it angrily at me after taking a sip.
“People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, Jude.
You think I don’t know Arla sent you to spy on me? ”
“Uhh, I don’t—”
“Don’t deny it,” he says, irritated, plopping into a cushy hotel chair. “I know Arla better than you do. She has a way of getting to people.”
I take a breath, lowering myself into the adjacent chair. “You’re right. You know her better than me. So why bring my friend into this game you two are playing? You could have just had a few drinks and left, then there would be nothing to tell.”
His expression is wary and jaded. He studies me as if deciding whether Arla has gotten to me. “I didn’t mean to,” he confesses. “Aaron isn’t like anyone I’ve met before. He’s spectacular. Sometimes, when my emotions get the better of me, the magic just happens.”
“And all the stuff you told him about us and the club? He thinks we’re practicing sex magic, Brennan. All of us.”
He groans. “I know, I know. I was scrambling to cover, to try and explain. I didn’t know what to say! It seemed better than the truth. Close enough to it that he would believe me, but far enough from it that he wouldn’t know everything.”
I sigh and rub at my brow. “How many times has this happened before?”
“Never!” Brennan insists.
When I look skeptical, he swears, “I promise, Jude. I’m always careful. Aaron’s different.”
The dreamy look in his eyes tells me he’s got it for Aaron, bad.
“Look, whatever you tell Arla, just leave Aaron out of it, okay?” His voice is urgent, laced with concern.
“Why?” I ask him. “Aaron is innocent in this. It’s not like she’d do anything to him.”
Brennan laughs, and it’s short and sharp like gunfire.
“You understand even less than I thought if you believe that.” He sets his glass on a nearby table.
“You know, when I first met her a couple of years ago, all she could do was make it rain or turn the faucet on with a look, push cups off the table with a thought, bend a spoon. We were so alike then,” Brennan says, remembering.
“Still figuring our magic out. But I didn’t know it then.
I thought she was better than me because she could do more than I could.
I thought she was a goddess. I didn’t just admire her.
” He leans toward me. “I worshipped her. She made me believe she had something I didn’t, something she could share.
She promised me this whole way of life.”
“And?” I ask him.
He sits back, spine stiff. “You’re not hearing me. Do you remember the night in the park? That first invitation we left for you … how it caught fire?”
I rub my palms together. “Of course. How could I forget? I was still holding it when it burst into flame.”
He grins knowingly. “That was the first time I ever saw Arla magic fire.”
My neurons sizzle inside my skull, trying desperately to get his message across.
“Do you understand me now?” Brennan says, clasping his hands together. “It wasn’t her fire … It was yours.”
I shake my head, confounded. “What?”
“The only power Arla ever had before coming to Seattle was with water.”
“A water diviner,” I whisper, recalling the title she used for it in her penthouse.
Brennan nods. “Exactly. She told me that she used to go dowsing with her mother as a girl. Then her father figured out she could locate oil too. He started using her to find crude deposits and collected mineral rights. She made him a wealthy man. That’s where the money came from to buy the club.”
I sit back, letting this sink in. Growing up with the opposite—a parent who wanted to repress the power in me rather than exploit it—I can’t really imagine what that must have felt like.
But I know the hot stare of a man who looks right through you and sees only what he wants. I know the pain of paternal betrayal.
Brennan goes on. “Crude oil, as it turns out, has very little water in it, sometimes less than one percent. So, her affinity for water is beyond exceptional, of that I’m certain.
But the rest…” He stares past me. “I looked him up, you know—her father. Not at first, of course. I believed everything she told me in the beginning. But over the last several months, as things stopped adding up, I became suspicious of some of those early stories. And then you came. She’s different about you, was even before you showed up.
I thought maybe she was just enamored with her new toy, but she’s keeping too many secrets.
Do you know why she had you meet us under that bridge? ”
I shake my head.
“Bat guano,” he tells me. “I saw her collecting it before you arrived. We were supposed to be watching for you. She didn’t know I was watching her instead.
” He grinds his jaw. “The night we were at the Space Needle, she took Twig outside the city on a private errand. I only found out because Cadence told me. She left Rock to babysit the psychic, keep her doped up and occupied in the hopes that Cadence wouldn’t detect anything.
But Cadence being Cadence kept ‘smelling purple,’ and later, I found bittersweet in Arla’s room.
It’s a climbing nightshade with purple flowers, every part toxic to ingest. Why would she need that? ”
I see the candle I found in my grandmother’s fireplace, half-burnt and wrapped in goldenrod, scrawled with a word I couldn’t fully make out and rubbed with blood, the dead snake tucked inside.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. But I can picture Rock holding that shovel in the cemetery, the bag of his aunt’s cremains. I think about telling Brennan, but I don’t want to fuel his paranoia.
Brennan tugs his phone out of a pocket and types something into it, before turning the screen toward me. “There,” he says, definitive. “See for yourself.”
Printed across the screen in bold letters is the headline—Colorado Oil Baron Alcott Wells Dead by Accidental Drowning.
My eyes meet Brennan’s over the phone. “Is that…”
“Her dad. She said they were estranged. But he was found in a fountain on his own property,” he tells me. “It was only three feet deep.”
I swallow, a sick knot of alarm spreading through my stomach.
“Survived by one daughter—Arla T. Wells,” Brennan reads. “Poor bastard.”
“You don’t think…”
He grins bitterly. “A year ago, I wouldn’t have. Six months ago, maybe. But now?” He lets the question hang there, the answer implied.
I don’t know what to say. Brennan seems convinced, but murder still seems a stretch to me.
“One by one,” he says, changing the subject, “she’s collected us. A full set. A water diviner, a catalyst, an oracle, a dream spinner, a night bearer, and a fire rover. Water, magic, night, fire … For what?”
I shrug. It might sound preposterous, but Brennan knows this group and its leader in ways I don’t. Is he seeing something the rest of us, even Cadence, are missing? Or has his time with the Fathom addled his mind?
“With every new person that comes into the group, Arla develops a new ability,” he continues.
“I didn’t realize it at first because she was moving things like I did from the moment we met.
I didn’t notice that when she talked about water magic growing up, it was all she talked about.
But as Cadence came along, Twig and Rock, you, I began to see how her magic grew, her powers mirroring ours.
And I realized that was the real reason we were there.
The real reason she wanted us close. She’s using us, Jude.
Our abilities. Siphoning our magic like a parasite. ”
“How?” I ask him, but he looks at me sadly.