I could only barrel onward now. Might as well get straight to the point. “The demons. You and the rest of your group had ways of controlling them and their power. What did you use on them to keep them in line?”
He was silent for a moment, long enough that my skin started to creep. “Why do you askthat?” he said finally.
“Just in case. For the future. Who knows what could happen thanks to the shit you all stirred up.”
I thought that was a reasonable enough answer, but a thread of humor came into Mr. Hallowell’s tone that suggested he didn’t entirely believe me. “I see. For the future. Well, Mr. Scarsi, the best thing I can tell you is thatyoudon’t have a hope in hell of wielding any influence over those fiends. From what I hear, Rose and a full contingent of Assembly enforcers barely managed to contain one. If you don’t want whatever’s got its talons in you to wrench you apart completely, your only real hope is to figure out what they want and give it to them as swiftly as you’re able to.”
My hackles rose even as a punch of hopelessness hit me in the gut. “You have no idea what you’re talking about or what I’m capable of. There’s got to be more to it than that. Just tell me—”
“If I have no idea, then I certainly can’t help you. Good luck, unsparked boy. You’ll need it. And I look forward to learning how badly you fall.”
With a clack, the line went dead.
Chapter Two
Rose
The tang of the lemon polish I was rubbing on the table made my nose itch. I paused to swipe at my face, and Meredith peeked into the dining room. She crossed her arms over her chest and tsked.
“You pay people to do your cleaning for you—and me to boss them around into doing it. What’s got you so worked up that you’re putting us all out of a job?”
I rolled my eyes at her jokingly chiding tone, but I also straightened up with a sigh. “I just need to dosomethingwhile I’m waiting for Evianna to get here. And you know she’s going to look down her nose at anything she can.” My family might have been of higher standing in witching society than hers, but from the moment my stepmother had moved in with her two daughters to Evianna’s moving out of our Portland home seven years ago, the older girl—well, woman now—had made it clear she saw her new circumstances as a trial.
Meredith shrugged. “What of it if she sneers? Ignore her and see her on her way. I’d take ten of you over one of her any day.”
The corners of my lips twitched upward. Our housekeeper had been with us long before my father’s remarriage and long after, the closest person I’d had to an actual mother since my birth mother had died when I was too young to remember, and she wasn’t fazed by much. But her comment didn’t totally settle the jittering of my nerves.
“It’s not just that,” I admitted. “The last few months, the feeling has kept creeping up on me that something isn’t quite right, that I’m missing something… Maybe it’s only baseless anxiety getting the better of me. But the past couple weeks I’ve had trouble tuning it out.”
“Wrap yourself up in those saucy books you love,” Meredith suggested with a sly grin.
I did have an extensive collection of romance novels that had long been my favorite escape, but… “Those don’t quite do the trick anymore.” Maybe because I had so much actual romance in my life now. Although even spending time with my consorts hadn’t erased the inexplicable worries.
“Well, if there is anything wrong, you’ve proven you’re more than up to tackling it. I have every faith in you.” Meredith tilted her head at the chime of the doorbell. “That’ll be Miss Priss now.”
I couldn’t restrain a laugh at the nickname as I followed her to the front door.
Evianna stepped inside all haughty airs and cool expression. I hadn’t seen her in ages, not since before her mother had died, and it struck me all over again how much she took after Celestine. The same pale blond hair, the same icy blue eyes… the same hint of disdain in the curve of her mouth when she rested her gaze on me.
“I don’t want to make this a real visit,” she said in a similarly cool tone, as if I had any illusions about us making friendly. “You found everything?”
I motioned to a case I’d packed that was standing by the wall. “All the documents you were looking for and the smaller items like the jewelry are in there. The footstool you mentioned—I wasn’t sure exactly which one it is. We seem to have a bit of a hoard in the attic. You can come up and take a look.”
Evianna let out a faint huff, but she tramped up to the second floor and then the pull-down steps to the attic without any other remarks. I’d dragged the footstools I’d found over to the area around the top of the stairs for easy access. I had no idea where any of them had come from or what significance the ones that were Hallowell-owned had to the family—as far as I was concerned my stepsister was welcome to any of them.
Watching her examine each of them in turn—it appearedshewasn’t completely sure which had once resided in her bedroom either—dredged up slivers of memories in the back of my mind. The glares and furtive kicks at the dining table. Her chuckling when her mother had found something about me to criticize. Her satisfied smirk when we’d been packed into the car to speed off to Portland, back when my father and her mother had forced me to leave behind the guys who’d been my only real friends.
Eleven years I’d gone without them because of Celestine’s strict ideas about witches and unsparked folk mingling. Not that my father’s attitudes had been much better…
I shook myself out of the uncomfortable reverie. Dwelling on the past didn’t help anyone. But the hollow in my stomach remained, images and emotions stirring in the back of my mind. I meandered deeper into the attic as if I could escape them on foot.
My eyes caught on a shadowed structure I hadn’t noticed when I’d been focused on footstools before. In the far corner of the attic, a rectangular wooden frame with carefully spaced slats and railings carved with flowers stood under a layer of dust.
A crib.Mycrib, I had to assume. I was the only child who’d been born in this house since my father more than fifty years ago.
I squeezed between the boxes, chests, and assorted other abandoned furniture to reach it. It even had the mattress still in it. I ran my finger through the dust, wiping clean the cherry-wood surface. No memories of using it rose up. It’d have been put away before I’d been old enough to remember much. I hadn’t realized it was even still in the house.
“Here. It’s this one,” Evianna announced. When I hustled to rejoin her, she’d nudged a footstool with a purple silk cushion toward the stairs. “I assume you can have someone bring it down?”