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He smiled widely at the two of us. “Yes, a pleasure as always, Mother.” He took his time making an exit, stopping once to examine one of the few remaining headstones.
“They say this cemetery full, but I’d gladly help free up a spot fo’ that one,” Jilo said, her expression as sunny as ever I’d seen it. Something about imagining the death of those who annoyed her brought out her best qualities.
“Why are you doing any kind of business for him anyway?”
“Like I done say, his money good even if he worthless hisself.”
“But what,” I emphasized the word, “are you doing for him?”
“Don’t you pay that no nevermind. Ain’t nothin’ to do with you.”
I kept my eyes glued on Tucker as he meandered out of the cemetery. “I don’t like it. I don’t like that you’re doing spells for him. I don’t like that Peter’s doing business with him. Don’t pretend you didn’t already know that,” I said, pointing at her.
“Jilo ain’t pretending nothing,” she said, “so you better get that there finger out of her face.”
“I’d hoped to have seen the last of him when Ellen cut him out of her life.”
Jilo looked at me, her expression inscrutable. “So you think Ellen has kicked him out of her bed?”
“Yes, she’s done with him,” I replied.
“Well they is done, and then they is done,” Jilo said. “And you can take what you like and don’t like and put it in yo’ hope chest, ’cause Jilo, she don’t care. She do business with who the hell ever she like.” Right on cue, Tucker circled by in his convertible, honking his horn and waving. Ellen sat by his side. She raised a hand too, but her greeting was halfhearted at best. She lowered her head and turned toward Tucker, probably reading him the riot act. She hadn’t wanted me to know she was spending time with him. Jilo let out one more cackle. “Now ain’t you sorry you made Jilo promise not to kill anyone?”
SEVEN
“Ellen is out with Tucker,” I said, suddenly feeling as if I were tattling on her. I stood in the doorway of our library, remembering a moment from childhood when I had complained to Iris about my sister.
“Yes, I know,” Iris said, looking up from the mahogany writing table where my grandfather’s old journals and files were spread out before her. She no longer wore her long blonde hair in a chignon as she had while her husband, Connor, was alive. Now it hung loose, falling just below her shoulders. She wore very little makeup, which she didn’t need, and had on black yoga pants and a pink hoodie—my pink hoodie, I realized. “I had hoped that she would make a clean break with him,” she said, “but there’s not much I can do about it. God knows I don’t have much room to criticize her taste in men.” Iris had been putting her best foot forward, but she still mourned her husband, or at least the Connor she had thought she knew. There hadn’t been enough time for either of us to process the fact that he’d plotted to kill me. I wasn’t sure there was enough time in creation for me to process it. Iris mourned a double death: Connor’s physical demise and the loss of the false image of him she’d held. Still, unlike Ellen, who clung to her married name, “Weber,” Iris had wasted no time dropping “Flynn” and returning to her maiden name.
I went to her and wrapped my arm around her shoulder. “What are you doing?”
She sighed. “I’m digging through your granddad’s notes, trying to see what he can tell us about the situation at Old Candler.” My first experience with having the power of a true witch, when I had been allowed to borrow Uncle Oliver’s magic, had led me to the old hospital. That was when I had become aware of the spirits that were trapped there by my grandfather’s spell. I guess Granddad counted them as collateral damage in his war to protect the children of Savannah.
After the old hospital closed, children began disappearing in the night. My grandfather tracked the source of these disappearances down to Old Candler, and after weaving a protective barrier around the building, sort of a miniaturized model of the line itself, he’d walked away, not realizing that he had built a pressure cooker with no safety valve. Jilo had alerted me to the need to open a tiny hole in the spell, as too much pressure had built up inside the place. She had intended to tap into it, channeling the energy that escaped to replace her then-waning power.
Jilo had agreed to abandon this plan after I gave her enough of my own power to keep her going for another decade or so. If the old hospital had remained as empty and unused as it had been for decades, my family and I would have had plenty of time to work out the logistics of how to free the human spirits trapped there without letting loose whatever dark forces had been responsible for taking the children. The building’s sudden and expedited transformation into a law school was forcing our hand and making us act more quickly than we would have liked.
“Found anything?”
“As a matter of fact I have, but I keep misplacing things just as quickly as I find them. I swear, either these papers have a mind of their own, or I am going soft in the head.” Iris glanced down at a stack of files; her head tilted to the side and she pursed her lips. She appeared surprised by what she saw there, but then casually moved the files off to the side and began riffling thoughtfully through the other papers neatly displayed on the desk’s surface. A foreign word—Lebensborn—had been written on the top file of the stack she’d pushed aside. I didn’t speak a word of German, but I recognized it. Lebensborn was the Nazi breeding program that had aimed to increase the birthrate of their favorite flavor of Aryan. When they hadn’t been able to breed blue-eyed babies quickly enough to feed the Nazi machine, they’d started kidnapping them from neighboring countries.
I reached for the file. “Why would Granddad have a file on Lebensborn?”
“He had a taste for what he considered the oddities of history. You might enjoy looking through his papers when you have time.” She took the file from my hand and put it back where it had been on the stack. “Just please keep them in order if you do.”
“Did he ever mention Mama in his writings?” I watched her closely for a reaction, but rather than betraying any kind of shock, her face relaxed upon hearing my question.
“Of course he did. He mentions all of us, but his journals aren’t like personal diaries. They’re filled with history, ponderings, and his theories about magical processes. All the same, his personal life crept into his writings from time to time. Is there something in particular you were wondering about?”
“No. Just curious.”
She looked at me, and her lips pinched together, causing lines to form around them. If she knew my mother was alive, her face did not betray her. I saw only a well-worn sorrow there. “Here,” she said, handing me a journal bound in marbleized paper. “This is where he wrote about what he found at Old Candler.”
My eyes scanned down the page, taking in bits and pieces of the meticulous script that covered it. “Jilo was wrong in one sense,” Iris said. “She assumed that a collection of minor demons, perhaps even common boo hags, were behind the unpleasantness.” Iris seemed to remember my own unpleasant encounter with a “common” boo hag as soon as the words slipped off her tongue, but it was too late to swallow them. She took the tack of moving on quickly. “But it wasn’t. It was one single entity. A demon called Barron.”
“So this Barron is what Granddad trapped at Candler?”
