Chapter Ten #2
While baby brother went through the dark to study the electric and the bell, Walter left the house, presumably to talk to Villetti, though I peeked out the window blinds to be sure.
It wasn’t that I distrusted Walter. Never.
But his brand had started glowing for no reason I understood, and I would never trust the man who had enslaved him, had branded him.
Never trust anyone who would buy and sell humans.
Who would use others to get what they wanted: not in politics, not in religion, not in power, and in my own past, especially not in love.
I went over the walls again, this time with my null cloak and staff laid out on the dining room table out of the way.
The scent of my brother’s gym clothes and Villetti wafted with every move.
I wrapped my power around me and watched for faint glows of magic.
There was nothing on the dining room wall or fireplace.
Nothing near the stove. If there was a magic working inside the walls, or even null wallboard, it was the good stuff. I couldn’t detect it.
“We can use the lights,” EJ said from the darkness. “I deactivated the working on the electrical box.” He flipped on the kitchen light and the one in the family room.
I trailed him to the living room. EJ dropped to his knees and put one ear almost on the broken bell, listening.
Then he called in the big guns—Dad, also an air witch.
We were getting deeper and deeper. One part of me was grateful for the help.
The other part went still and cold, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The conversation between Dad and EJ was all about vibrations and the energy captured in musical workings, the math involved with bell tones. Things over my head. Several minutes later, EJ said, “Okay. Got it, Dad. Hang on. Angie, what colors do you see in the broken crystal?”
“Blues heading toward green in the bell. The clapper is more yellow-green.”
From a pocket he pulled one flute, hesitated, and put it back. He pulled a different flute, this one made of wood.
Alex broke into the conversation. “Angie, it looks as if the access to the safe room opens on the passway between the kitchen and dining room, in the space between the chimney and fireplace. There is a two-foot-wide section of wainscoting in the pass-through.”
I returned to the pass-through. “I see it,” I said, running my fingers over the area again, searching for a crack, a lever, anything.
“Dad thinks it will open to a single note,” EJ said, “probably a C, possibly high-pitched, though he suggests we start with middle C. Let’s try it.”
I grabbed my cloak again and pulled it tight over Villetti’s coat, the null energies like a heavy weight on my soul. I took my staff in hand, in the event that a demon bomb was waiting on the other side of a false wall. “Stand behind my cloak,” I said to EJ.
I braced myself in front of the wainscoting, my injured thumb above the trigger of the staff. The white, frostbitten skin of my left hand glowed oddly in the energies from the staff’s capstone. Another thing to deal with later.
EJ stepped a little behind me, and though I didn’t look to confirm it I felt his frustration at being behind instead of in front. “Suck it up, little brother.”
“Reading my mind?”
“You always did run toward danger. Kinda funny when you were in diapers, toddling down the hall toward a marauding vampire.”
“We were never attacked by a marauding vampire. And you are clearly one to talk about running into danger.”
“Blow the note, baby brother.”
EJ blew the note. Nothing happened.
“That was anticlimactic,” I said.
Over the speaker on EJ’s unicom, I heard our father’s voice say, “High C. Hard and quick, like a bell clapper.”
EJ switched out flutes for a steel one and blew hard. There was a click. A panel in the wall opened.
Light spilled out. Two sets of eyes peered up at me from where they sat on the floor. Two mouths opened in shock. Beside them were children’s books from the Beatriz series, The Super Witch. It was open to a page where the witch was wearing a red cloak and carried a staff.
Oh no…
“See?” one kid said, the tone awed. “I told you the witch would save us.”
I swung the null cloak off my shoulders and over the dining room table again. But it was far too late.
The house was swarming with police, CSI, PsyLED, and PsyCSI.
And two parents sat with two children on the sofa in the family room, the children telling the nice policeman and their grieving, yet joyous parents how Gramma had put them in the closet and told them a witch would come to save them from the bad men.
Holding the folded piece of paper I had ripped off the wall in the safe room, I stood in the corner, out of the kids’ line of sight, as they chattered about fictional witches. EJ stood across from me. Both of us watched Walter.
Our bodyguard didn’t express tenderness. His own youth had been a small piece of hell. But as he watched the two pampered, sheltered children, his face softened. I caught a glimmer of wistfulness, as if he was thinking about being allowed to grow up safe. Protected. Innocent.
Walter touched his cheek, his fingertips brushing over the brand. It was glowing again, brighter now. His brows drew down as he stroked the rough, puckered, raised flesh.
Spinning away from the family room, Walter dropped his hand. Headed out of the house.
“Walter,” Villetti said from the kitchen. “Can we talk?”
I looked toward EJ. Our gazes met.
He nodded. Looked at my hand, hiding the paper. His head tilted in a question. His mouth turned down in an I’m interested expression.
Walter dragged in a breath, fighting for calm. Our usually staid vampire bodyguard was close to vamping out, and Villetti had a way of pushing anyone’s buttons.
“Walter?” Villetti asked.
Walter dropped his hand and breathed out the breath he didn’t need. Walked to the detective. “Can we talk? I am capable of both speech and listening. You seem to have the same abilities. We speak a few of the same languages.”
“I never took you for a smart-ass.”
Walter chuckled, the sound surprising, considering the tautness of his stance, and entered the kitchen.
EJ and I slipped closer, standing in the shadows.
Listening. I glanced at my brother. His nickname growing up was Little Big Ears, because he had managed to hear everything.
He hummed a faint tone, opening an obfuscation working over us.
We weren’t invisible, but we were as close to invisible as a witch could make us.
I passed the paper to him. He tucked it in his pocket for later.
Villetti stood in the corner near the stove-oven combination, slouching against the cabinets. His trench coat was off, draped across the back of a stool, and he’d pulled his tie loose, his cuffs rolled up. Casual. Unthreatening.
Hopping onto the island, Walter sat, facing the detective, his feet dangling.
I could see his face reflected in a large copper kettle.
He looked like a kid. It was a pose the detective wouldn’t expect.
Actors, both of them. But it was the small things that could tilt the balance of a conversation.
Mildly, Walter said, “I am available to be interrogated. I’ll warn you though, I have been through torture. I am very difficult to coerce.”
Villetti’s face closed down. “I do not torture.”
Walter shrugged and smiled. “Not now, perhaps. You were a member of special operations in the war. You successfully interrogated forty-six prisoners, obtaining information crucial to the war effort. Twelve of them were possessed, and yet they spoke to you. How did you, a human, do that without torture?”
I had no idea how Walter knew that. I had no idea how to process that information about my once-upon-a-time boyfriend.
Villetti stood straight. Far too quietly he said, “That is classified.”
Walter brushed aside the comment with a wave of one hand.
“You chose to move out of a high-profile position with the military and instead of going to work with the FBI, CIA, or any of a dozen federal alphabet soup law enforcement organizations, you chose Georgia Bureau of Investigations. There you made a name for yourself.”
Villetti’s expression didn’t alter but Walter smiled slowly. Villetti had given something away.
“Even I can’t access those records.”
“You hate what you did in the war, don’t you,” Walter mused, sniffing, deliberately taking in the man’s scent with each breath, telling Villetti how much he was giving away.
Walter was toying with Villetti like a cat with a mouse.
“Foolish human,” Walter said, goading. “Thinking to interrogate me, to frighten me, or worse, to cajole me into sharing confessions.”
Villetti’s eyes narrowed, his mouth tight. Something broken inside him was trying to get free.
“So,” Walter continued. “After the war, you opened a cold, hard place inside of your soul, where you crushed all those memories, all those things you did to keep yourself safe, to keep others safe. And you thought they would stay there, all the vile, screeching memories of war, only to realize that they couldn’t be contained. ”
Villetti snarled. Literally snarled. If he’d been a vamp he’d have attacked Walter in blood challenge. My heart was pounding. Walter surely knew we were standing in the shadows. Had to. Vamps could hear heartbeats.
“The memories of the horrors of war had taken root, sprouted, and spread through you, right, boy?” Walter said. “Filling you, until you would never again feel wonderment. Joy.”
Villetti’s body shifted, standing with his weight on his back foot, his fists balled. Ready for personal battle.