Chapter Sixteen #2
“You would like me to ascertain her standing in the realms?”
I’d never get over the way he said that. “Yes.”
“Who is hiding her?”
“Her father—Floyd Pallás. He’s using her to hurt Ronan. He’s not above killing her to keep himself in power.”
“Revolting. A father should never harm his child.”
The cognitive dissonance was astounding, but I wasn’t going to bring it up. “I agree.”
“There is an issue.” Sexton removed his glasses and tucked them back into his pocket.
“You won’t help me?” I asked, my voice squeaking on the last word.
“Granddaughter, if you dropped an earring off the side of a sailboat and required me to drain the Pacific to find it, I would not hesitate. You need only ask.”
“Eh, I don’t want to create a climate disaster over a piece of jewelry, but I thank you for the sentiment.” My reply had been flippant, but the feeling Sexton had engendered in me was anything but offhand.
Part of me wanted him to treat me like a granddaughter.
I missed Mom and Abuela Lulu so much—especially the way they’d loved me.
Ours had been an effortless sort of love, the kind you didn’t have to try hard to feel, even when you disagreed.
I wanted to experience it again, and this scary, odd cemetery demon was the only family I had left.
However, another part of me was terrified of the damage letting him further into my life—my heart—might do.
“Sadly,” he continued, “even one such as I has boundaries exacted upon me by the gods. I cannot locate a person I have never seen in the flesh, and I have never had the good fortune to meet your young friend.”
My disappointment was a thousand-pound weight in a quicksand pit. Just when I thought it couldn’t sink any deeper, down it went.
“Worth a shot,” I said, tears itching at the backs of my eyes. Why was everything so damn frustrating? The spell hadn’t worked right, the runes, and now Sexton.
“I am sorry, granddaughter. I have failed you.”
“No. It’s not your fault. I appreciate you answering my call so quickly. You didn’t have to help and you— Wait a minute.”
His head turned to the side with an old-door creak. “Yes?”
I shuffled through the other photos, held up the one of Floyd. “Have you ever met this assface?”
“Not in the flesh, no.”
I tossed it aside and held up another. “How about this one? His name is Mason Hartman.”
One bony finger crawled out of his billowy black sleeve like a spider and tapped the photo. “No. Before I reintroduced myself to you at your wolf’s drinking establishment, I had not ventured into the county seat in several decades. I had, of course, made appearances elsewhere.”
An allusion to his visits to my mother before she died.
“I am sorry to have disappointed you,” he said.
“Again, not your fault. I was just hoping you might go into your trance state to find Rory, like you did for Ronan. But if you can’t, you can’t. Thank you for coming.” The words were a gentle dismissal. If he couldn’t help me, I had to find someone—or something—that could.
He rose in that peculiar way of his, with creaking joints and rattling bones. Rested his fingertips on the table and gazed down at me, with a gentle smile.
“Granddaughter, I did not go into my trance state, as you refer to it, for the wolf. I located your wolf, yes, but I went into the meditative state for you.”
I had no idea how to respond to that. “Oh. Thanks.”
He drummed his fingers against the table. The now-cold tea in my mug shivered. “Before I take my leave, I must again stress how important it is that you reach out to your demon side. You cannot continue to suppress her. She will grow restless.”
“I’m trying my best.”
He sighed, frosting my eyelashes with ice. “If you do not allow her to manifest, she will eventually cease to regard you as an ally.” He bent closer, and the rest of my face went numb. “You do not want her to treat you as an enemy, granddaughter. You must trust me on this.”
I shakily thanked him for his help and escorted him to the door. He walked so slowly I was tempted to give him my arm to lean on. He seemed to be in real pain.
“Are you okay?” I asked, surprising myself. I didn’t like the idea of him hurting, and it was more than my normal feeling of not wanting to see others in pain. It was him—I didn’t want to see him in pain.
“Fatigued and weighted with powerlessness is all. I have been on this plane for too long. I require a cup of my special tea. Goodbye.”
He exited through the front door and disappeared.
Not walked off into the distance—disappeared. As in, now you see him, now you don’t.
The protection spell woke me up at half past eleven.
I’d drifted off at the kitchen table with Cecil’s runes clutched in my hand. Like the meeting with Sexton, they’d netted me nothing new.
After the attack on Gladys, Fennel and I had added a component to the park’s protection spell, an annoying alarm that only he and I felt.
The alert was a brief, low-intensity electrical current that passed harmlessly through the body.
The sensation was annoying, similar to the pain of banging your elbow.
It was incredibly sensitive and responded to anything larger than a mouse entering the property unauthorized.
Not something we could maintain for long if we wanted to retain our sanity, but a necessary evil for now.
I yawned, stretched, and shoved my feet into my sneakers. It was probably another rat—not the shifter kind—and nothing to worry about, but I had to check it out.
Fennel met me on the porch, and we headed to the source of the alarm—Ida's trailer. We'd just passed Violet when my cell rang. It was Ida.
I tapped the screen. "You okay over there? I got an alert from—"
"Come quickly. Back porch," she said, her voice shaking. "Bring the boys."
I sent Fennel to the garden room to fetch Cecil and ran to meet Ida.
Her porch was shaded and closed off, accessible through a back gate and a narrow front entrance from the street.
No one could get to it without setting off the alarm, but more than that, no one could get to it without experiencing severe pain from the protection spell.
Margaux was a powerful witch—she'd only managed to get ten feet past the mailboxes, and it had made her violently ill. It had sent both Floyd and Mason screeching out of the parking lot once, and I hadn't had the severity cranked up to what it was now.
"Ida?" I called out in a whisper.
"Betty, stay back." She emerged from the darkened corner beside her back steps. The porch light was out.
I turned on my cell flashlight. It wasn't the strongest, but it allowed me to see where Ida was— “Oh gods.”
"Don't look. You don't want to look," she said.
But looking was all I could do.
Sprawled over the steps was a body—or what had been one. The person had been flayed open, chest to pelvis, and things that should’ve been on the inside were on the outside. They’d also been drenched in silver—someone had poured it like paint into the abdominal area.
The silver told me the victim was a wolf. From the height and shoes, I guessed it was male.
I moved close and shone my flashlight on the face.
The cell dropped out of my hands and skittered across the cement. My head swam and my breath jammed in my lungs before releasing in short, groaning pants. The world narrowed to a pinpoint, the edges closing like the shutter of an old camera.
“Ronan.”
“I don’t think so. Hang on.” Ida opened an app on her cell phone, and the porch light came on, bathing the steps and most of the porch in bright, white light. “Look closer. It’s not him.”
“But it’s his face.” My voice came out as a gasping whimper. I knew Ronan’s face. I’d kissed every plane of it, explored this jaw with fingers and tongue, stared into those dark brown eyes for hours on end.
No.
No, that wasn’t right. Ronan had hazel green eyes, not dark brown ones.
“Look, Betty. Look.” Ida pointed to where the edges of his face didn’t line up. “It’s all wrong.”
Relief poured through me, turning my legs to water. Someone had used magic to superimpose Ronan’s face over the victim’s. Either an amateur or someone working quickly, because it was a terrible job. Similar to the way my face looked when I was holding Demon Betty back.
By this time, Fennel had returned with Cecil.
The cat leapt to the top of the steps, beside the victim’s—not Ronan’s—head.
He sniffed the wound on the chest then pulled his head back, mouth partially open as if he’d smelled something unpleasant.
Cecil climbed up beside him, dipped one tiny hand into the man’s open chest, and began rooting around.
I gagged at the sound.
With a wet squelch, Cecil pulled a hex bag out of the wound. He dragged it a foot away from the body, extracted something from his hat, and the bag burned to ash.
Ronan’s face faded away, revealing another familiar one.
“Oh no.” The words erupted from me. “No, no, no. Come on. He was just a kid.”
“Did you know him?” Ida asked gently.
“His name was Trey Jefferson. One of Floyd’s—one of Ronan’s wolves.
He’s young. Barely twenty-two.” I turned to her, suddenly desperate.
Emotion ricocheted through my body like a barrage of rubber bullets—fear, sorrow, hope, relief, guilt.
“Can you talk to him? Maybe he can tell us who did this to him.”
“Is there any doubt?” Ida looked skeptical. “It’s got to be the alpha.”
“He might know something about Rory,” I said. “Please.”
“I’ll try.” She closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, they gleamed with white light. Ida’s necromancer power was like Ronan’s ability to enthrall wolves; the trick wasn’t to release it as much as to get out of its way and let it go to work.
Her eyes brightened then dimmed back to their normal blue. “I can’t do it.”
“Why? Is his soul too far away?”
“The opposite. It’s too close.” She looked from Trey to me. “Betty, he’s alive.”