Elemental Storm (The Eldritch Files Book 6)

by Phaedra Weldon

I excused myself, not that anyone was paying attention, and walked back into the house and into one of Arden's studies. After shutting the door, I looked up Kevin Berry's in Savannah, Georgia and got the phone number.

  Two rings. "Kevin Berry's."

  "Hey, is Dags McConnell working tonight?"

  "Ah…yeah he is. Hold on." The guy covered the receiver for a second. "You need to leave a message?"

  "Actually, I'm trying to track him down. My name's Samantha Hawthorne, and I need to get hold of him." I wanted Dags's phone number, but I figured I needed to make up some line to feed this guy so he'd give it to me.

  I was wrong.

  "Sam?" The guy laughed. "It's me, Mike."

  My jaw dropped. "Mike Ross?"

  "The same. How you doing?"

  Mike Ross was the client who hired me to help find his daughter in Savannah, Georgia over a year ago. In fact, that job had started me down my present road. I'd met up with Grey while battling Chimera, then driven on to Savannah to meet Mike, and then later, Dags. I learned Brendi, the daughter, had been taken by Medbh, the previous Faerie Queen, and the same queen who turned my mother into a Hunt animal.

  Symmetry.

  Dags was a different sort of entity, and something my dex didn't know what to do with. For one, he was what was referred to as a Goblin, a half human, half Faerie. But he was also something else.

  A living Grimoire.

  The Grand Grimoire.

  "Mike, I hate that I don't have time to catch up, but I really need to talk to Dags. I need something out of the book."

  "Sure. Got a pen?"

  I grabbed pen and paper off the desk and jotted down the number. Mike hung up and I dialed the number, now getting a little nervous since I hadn't spoken directly to him since the incident with the Djinn and that other stuff.

  "Yello."

  That sounded like him. "Dags? It's Sam."

  "Sam! Uh oh…what's wrong?"

  I'd forgotten how young he sounded, even though he and I were the same age. I think it was because I'd gotten so used to Crwys's deep voice.

  I gave him the short version and he listened quietly. When I was done he was still quiet. "Dags?"

  "I'm thinking about what to look up. Okay…hold on?"

  I did, and I paced the room, knowing what he'd have to do. Since the book was part of him, he'd have to bring it out where it would float in front of him, and he'd go through it.

  This could take a while.

  "Oh, there you are," Arden said as she opened the door to the office, just as Dags said, "I got it. Ready?"

  I put a finger to my lips for Arden and sat back down at the desk with a fresh piece of paper. I wrote down everything in the spell and then double-checked.

  "Thank you."

  "Hey, you need help? Weather says New Orleans is under a storm watch. It's kind of weird looking on the news. Just this gray mass over the city."

  "It's something I have to take care of tonight. But thank you."

  "You call us if you needs us, Sam. Always."

  I said good-bye just as Arden came and looked at the list. "This is the spell? The one that's only in one of two books?"

  "Yes."

  Arden had that thinking look on. 'So…you know who has this Grand Grimoire."

  "Not getting into that right now."

  She looked dubious as she looked over the list of things needed. "I'm pretty sure I have everything but that." She pointed at something I'd scribbled in the middle of the list.

  I looked at it again. "My measure." Then I looked at her. "Mom and I were just talking about my measure yesterday."

  Arden and I left the office and headed back to the pool. Mom stood up as I approached her chair. "You said me and Monica had our measures taken."

  Her face lit up. "Yes…you did. Why?"

  I showed her the list. When she bit her lower lip I felt my heart skip. "What?"

  "Ina and I took your measures, sweetheart, but it wasn't long after that when Dionysus showed up and Medbh took me." She looked at me with sad eyes. "I don't know where it is."

  TWENTY TWO

  Crwys sat in front of the tablet propped on the desk. He'd been scrolling through the news articles on the explosion at Nadeen Lefebvre's house for most of the day. A flat-screen mounted to the wall of Cosgrove's office sat parked on CNN, so the news cycle had already looped half a dozen times.

  His fiancée was believed dead by the local Witch Elders, and Cosgrove had tried convincing him it was her Arcane that finally took her down, just as it had all the Witches before her who dared believe they could control that kind of evil.

  He already knew Sam wasn't dead, because he would have felt it. She was alive and thriving. When he'd first followed Cosgrove to the Cleric Office, he'd been ready to believe anything the man said. His head had been fuzzy, ripe with the symptoms of Sleep. He figured it would be easier to believe the bad stuff about her, easier to accept Sleep without her there when he woke up because she was a bad person. But after spending time in the Cleric Office, those thoughts seemed alien to him. Ridiculous. But his cop's instinct warned him not to argue with Cosgrove or his assistant, Ethel Delacroix, when they told him about Sam being the one who killed Mambo Nadeen. Crwys had already talked to Arden and Emily about the incident with the boys in the house. The ritual and seeing her Sylph cut his ties to Sam. Sam didn't have anything to do with that; he knew his heart's love well enough to realize she'd suffered for that.

  Crwys also knew the timelines didn't match. Nadeen's time of death was hours earlier than the incident with the Sylph. At the time Nadeen was killed, Sam was with him, complaining about having to do Cleric work and getting out of bed so early.

  Sam was not responsible for any of this. It all had to be linked to that ring, the one stolen from the safe. And the missing knife from Nadine's altar, the ones the boys were using, and the one the Sylph used.

  On a hunch, he picked up the tablet and set it in his lap. This way, if he were under surveillance, which he always assumed he was, the angle would make it difficult for anyone to see what he was typing. He entered several dates and terms into the search field.

  It took a bit of digging, but he finally found an online article celebrating Mambo Nadeen's fifty-year anniversary as being one of New Orleans's top attractions. There had been a celebration in the Quarter that day. Crwys remembered it since it was one of his and Levi's first assignments when they came to New Orleans.

  He swiped past pictures of the parade and clicked on a link that said "Mambo Nadeen's Open House."

  There he found pictures of the house as he'd hoped he would, and the scandalous picture taken of her altar. There had been a lot of nasty threats flying about it in connection with that paper. Mambos didn't like having their altars viewed by strangers, much less having pictures of them taken and then published online for the world to see.

  It was a candid shot, something probably taken with a small camera. Nadeen was to the side, in conversation with someone not in the shot. The target of the picture was the altar and that's what he concentrated on.

  Everything was pretty much the same as the pictures he'd given Kyle. He scrutinized every object until he got to a cauldron in front where he spotted something placed in front of it. He zoomed in as far in as he could get. The image was pixelated, but he was pretty sure he was looking at the knife described by Arden, Dharma, Emily, and Sam.

  The knife that wasn't on Nadeen's altar when they discovered her body.

  Since he hadn't seen the knife used by the three boys, Crwys couldn't say that was the exact blade. That was something the Cleric team was going to have to do. The police report said the altar had wolf fur and long dark hair on it. As he stared at the altar, he semi put together the spell Nadeen had been in the middle of when the picture was taken. Why hadn't he been able to do that with the newer pictures he'd taken of the altar? Why hadn't it even occurred to him to use that power? He wanted to look at those pictures again, but his phone was missing and Cosgrove had in
sisted he didn't know where it was.

  I should have thought of this before. Why was I so…lazy before? I could have proven, or disproven, what Kyle said about the love spell. But I didn't. He looked around at Cosgrove's office, once Dryden's office. Why was Cosgrove so quick to blame Sam for this? Why had they taken such drastic measures to arrest her, Arden, and Ivan? Cosgrove should have kept this as an internal affair of magic and not made it public. The NOPD shouldn't have been involved with this.

  And why the hell was Kyle so adamant that Sam had been sleeping with Bastien behind his back? If anything, Crwys was pretty sure Kyle would normally be loyal to Sam and not go to Cosgrove. And what about Ivan? Had Kyle told Cosgrove about Ivan's true power?

  Everything sharpened for him as he sat there. He'd been in the Cleric Office for nearly thirteen hours. Ever since he followed Cosgrove and Ethel yesterday.

  Wait a minute…

  He sat up straight. I haven't had a genesis the whole time I've been here. And I haven't been exhausted. Driven, yes. Angry—a whole lot. But not one symptom of Sleep.

  Was it possible something else was influencing him? Something that might have to do with this Dybbuk or the oppressive clouds over the city? Could that be?

  He grabbed a pencil from inside the desk and pushed around a tan folder. Taped to the outside was a picture of Sam and stamped across that picture was the word DANGEROUS.

  After clearing the tablet, Crwys glanced at the door while he pulled the folder out and flipped through it. He recognized it as a police file, one of the thousands he'd worked with during his life as a cop. Personal information was fixed to the left side, held in place by a two-hole clip.

  On the right were thick reports of incidents in Sam's life. Starting from when her mom was a detective. He pulled the files up and found a few copies of cases from Elizabeth Hawthorne's history, all of them revolving around an international thief with the code name Dionysus.

  He flipped back again and found notes jotted down pieces of paper, handwritten questions about where Sam's mother was, and what happened to her father and his wife, Pauline. Where was the house in Picayune? And what happened to the Cleric Fred Chadwick?

  What caught Crwys's eye was the handwriting style. Flowing script, almost old style. And very, very familiar. He'd seen handwriting like this before…a very long time ago. He'd seen its delicate curves on documents in the past and even…a marriage license.

  Sitting back, he took a deep breath. Was this possible? Was this person, this creature still alive? Was she here? In New Orleans? He needed to call Levi. Levi was the only one that would understand the choking fear creeping along Crwys's back.

  He took in a deep, soothing breath and recalled his arrival at the Cleric Office. The car, the woman driving it. Ethel Delacroix. She asked for his phone. She told him phones didn't work properly in the Cleric Office because of the wards…

  "The wards, m'sieu," she'd said in that odd accent that wasn't French or Acadian. "They protect the house from everything."

  He placed the file back in the drawer and searched the rest of the desk, coming up with several more folders, one of which had Ethel Delacroix's name written on the tab.

  But when he opened it up, it was empty. Had Cosgrove started this file on her but removed the information in it? Or had there never been information in the first place, because this woman didn't exist?

  Putting the folder back, he grabbed the tablet and logged into a name database used by the NOPD for researching missing persons. Accessing it on the tablet was easy since it was online. He used his badge number and his name to look up Ethel Delacroix and put in approximate age and description.

  As he waited for the database to search he stared at the name. If this was who he suspected it was, there could be something there—

  And then he saw it in the first name. Ethel. Rearrange the letters and it spelled…Lethe. Delacroix meant of the cross, like his own name Crwys, which meant cross.

  If there was one thing Lethe had always been, it was consistent in her wit. She loved to leave clues so obscure that by the time anyone figured them out, it was too late.

  The database came up nothing, just as he expected it to. There were plenty of Ethel Delacroixs in the world, just none that matched this woman's particular description and age. But why leave these folders in a desk, in the open? Unlocked? Cosgrove told Ethel to put him in his office so he could rest. He had to have known that as a cop, Crwys would snoop.

  Unless that's what Cosgrove counted on. Were these files compiled by Cosgrove? Had he tried to research Ethel Delacroix and found nothing? Was this Cosgrove's way of letting me know he didn't trust Ethel?

  Crwys wiped out the browser history to protect the database and pulled the drawer out to look at Sam's file again. Why leave this here? Was there something odd about it? A closer look showed it wasn't an official police file. No stamped agency on the front claiming rights to it. This was a homemade folder, someone gathering intel on Sam over a period of time.

  He doubted Cosgrove put this together. But it might be something Ethel gave him.

  Lethe…what are you up to? I have to believe it's you, and you've been watching Sam. Just know, if you hurt her, I will hunt you down myself, and finally kill you.

  But regardless of whatever silent threats he made, he knew they were all in danger. A crazy Dragon was in the city. And not just any Elemental Dragon, but a Dream Dragon. A Dragon of Spirit, an old enemy come to try and claim again what she always believed was hers.

  Me. But I'm a lot smarter now. I'm not the same lost and confused Drachen I once was. Crwys had the experience of living among humans to know what anyone, or anything was capable of. And right now, putting Lethe in the proper category as serial killer, he knew if he let on that he suspected she was there, it could force her to act faster on whatever she was planning. He had to be a cop, a detective, and investigate from the beginning. Thinking Sam's destruction was the end game was a sure bet. He had to hide his revulsion and suspicion with Ethel until he could confirm a few of his theories.

  But he wasn't going to get that done by staying here. And his Mustang was back in the Quarter.

  The door opened and Cosgrove stepped in. He was dressed casually in a pair khakis and cotton short-sleeved shirt. Better suited to New Orleans temperatures. That is, when there wasn't a storm cloud covering the city. "Good evening, Mr. Holliard. Ethel said you've been in here all day. Did you sleep?"

  "No." Crwys forced a smile through a set of new suspicions about the chief of detectives and his assistant. It was like a veil had been lifted, and he could see things a bit more clearly. He stood and went to the window behind the desk. It looked out over Lake Pontchartrain and the French Quarter on the other side. From here he could see the clouds centered over the Quarter. But not above the Cleric Office. "I've been thinking about everything found in Nadeen's house, the evidence you say links Sam to her death. And I've got a few questions." He turned to face Cosgrove. "If you don't mind me asking."

  Cosgrove held out his arms. "Anything."

  "How old are the wards on this building? And how often are they fortified?"

  "I can say they are strengthened every morning and evening. That's the job of the House Cleric."

  "And who would that be?"

  "For right now, the position's being filled by Gerard Cunningham. He used to belong to the same Cleric team Sam had been assigned to. He is an Air Cleric."

  "Are the House Clerics always Air?"

  "Not always. But given the recent strange weather patterns we've been having, Ethel suggested we use an Air Cleric to add in some protection from the temperatures. And it worked. I'm sure our air-conditioning bill is going to be much lower next month." He shrugged. "As for the age of the wards…I could only guess."

  "Over a hundred years?"

  "Possibly. This church was established as a sanctuary for Witches after the trials in Massachusetts. Our founding Elders set it up."

  So Ethel suggested setting up a kin
d of bubble over the Cleric Office. Interesting. "How long have you known your assistant?"

  "Not very long. May I ask why you're so interested in Miss Delacroix?"

  Careful. Crwys shrugged. "I'm a cop, Mr. Cosgrove. And as a retired cop, I'm sure you've covered all your bases before. Even the ones that lead to obscure and sometimes…odd outcomes."

  It was a subtle inquiry. But Crwys had to let him know, cop to cop, that he was on to Miss Delacroix, even if it wasn't for the exact same reasons. Now it would be up to Cosgrove to work with him, or against him, if he got the message.

  Luckily, he did.

  "Well, I see your stay here has cleared your head, as I hoped it would. I'll see about getting you a ride back to the station."

  The door burst open and Ethel came in. Crwys really looked at her this time, now that his mind was much clearer. This body was just as tall and shapely as all of Lethe's others, though she had dark hair this time and dark eyes, forgoing the blond and blue with hues of mint green she was always so fond of. But the way she walked, the awkward gestures, and the odd accent…he was sure now, the woman blocking the door was Lethe.

  "Oh, Miss Delacroix, so good of you to join us. Detective Holliard is going to step out for a while. I told him he could use my car."

  "Stepping out?" She looked from Cosgrove to Crwys and back to Cosgrove. "Why? There's a storm festering out there. He should remain here."

  "Miss Delacroix, I'm sure Holliard can drive just fine in the rain. Besides, he still has work to do on this case."

  "Can't another officer do the same work?"

  "They've all called in sick, Miss Delacroix." Cosgrove smiled. It was an odd, misplaced expression.

  "I need to find my partner," Crwys spoke up. "I haven't seen him since yesterday, and I'm a bit worried about him. Oh, and there's one more thing"—Crwys made sure everything on the desk was exactly as he found it before he approached the two of them—"is it okay if Ivan Westerfield comes with me? He's just a Dianic, as I'm sure you know, and he was just following Sam, so any guilt when it comes to Nadeen's murder shouldn't concern him. I'm sure Miss Parande is worried sick about him."