Chapter 71 #4
Beth closed the door, confirmed that it was properly locked, then followed Kia.
“This way,” Kia said, turning in the opposite direction of the wall sign for the lobby. She walked to the end of the corridor and the mural that filled the wall.
Beth didn’t see a handle of any kind, although there could have been one. She was too busy staring at the webbing between Kia’s fingers.
Noticing Beth’s attention, Kia said, “Water Arcana,” as if that explained everything.
Maybe it did.
A door opened in the wall. Kia gestured for Beth to go first. Once they were both on the other side and the door closed behind them, Beth looked around—and saw nothing that looked different from the other side of the door, but the air smelled different.
“This is the Arcana’s side of the hotel,” Kia said.
Did that explain the growing sense that she was in another place?
Kia opened a door at the end of the corridor. “Watch your step on the stairs.”
Not a metal fire escape, which would have made sense. These wooden stairs were more like a Gothic representation of a series of waterfalls than something as basic as stairs.
Beth paused when she saw the moon gate.
“That leads to the public area of the park,” Kia said. “If you go through the gate from this side, you can’t get back to the hotel or your room without going around to the public side.”
“If I stay on this side of the gate?”
“Then you can return to your room using the stairs.”
And try to figure out how to open a door that had no handle.
The flagstone path wandered through flower beds that, even in moonlight, seemed to invite her to touch, to rest, to breathe.
Kia pointed to a shallow water feature. “Birds gather there to drink and bathe.”
“Is Rahele allowed to come out and fly around and bathe there?”
“Yes,” Kia replied. “Although she lost her crow friend recently and is feeling too sad to come out on her own. She will, in time.”
“Her friend died?”
Kia stopped walking and gave her a puzzled look. “No, he didn’t die. He had to return to his own form and begin the next part of his journey. But that journey isn’t here.”
They continued to an open-air pavilion with walls made of fine netting. Several tables were set for a meal. Various kinds of lanterns and candles in glass globes lit the pavilion and the tables, the flickering light making everything look soft and a little unreal, like a fantasy.
That’s what she first thought when Lucas Frost turned around and looked at her. A fantasy. The delicate antlers rising from his head were proof that the Arcana weren’t human. The look in his eyes was a warning that he was a power that should not be taken lightly.
She looked past him to the women coming up to join them. Looked at the various shapes of antlers and horns—and realized she’d seen all these variations in her sketchbook.
The Arcana. The masters of the uncanny.
She also realized that something had settled inside her, and the faces of the people around her no longer shifted or looked out of focus. She saw them for who they were.
“Sit with us,” Lucas Frost said. “You’ve met Ethan Sharpe. And you’ve met my wife, Justine, and her sisters, Zerah and Lysandra. Have you met my brother, Jack?”
“I would have remembered if we had,” Jack said.
Those words might have sounded lightly flirtatious coming from another man, but Jack Frost was stating a fact, and his smile was sharp and feral—a predator sizing up potential prey.
Seated between Lucas and Jack, Beth felt relieved when Ashley Laxton took a seat opposite her. Kia Dance and a woman named Mia Skov also sat at their table.
Given the placement, Beth had a feeling that this was the high table, and she wouldn’t be sitting there if she wasn’t a guest.
At first the talk flowed around her as servers offered platters of various meats and vegetables. Some things she recognized. Other things she’d heard of but had never tasted.
At one point she found herself in an animated discussion with Ashley and Ethan about a mystery series she enjoyed reading and stopped seeing the horns and other markings that made the differences between humans and the Arcana so obvious.
Lucas said little and seemed preoccupied. Did the leader of such a place feel alone even among his people?
After the meal, the Arcana left the pavilion in groups or alone until the only people left were Justine and her sisters, Ashley, Lucas, Jack, Ethan—and her.
Justine stood and looked at Beth. “It’s time for your answer. Come with us.”
Beth followed Justine past quaint cottages and rambling buildings that could house a dozen families. All were made of wood and stone and blended in so well, she wondered how many other buildings she had passed and hadn’t seen.
Finally, they came to a stone sculpture that looked like the trunk of an ancient tree that had been cut to the perfect height to hold a large stone bowl filled with water. Filled with moonlight reflected in the water.
Justine pointed. “Stand there—and look.”
Moonlight and water and…
Beth gasped. She raised her hands, an involuntary move to touch the antlers that rose from her head. Her hands felt nothing. She took a step back and looked at Lucas.
“Mine are real,” he said quietly. “Moonlight and starlight reveal our true nature. That’s why visitors aren’t welcome after dark. Yours are a kind of ancestral memory.”
Beth stepped toward the stone bowl of water and stared at her reflection. “I’ve seen my reflection at night, even reflected in water. I’ve never seen those.”
“You’ve never been standing on Arcana land.”
Would Lucas and the others know the names Maxine and Arianna Greenwood? If they did, was she ready to know about that branch of the Arcana? Not yet. Tonight, it was enough just to have confirmation that the dreams brought on by that special tea were true.
Justine stood on the other side of the stone bowl. “What this tells us is that you are one-quarter Arcana. That’s why the antlers don’t physically manifest and why your heritage is only revealed in this way.” She looked at Lucas. “And that’s why there is something else you need to see.”
Justine led them back to the hotel and walked through the moon gate.
“It’s all right,” Lucas said when Beth hesitated. “Kia will see you back to the public side of the hotel. Her difference is less obvious to any human guests who are staying tonight.”
One side of the carved wooden doors that secured one of the pavilion’s archways slid into the wall. They all followed Justine into the room where she and her sisters assisted people who wanted to meet—or change—their fate.
Lysandra walked over to her table and picked up the sketchbook she used while supplicants asked for whatever they wanted and heard what it would cost. She removed a sketch and held it up for all of them to see. “Do you know this woman?”
Beth stared at the drawing and shivered.
“Her name is Bonnie Wilson. I don’t think there was any legal document assigning her as a foster parent or my legal guardian, but after my parents disappeared, I lived with her until I turned eighteen.
Someone sent money every month for my upkeep.
When I turned eighteen, the money Bonnie received for taking care of me stopped.
She liked to gamble, and when she couldn’t pay her bills, she would call me and try to guilt me into sending her money. ”
“Did you send her some?” Lucas asked.
“For a while, I did send her a little money whenever she threatened to tell the police academy that I was strange and unstable.” Beth smiled bitterly.
“I think the correct term is ‘smear campaign.’ I doubt Bonnie had any proof about my heritage except the sketchbook and the ring, and I doubt she understood the significance of either, but she had the ability to find a person’s weakness and exploit that vulnerability.
She did it with me every time she reminded me that there had to be a reason why my parents left one day and never came back for me.
When I was older, I recognized that she used the same gaslighting techniques on other people.
She liked sowing discord. But with me?” A sigh.
“Well, she wasn’t wrong about me, was she?
I worked very hard to become a police officer and then a detective, but I’ve always felt I had to hide a part of myself from my colleagues—and now I know why. ”
“A life torn asunder,” Lysandra said. “That is what we read as her intention.”
Beth nodded. “She called recently, wanting money. She said she knows my secret. People in Penwych are already upset about the Arcana’s alleged involvement in the deaths of the four boys who were killed by Albert Palmer and the two boys who are still missing.
Once an accusation is made that a detective on the special investigations team isn’t fully human, there will be a public outcry and demands for every police officer to take a DNA test to prove he or she is human.
It won’t matter if everything Bonnie says is a lie, because it will be what enough people want to believe, and that will end my career as a cop.
Captain Forrester’s team is already being criticized.
He doesn’t need my problems on top of that. ”
And his daily worry about his son.
“What humans often forget is this: if you try to change or damage someone’s fate, you also change or damage your own,” Justine said.
Beth sighed. “At least I’ll be prepared when it happens.”
“Come with me,” Lucas said.
It wasn’t a suggestion or a request. Beth went with him and didn’t try to break the silence as they strolled around the ornamental lake until she noticed the empty pedestal. “The statues are missing.”
“Not missing,” Lucas replied. “They’re off duty—and probably hunting.”
She heard a dark edge of approval in his voice.