by Eva Chase
I hefted another box to the side and sneezed at the puff of dust that rose up. Naomi’s laugh carried from my phone I’d left on top of one of the trunks, on speaker mode.
“Sounds like that attic really needs to be cleaned more often.”
“No kidding,” I said. “I don’t think anyone’s been up here since before we moved, and that was almost twelve years ago now.”
“But you think you’ll find something useful up there?”
“If I’m going to rattle my dad and get him to rattle Frankford, I’ll be better off with old projects where they might not remember all the details.” I opened the next box, found it stuffed with suits, and pushed it to the side too. “We know they’ve been skirting the rules in a lot of ways, so chances are they’ve done some shady stuff here and there along the way. I just need to make them think I might have uncovered something incriminating. With the arrests Kyler has been prompting, they’ll already be on their toes.”
“And then you hope Frankford will set up a meeting with the Assembly people who are above board.”
“Exactly. I’ve already found some notes from a real estate deal they worked on together twenty years ago, one that involved negotiating with some unsparked company heads. That would be under the domain of Unsparked Relations. Now I just need a good one to get them worried about International Affairs investigating.” Justin Brimsey and Gwen Remington, the heads of those two divisions, were two of the Assembly officials both Thalia and my aunt Ginny had felt confident were no friends of the Frankfords.
“You know if I hear anything useful on this end, I’ll get in touch ASAP. I wish I could stay down there and really pitch in.” Naomi sighed.
“It’s good just being able to bounce ideas off you,” I said.
My hand stilled on the flap of the box I’d just opened. This one was full of fancy dresses: silk and satin with ornate embroidery in rich jewel tones. My mother’s old dresses. Even as I thought that, a smell I couldn’t attach to any conscious memory but that struck a chord in me all the same wafted from them over me. She must have used to wear that perfume, a mix of peach and amber notes. It closed around my heart.
“Rose?” my cousin said, and I realized she’d started talking again without me even hearing her.
“Sorry,” I said. “I just— I found a box with some of my mother’s stuff. It’s still hard to think about her, with everything I know now.”
“Oh, Spark help me, I can only imagine.” Naomi paused. I ran my hand over the delicate fabric, listening to the soft hiss of its movement. I didn’t quite dare to pull one of those dresses out. I wasn’t here for that, and I was already distracted enough just looking at them.
“Do you think it really was cancer that killed your mom?” Naomi went on in a low voice. “I mean, it does seem strange that she died so soon after she was getting suspicious of your dad.”
I’d wondered that so many times since I’d talked to my aunts and heard their side of my mother’s story. The whirlwind courtship and romance with my father, the way he’d isolated her, the letter she’d sent while she was sick claiming he was trying to steal her power.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Your mom said mine was already sick when she wrote that letter. There’s no way to know what she’d found out. Dad always seemed to really care about her.” But then, I’d thought I’d been able to tell that he cared about me too. “I’m not sure there’s any way to find out at this point. Any evidence of that would be long gone.”
“Yeah. And it’s not like you can expect your dad to tell you the truth about it.”
I forced myself to close the box of Mom’s dresses and moved to another. This one was full of file folders. “Oh, I might have something useful here,” I said. “This looks like work stuff.”
Naomi was silent for a moment as I started flipping through each of the folders. Then she said, “You’re hanging in okay, right? With Gabriel… and everything…? If you want to talk about any of that stuff with someone who’s not one of the guys, you know you’ve got me.”
My mouth twisted with a bittersweet smile. “I know,” I said. “I— Mostly I’m trying not to think about it. It still hurts a lot. And obviously if he was going to come back, he would have by now.” I just had to show him he hadn’t really lost me. That I could tackle the Frankfords without stooping to anywhere near their level.
I’d rather take them on that way anyway.
I hesitated over the folder I’d just opened. “Hey, I think I’ve got something useable here. My father and the Frankfords did some project together in Brazil in the late ‘80s.” Just a year or two before Dad would have met my mother.
“Sounds promising,” Naomi said. “Does that mean you’ve got everything you need?”
“I think so.” I paged farther through the documents. It’d been a big business endeavor, taking six months to complete. One of the first deals they must have worked on together. My father would have been in his early twenties, the Frankfords about ten years older. Taking him under their wing like a sort of apprentice. My hackles rose at the thought.
Had the Hallowells already been tied to the Frankfords and their schemes before that? Or was that when Charles Frankford had roped Dad into this horrible conspiracy? If there were files that went back before Dad’s time, they hadn’t been on that hard drive, so I could only speculate.
I couldn’t put all the guilt on the Frankfords, not when my father had made his own decisions, but that didn’t stop me from gritting my teeth when I pictured them cajoling him into going along with their schemes. Just promise your first-born daughter to tame a few demons. No big deal.
Oh, I was still furious with Dad too, no doubt about that.
I pushed that anger aside with a few deep breaths and jotted down some notes about the project on a piece of paper. I couldn’t let my emotions get in the way. To get the reaction I wanted, I’d need to play Dad just right.
He’d used me, and now I was going to use him in return. It’d be perfect as long as he didn’t realize that was the point of my call. After the way I’d reacted to the Frankfords’ previous attacks, I didn’t think he’d have trouble seeing me as vengeful.
“I’d better let you go now so I can make this call,” I said to Naomi. “Thanks for keeping me company up here.”
“Any time!” she said cheerfully. “And if you need more than that, you know I’m just a few hours’ plane ride away.”
After I’d hung up with her, I took the phone and my notes, and sat with my back against the wooden chest. My pulse had kicked up a notch. I closed my eyes and willed the surge of adrenaline away. Calm and collected, on the inside at least. That was what I needed to be.
My hand still shook a little as I tapped on Dad’s name in my contacts list. My fingers curled against my palm where I was resting my free hand on the floor. I held my breath as the phone rang, and rang, and—
“Rose?” Dad’s voice on the other end was startled. I couldn’t tell if it was a happy surprise or a wary one.
“Hi, Dad,” I said evenly.
He didn’t seem to know what to say after that. “I— It’s good to hear from you. How are you?”
“I’ve been better.” I rustled the paper purposefully. “This isn’t going to be a long call. I just wanted to give you a chance to make amends, since I know everything that’s happened was more Charles Frankford’s idea than yours. I’ve been doing some digging. I think International Affairs and Unsparked Relations would be very interested to hear about a couple of the projects you two worked on together.”
Any warmth that had been in my father’s voice fell away under a nervous edge. “What are you talking about?”
Good. He wouldn’t be nervous unless he knew there were things I could have uncovered.
“Oh, it seems like some of your choices in Brazil way back when were pretty questionable.” I glanced at my notes. “I’m not sure any amount of land or profits in coffee farming will make up for it. And that San Francisco real estate deal in
’98…” I tsked my tongue. “You didn’t even respect unsparked people who had the savvy to do business with you, did you?”
“I don’t think dragging up all that history is going to help you get what you want,” Dad said.
“Well, I don’t think you understand what I really want, so you can’t really make that decision. But here’s the thing. If you come with me to the Assembly and tell them about all the recent crimes the Frankfords and the rest of their faction have gotten up to, then I’ll leave out your part in the business deals. It was Frankford who took the lead on those early ones anyway. I just wanted to give you the chance to do the right thing.”
I hadn’t even for a second expected him to take that offer. The whole point of this ploy was to send him running to Frankford to warn him. But a pinching sensation jabbed through my heart anyway when Dad said, without hesitation, “I can’t do that. There’s too much at stake. You don’t understand, Rose.”
I did. Better than he could probably have imagined, after what I’d heard from Thalia Ainsworth. But he didn’t know I’d even spoken to her.
The witching men didn’t want to give up the power the demons were lending them. Not even when they’d put the whole world at risk by making their deals in the first place, if Dad’s warnings were to be believed. Not even when they were sacrificing the sanity of their wives and daughters to get it.
“Fine,” I said. “If you change your mind, you know how to contact me.”
I’d meant to hang up there, but one thing I still didn’t understand, fresh from my perusal of the attic boxes, stopped me. Before I could stop myself, I was saying, “What really happened to my mother, Dad?”
Dad hesitated a beat longer than was comfortable. “What do you mean? She had an aggressive cancer spread from her liver. We did everything we could, but it moved so quickly…”
“I know that’s the story you’ve always told me,” I said. “I also know that she was writing letters about you, about how she was afraid of you, to her family before she died. I know what tends to happen to people who mess with the Frankfords’ schemes.”
He swallowed audibly. “I don’t want to talk about this with you right now, Rose. But you have to know that I had nothing to do with the sickness or her death. I wouldn’t have made that call.”
Something about his wording made me abruptly sure that even if he hadn’t, someone else had. And he knew that. He knew her death hadn’t been just a random tragedy.
But he’d stayed loyal to those people, more loyal than he was to his own daughter, anyway.
“Sure, Dad,” I said, allowing a sliver of sarcasm to creep into my voice. Then I hung up before I could screw up whatever progress I’d made by letting my tongue fly with my temper.
I sat there for a few minutes longer, my shoulders shivering and stilling, shivering and stilling, until the lingering discomfort of the conversation had faded. Then I headed down into the main body of the house.
At least I’d put that plan into motion. Ky would keep watching the Frankfords, following their movements as well as he could. If they reached out to Charles’s colleagues at the Assembly for any sort of secret meeting, Ky would be watching to catch them.
The front door was just opening as I came down into the second-floor hall. Damon stepped inside. Like my other consorts, he had the code to the gate—a new one after I’d reluctantly changed it after Gabriel’s departure.
He looked around the foyer with his shoulders slightly hunched in a wary stance, as if even after the last few weeks of dropping by regularly, he half expected my father or the staff to show up and chase him off.
I waved to him and hurried down to meet him. “Hey,” I said, stepping into the arms he opened and hugging him back. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“I just heard from my ‘friends’ who went to scope out the Cliff property,” Damon murmured by my ear. “Are we okay to talk?”
None of the staff was around right now, but I was trying to limit how much they saw me being affectionate with the guys. I tugged him into the sitting room and closed the door. “What did you find out?” I asked eagerly.
His grimace dulled my excitement. “There are a ton of guards patrolling the property, plus a squad staked out around the gate. My contact said something along the lines of, ‘They’d have to have the queen’s jewels stashed in there for us to risk that attempt.’”
“Oh.” I tried not to let my disappointment show, but I must have visibly deflated, because Damon caught my hand again.
“We’ll find a way to get those Assembly pricks out there without the Frankfords stopping us,” he said. “You might even manage to convince me not all of the Assembly people are pricks. I’ve got all the details on the patrols for us to go over. The guys from the gang—they wouldn’t have counted on having magic on their side.”
No. There was that. But as he pulled a sheaf of paper out of his pocket to go over those details, my heart had already sunk.
What good did it do us to know how to reach the right Assembly members if we couldn’t show them what we needed to?
Chapter Twenty
Jin
“Well,” I said, toeing a charred chunk of plaster that had fallen from the even more charred gallery ceiling—or what was left of its ceiling. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot else I could say.
Seth’s mouth twisted as he rotated on his feet, taking in the whole space. The foundation of the building was still standing, but that was about it. The fire had gutted the rest, from the roof to the once-gleaming hardwood floor that was now a scorched mess of cinders. It’d eaten away at the white walls and the paintings that’d been hung on them, exposing the brick exterior from the inside out. All that was left of the second floor were some blackened stumps of joists protruding from the edges of the space like jagged fingernails.
The smell of burnt wood and plaster hung heavy in the air. I rubbed my nose. With each breath, the stink coated my throat too.
“Yeah,” Seth said, coming to a stop facing me again. “I don’t think there’s much we can preserve here. We’ll need to strip it completely and rebuild from scratch.”
I nodded. I’d figured as much after seeing the reports, but I’d wanted to get an educated second opinion. Even if hearing that opinion made me feel a little sick.
It was hard not to picture the gallery the way it had been the last time I’d set foot in it—hard not to remember the works I’d been proud of creating or acquiring that were now simply gone. Their absence resonated through me twice as strong as before, standing here where they’d used to be. My whole chest ached with it.
“You lost a lot,” Seth said quietly.
“Things,” I said with a dismissive gesture that wasn’t really honest. “At least no one was hurt.”
I should have known he wouldn’t buy that. We all knew each other too well at this point, and Seth had never been one to shy away from tough conversations.
“I’m pretty sure your art was more than just ‘things’ to you,” he said with a hint of dryness. “You don’t have to pretend it doesn’t matter, Jin. I can’t say I know exactly how you feel, but I know how awful it is, looking at the way those people have destroyed things or nearly managed to and not knowing how to properly fight back.”
A lump rose in my throat. My voice was a little hoarse when I answered. “It sucks. That about sums it up, right? But… we knew we were messing with something dangerous from the moment we got involved with Rose again. We knew there could be trouble. I can’t imagine going back and making some other decision about whether to be with her. I lost a bunch of artwork—I can make more. If we let that faction get away with what they’re doing, they’ll keep ruining who knows how many lives.”
“We’re doing something good,” Seth agreed. “It’d just be easier if we knew we’d all come out of it okay. All of us, including Rose.” He paused. “I don’t want to think what she might have done if they’d actually managed to kill my dad. She was so angry even after what did happen…
”
I hadn’t been there when Rose had tortured her former teacher for answers, but I’d heard enough of the other guys’ talk about it to know it’d been brutal to watch. I loved Rose when she was fierce and filled with power, but it’d pained me a little just seeing the rage tear through her when she’d heard the news before they’d headed out.
“She’s sorting herself out,” I said. And we’d keep bracing ourselves for the next potential attack we couldn’t really predict. So far no other witches had come into town, but that didn’t mean the Frankfords weren’t making new plans. My lips curved into a slanted smile. “I guess if I really want to be safe, I’ll have to have the new studio and gallery built on Rose’s property.”
I meant it as a joke, but Seth’s expression turned thoughtful. “She’d let you, you know. We could clear a spot—even add a new gate and a road in.”
I laughed. “Like that wouldn’t get tongues wagging ten times as fast. No, I think I’ll stick to creating rather than displaying until this is all over.” I’d ended up taking over one of the brighter rooms in the manor for my work, since I’d ended up doing an awful lot of art incorporating Rose’s magical glyphs. The temporary apartment I’d found over one of the shops in town was a good enough sleeping spot for now, for the nights I didn’t spend with her.
Seth gave me a knowing look. “Have people gotten on your case?”
Had they gotten on his? I shrugged. “Nothing major. A few odd looks here and there, but I’m pretty used to those already.” I didn’t want to talk about the one person who’d really spoken up, whose comments had niggled at me. The other guys didn’t need to know that my mom had decided Rose was ruining my life. I’d rather I didn’t know it.
“Well, when you’re ready to start planning, just give me a shout,” Seth said. We headed out onto the street together. “For a project that big, you’ll need to bring an architect on, but I can help you find a good team.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
