Page 29 of The Diamond in the Rough

“Fucking hell,” Hart muttered.

Raj let out a low rumble.

“The Ordo were involved with—” He broke off, his eyes back on me.

“Yes,” Ward answered, although I wasn’t entirely certain what the question had been asking. “The Ordo were involved in Tranquil Brook.”

Oh. I swallowed. I suppose I should have thought of it myself, given the fact that the necklace had been used to drain magic—and that’s what the Ordo had been trying to do to us at Tranquil Brook.

“Fucking fucksticks,” Hart muttered, running a hand over his braid. “So we’re back to this shit? Draining people of magic and leaving them for dead?”

I shuddered. “That’s what the killer wanted to do,” I confirmed, and everyone else fell silent watching me. It was strange to have all their attention focused on me. “But that was something he was keeping from Dagget.” I looked up. “But if Dagget was still Ordo, why would he have to do that?”

“We don’t actually know thatthisDagget is the same person,” Raj said coolly. “Or even bears any relation to the one from the Ordo. The name Garraway doesn’t appear on any of the associated lists, so perhaps the name Dagget is a coincidence.”

Ward snorted. “Coincidence, my ass,” he muttered.

I couldn’t help but agree—if it had just been the mention of a name, I might have believed it, but not in combination with magic siphoning.

“There’s more than one organization that drains magic,” Raj replied, his voice grim and tight. “And I’m sure that particular practice wasn’t exclusive to the two we know about, either.”

“Gee, Tony, thanks for that little fucking ray of sunshine,” Hart snarked.

Raj rolled his eyes. “I am trying to be realistic,” he replied dryly. “And also to raise all possibilities so that we don’t make assumptions that lead us in the wrong direction.”

“Seriously, though, Tony. You really think this is a different fucking Dagget?”

Raj sighed. “I think it’s more likely that this is a brother or son or nephew than that we’re dealing with an imprisoned warlock,” he replied coolly.

I could tell from their expressions that Ward, Mason, and Hart were less confident in that than Raj was.

“Why?” I asked. Everyone turned to look at me, and Raj raised both dark eyebrows.

“Why do I think that’s more likely?”

I nodded, and found myself holding his gaze, wanting to find something in his expression that would… I don’t know. Reassure me? Convince me that he was telling the truth? I hadn’t really studied his face before. Not that I didn’t know what he looked like, obviously, but I hadn’t reallylookedat him.

He had an oval face that looked sharper because of the stubble beneath his cheekbones and the carefully trimmed goatee around his mouth. Thick, dark brows arched in the center and winged out a little on the sides, giving him a slightly severe, if quizzical, neutral expression. His nose was long and narrow, cheekbones wide, but not particularlysharp. All of this was topped by thick, wavy black hair that framed the rest of his face.

When he didn’t answer, I forced myself to look away, both self-conscious at the fact that I’d stared at him for so long and worried that he might think I was questioning or challenging him.

Raj cleared his throat. “Well, let’s just say that I know what is being done to make sure Roderick Dagget is unable to practice any sort of malicious magic.”

“You’recertain?” Mason was the one who asked the question.

“Let’s call it… ninety percent,” came the reply. “I don’t like absolute certainty.” But I noticed that Raj didn’t flinch as he met Mason’s gaze. It wasn’t something most people could do.

Mason grunted a little with a nod, seeming to accept this.

“So what if it is his nephew or some shit,” Ward put in, his voice still clearly agitated. “How does that mean anything different? We know the Ordo is a fucked up family tradition for these people.”

“That’s one way to put it, sonny,”came the contribution of the other of the company’s resident ghosts—Archie Lagarde. I saw Hart twitch slightly. I knew he wasn’t terribly fond of ghosts, period, and that Archie in particular also often irritated him.“The other way to put it is that being a shithead is inherited.”

Raj huffed, and I realized that the sound meant he was amused—he just didn’t want other people to know. Or maybe he just didn’t want Archie to know.

The only thing I didn’t like about Archie was that he liked to pester me about learning necromancy—as a death witch, I had the capacity to learn, if I wanted to, at leastaccording to him. I very much did not, but Archie wanted to teach me, I guess. I’d heard enough of his conversations with Ward to know that he’d been pestering the warlock to let him teach Jackson, too, but Ward had given that one a hard no until Jackson was a legal adult and able to decide for himself what he wanted to do.

I was already a legal adult, and while I knew that Ward—and Mason—didn’t approve of necromancy, no one was going to forbid me from learning it, if that’s what I wanted to do. It wasn’t. Not that I knew all that much about it, but the idea of reanimating corpses really didn’t appeal to me. At all.