“Exactly. So how on earth am I the strange one?”
Chapter Seventeen
Rory was in the freshly opened antiques shop the next morning when the side door swung open and a small head poked around the frame. “Oi, Rory! Phone’s for you.”
“For me?” Rory said, nonplussed. “Not the shop?”
Lizbeth Meyers shrugged, clearly an eight-year-old with bigger concerns. Rory went for the door, but she blocked his path, hands on her hips as accusing brown eyes stared up under heavy brown bangs. “We haven’t played jacks forthree days.”
“You have school, dear,” Mrs. Brodigan said from the register. “But I happen to know that Rory will have some free time this afternoon to play as many games as you like.”
Rory rolled his eyes but had to smile as Lizbeth lit up. “You’re not gonna win nothing,” she said. “I’m gonna take you for a ride.”
“Where’d you learn to talk like that?” Rory demanded as he let her drag him by the hand to the brownstone’s lobby.
“From you.”
Oh. Whoops. “Maybe don’t tell your mom?” Rory said hopefully. Getting cut off from Mrs. Meyers’s cookies would be tragic.
Lizbeth only scoffed. “I didn’t snitch on your big six friend for wearing his pajamas out on the street, did I?” she said, which meant she’d seen Arthur leave the antiques shop yesterday. She leaned in and whispered, “He’s the bee’s knees.”
“Oh yeah?” Rory curled his free hand, the carefully wrapped bandages on his fingers a lingering reminder of Arthur’s soft touch. “You talk to Ace?”
“I asked if I had to keep his jammies a secret. He said it was my choice ’cause women got the vote and no man gets to tell me what to do.”
Rory was grinning as he picked up the phone, expecting the man in question to be on the other end of the line.
But it wasn’t Arthur, it was Jade. “I’m terribly sorry to call you at work,” she said, in that lovely clear voice that made him wonder if she could sing like her sister. “But I was wondering if I could impose on you and borrow your expertise this morning.”
Rory furrowed his brow. “I’m listening.”
Arthur was running late to Chelsea and the small gallery where Zhang had tracked part of Gwen’s art shipment. Every ex-soldier inch of him protested being late, but he couldn’t exactly admit he had to leave a Kenzie family breakfast early because he was chasing the trail of a dangerous paranormal and a relic of unknown but likely deadly magic.
The art gallery was tucked into the base of a brownstone with large, arched windows to the street, paintings lining the white walls and sculptures on pedestals every few feet. The proprietor was a white woman with a tidy red bob, dressed in sleek black from her hat to her shoes. She looked up as Arthur pushed open the door.
“Mr. Kenzie?” At Arthur’s quick nod, she gestured to the back. “They’re in the anteroom.”
They?
There was a curtain hung on the back wall. As he moved it aside, Jade tugged him into the back room, noiselessly replacing the curtain as she put her finger to her lips. An unnecessary suggestion—Arthur had already gone silent. Rory was kneeling on the ground in front of a small painting of a sidewalk cafe, done in the art deco style but not by an artist Arthur recognized. Behind the glasses, Rory’s eyes were closed, and he was running bandaged fingers over the brush strokes, his movements deliberate and precise.
The hairs on the back of Arthur’s neck stood on end. This wasn’t the little lost bunny drunk on the Magnolia’sbrandy. This was Rory scrying with full control.
“You brought him to scry Gwen’s art?” he hissed under his breath at Jade. “Are you mad?”
“He’spsychometric,” she whispered fiercely back. “If he won’t leave town we should offer him a chance to help. He might be able to see something in the trail to give us a lead before Saturday’s gala—”
“Or he might get stuck in the painting’s past—”
“He scries antiques for a living, Ace, have some faith in him—”
“Or try trusting me enough to tell me the truth.”
Arthur’s stomach twisted as he realized Rory had opened his eyes. “You heard us?” In Arthur’s experience, scryers usually went too deep in their visions to hear whispers around them.
“I knew the moment you walked into the shop.” Rory was glaring at Arthur, but worse, there was hurt thickly threaded through the anger. “Were you ever gonna tell me you knew the doll from my vision?”
Arthur winced. “I was hoping to talk you into Hyde Park before you ever had to find out.”
