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“Good. That’s taken care of.” Oliver whisked the pie that had been tempting me from the table and found a fork to dig in. A silent conversation passed between Adam and Oliver. “What?” Oliver asked in response to the unspoken challenge. “I have a fast metabolism. A taste of pie won’t hurt.”
“I was actually wondering how you could stand there eating after learning the demon who seduced one of your nieces and attempted to murder the other has returned and has been practicing some form of vivisection on an innocent woman.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions, Detective.” Oliver took another defiant bite then pointed at Adam with his fork. “How can you be so sure the two things are connected?”
Adam slid back in his seat and put his forearm on the table. “Well, you and Iris agree magic has likely played a role in the preservation of the body parts we have found, and that this same magic is preventing Iris from doing her touchy-knowy thing.” Until about six months ago, I had believed psychometry, the ability to touch a person or object and know their history, to be Iris’s greatest power. Of course, six months ago I didn’t know she was hiding her abilities in order to protect her husband’s fragile ego. The woman, she could also fly, let the wind lift her to the skies. How she could have lived without that for so long astounded me. I had always assumed that Ellen was the most powerful of my mother’s siblings. Lately, I had begun to question that and wonder what other tricks Iris might have up her sleeve.
Still, that Iris had been unable to pick up any impressions from the body parts was news to me. “Nothing?” I asked her.
“Nothing. It’s like the hand and foot I touched were blank. Like they had been wiped clean of any possible impression.”
Adam raised his eyebrows and angled his eyes at Oliver to deliver an “I told you so” look. Still focused on my uncle, Adam nodded toward Connor’s pendulum. “We know that thing is magic. And we know your crazy evil sister, Emily—” He turned to me. “No offense.”
“None taken.” Our feelings regarding Emily Rose Taylor were much the same, even if my cocktail of emotions was a bit more emotionally complex than his. Emily and Josef had kidnapped Adam, beaten him to a bloody pulp, and then left him to fall to his death from the lighthouse at Hunting Beach. And they had done all this merely to get my attention.
“We know she is still out there,” he continued, “and without a doubt still hell-bent on destruction. So, yeah, my Magic Eight Ball’s sources point to yes. Your demon is connected to this murder.” His hand shot out and clutched the pendulum, letting the fob fall to the end of its chain and swing. He looked at Iris. “Connor used this thing to answer questions and find things, right? Show me how it works.”
“Sorry, but I could never bear to touch the thing, so it’s going to have to be either Mercy or Oli.” Iris’s chair scraped the floor as she pushed back from the table. “But for the record, I think the demon showing up with Connor’s pendulum is either a play for attention if he is, as I suspect, working on his own, or a trap if he does indeed have accomplices.” She crossed the room to our kitchen’s extraordinarily orderly junk drawer and riffled through its contents. “The minor demons, they love to brag, to make themselves seem much more formidable than they are. Most likely Wren collected the pendulum the night Ginny’s house burned.”
“He sure didn’t seem very minor when he was holding a knife to my heart,” I said. “Besides, Wren escaped the line. If he hasn’t found access to some major mojo, he must have some connections with power. He said he had friends.” Even as I made the point, I wanted more than anything for her to offer me an acceptable alternative as an explanation.
“Did he escape by his own means or with the help of these alleged allies? Maybe he did, but maybe the line simply shifted him unharmed, as it did with Maisie, and maybe when you brought Maisie back to us—”
“You got two for one,” Oliver finished Iris’s thought for her. “Little bastard has probably been hanging out, licking his wounds until he was strong enough to try to get a rise out of you.”
Iris pulled a paper rectangle from the drawer. As she began to unfold it, I recognized it as a more-than-decade-old tourist map of Savannah and its environs. I had spent many childhood hours poring over it as I plotted the best routes for my then-nascent Liar’s Tour, on which I trotted inebriated tourists around Savannah and made up the most lurid lies I could come up with on the spot about the landmarks we encountered. No harm done, as the fun lay in the fact that everybody knew I was lying. Still, a few of my fibs had over time worked their way into the fabric of Savannah’s folklore.
Iris lost patience with the folds and shook the chart angrily open to its full size. “I know what you’re hoping for, Adam,” she said as she covered the tabletop with the map. “That Connor’s tiny bauble will magically point to the location where our still-living, if much diminished, victim is to be found.” She leaned toward him and patted his back. “I don’t have the gift of prognostication, but I am fairly certain what you are hoping for will not be our actual outcome.”
“We have to try.”
“Of course we do,” she said. “Still, I feel the need to remind you of two things before we do.”
“I’m listening.” Adam let the pendulum slide from his fingers and fall to the map.
“My first point is that the pendulum itself is not magic. It was never the source of Connor’s tracking abilities. It was a focus for Connor?
?s powers. In our hands, it will probably be nothing more than a brass sinker on a chain.”
Adam nodded. “Understood.”
“The second thing I want you to consider is that if this is a trap, the damned thing might well carry a curse. Mercy, how many pieces of jewelry have you been given in the past year?”
I knew where she was going with this. “Three.”
“How many of those had been enchanted with harmful magic?”
I looked down at my wedding ring. “Only two, I hope.”
Iris’s eyes glimmered at my little joke. “That one, my dear, is blessed with good magic.” Then the moment was over. Her smile faded and her warm gaze turned stern. Iris was back to being all business. She looked at Adam. “So whose well-being should we risk? Oliver’s or Mercy’s?”
Oliver rolled his eyes. “Really, enough drama. I’ll yank the chain, and if anything happens, you two will shoot the winged monkeys.” He reached for the pendulum only to have Adam slap his hand away with a loud thwack. “Ouch. Damn. What’s wrong with you?”
“I believe Adam has decided the risk doesn’t merit the anticipated return,” Iris said.
Anyone else might have crumbled, but Adam had a stubborn streak almost as wide as my own. He grasped the chain and held the pendulum over the map. To our common surprise, it began swinging counterclockwise in a small precise circle.
“Drop it, buster,” Oliver commanded. I knew he would have compelled Adam to obey if he still had that ace up his sleeve, but Oliver had surrendered the option of compelling Adam years ago. Adam had been none too pleased learning Oliver had compelled him to disregard the apprehension a non-witch usually suffered when encountering true magic. To placate Adam, Oliver performed a mini self-binding to prevent himself from being able to influence Adam with magic again. At least Oliver claimed this was the reason behind his action. I believed the truth was that he wanted to be certain that if and when he won Adam’s heart, he would know he hadn’t unconsciously compelled Adam to return his feelings.
