Tithes (Ava Delaney

by Claire Farrell

“Almost,” she said. “In less than an hour, we’ll find out where the child was born. Whoever took the child was too late to stop that spell, at least.”

  “I’m going to check in with the kids,” I said. “Just in case any of them heard anything weird.”

  Phoenix nodded. “I’ll take a look around here.”

  I jogged back to the main building, where Noah and Ari were already waiting for me at the side doors.

  “The baby’s gone,” I whispered under my breath. “Did you see anything?”

  “Ari did,” Noah said, nudging her.

  She looked bored, as though she didn’t care, but an excited gleam in her eyes made it past the surliness. “There was smoke. Some kind of distraction spell, I think, but it wasn’t like… normal magic.”

  “How did you see it?”

  “I woke up and felt weird. I’ve been catching bits of magic from the caretaker’s cottage, but this felt different. I went to the window, saw the smoke. So I woke Noah, and he missed the smoke, but he heard the car and went to check it out.”

  “Car?”

  Noah nodded. “A black hatchback lingered at the gates with the engine running, then it was gone. When we saw the witches running around, looking freaked out, I texted you. We knew something was wrong, but we weren’t sure what happened.”

  “Aren’t there guards on patrol?”

  “Not anymore,” Noah said. “Not for a while now.”

  I clenched my fingers into fists. “Of all the… okay, thanks, you two.” I heard footsteps and shoved the kids through the doorway and into the kitchen, where I hid with them.

  Phoenix and Clementine walked by just in time for me to hear Phoenix say, “Ava believes she’s been cursed. Is that something you can help with?”

  “After this is over,” Clementine said. “I promise I’ll—”

  Then they were gone. I looked at the others, about to tell them to go to their rooms.

  Ari took a step toward me. “I did not curse you.”

  “I never said you did. I’m not talking about childish pranks, Ari. This is real. Serious. Now, you two, get back upstairs before anyone realises you were gone. If you notice anything else, let me know.”

  “I can help,” Noah said.

  “Not with the witches around,” I whispered. “I don’t trust them.”

  I left and found Phoenix and Clementine. “Anything?” I asked.

  “No trace of anything,” Phoenix said.

  “Not even magic?” I asked.

  Clementine narrowed her eyes. “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  The three of us walked back toward the cottage. A young witch with vibrant blue and purple hues to her hair came running toward us, a gleeful look in her eyes.

  “We did it! We found the birth place.”

  “You have an address?” Phoenix asked.

  The woman glanced at Clementine, who nodded. She dug into her pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “This is it,” she said. “This is where the child was born.”

  * * *

  Phoenix and I drove alone to the address Clementine had given us.

  “Do we trust this?” I asked, my voice still sharp with anger. I blamed Phoenix and the witches for taking the baby in the first place—and myself for letting them. I could have stopped them or done more, and if it had been anyone other than Phoenix, maybe I would have. I’d been blinded. That couldn’t happen again.

  “We don’t have a choice.” He glanced at me. “What weren’t you saying earlier? Did the children notice something?”

  “Noah and Ari. She said she was woken up by some unusual magic. She saw smoke of some kind, and Noah heard and saw a car waiting outside.”

  “They contacted you first?”

  “Noah overheard me talk about the baby,” I explained. “I asked him to watch out for anything weird. Tonight counted as weird.”

  “It surely did,” he said. “I find it interesting that magic was used here tonight. Perhaps another coven decided the child belonged to them.”

  “A stronger coven, obviously,” I muttered.

  “We don’t need a witch war.” Phoenix turned a corner as sharply as possible in a limo. “We should have stolen a car.”

  “Yeah, that will do the Senate’s reputation so much good.” I frowned. “Did you know there haven’t been any guard patrols at night for ages?”

  “I didn’t.” He shook his head. “Something’s very wrong with all of this.”

  “We should get help.”

  “When we find out what’s at that address,” he said. “We don’t have time to wait. I sent Shay a text, telling him to be ready, but I don’t want anybody else getting in the way tonight.”

  “How should we handle it?”

  “The way we handle everything,” he said with a cold smile. “Everything gets what it deserves.”

  I shivered with anticipation. Whoever had stolen the baby was not in my good books. I didn’t care that darkness lurked in Phoenix’s expression. I was sure I had it, too.

  We travelled past Citywest, away from the businesses, until we ended up on a poorly lit road filled with potholes. Our destination was an old house, more of an estate, on a narrow patch of land. The area was dark and deserted. Conspicuously tall walls kept out prying eyes, but the metal gates were wide open and inviting. Nothing to hide. Or a trap.

  “This is where she was born,” Phoenix said. “But it doesn’t mean it’s where she is now.”

  “Can’t witches do tracking spells or something?” I got out of the car and slammed the door.

  “There’s no need to take your bad mood out on the car,” Phoenix murmured as he followed me.

  I stood outside the gates and looked at the house, reaching out with my other senses. “Doesn’t seem like anyone’s home.”

  “The front door is ajar. Perhaps there was a burglary.”

  I glanced at him. “Is that an excuse for you to go inside?”

  His upper lip curled. “I need no excuses.”

  Side by side, we passed through the gates and strode along a short, well-kept path to the front door. The massive brass knocker had been recently polished.

  “You may wait outside, if you wish,” Phoenix said.

  “Yeah, right.” I pushed open the door and stepped inside, holding my breath, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.

  Inside, the building was slightly more modern than it first appeared, but it still didn’t look like a home. There were no paintings or pictures on the walls, rugs on the floors, or decorations of any kind. The hallway felt soundless, full of shadowy corners.

  Phoenix’s shoes echoed as he took a step toward the looming staircase. Wary, I again reached out with my other senses, but there was only Phoenix. My first impressions were correct. The baby, and whoever had taken her, was gone.

  “They knew we were coming,” I said bitterly. “They must have known. Somebody told them, Phoenix. They had to.”

  “They may have moved on as soon as the child was left on your doorstep,” he said. “I’ll look upstairs. You search these rooms. There may be a sign, some clue left behind.”

  I nodded, pressing my lips together to stop me from losing all control. I headed into the main room—and found nothing comforting there. The building was too large to be a house and too old-fashioned to be a business. I saw no sofas, televisions, computers, or books. But the carpets were well-worn, and the lack of cobwebs made me think the place was regularly used.

  The kitchen held some contents, all basics. There were meat and frozen vegetables in the freezer and a carton of sour milk in the fridge. No luxuries.

  I searched everywhere, confused by the house, until I found a staircase leading down. I hesitated at the top. I never found anything good at the end of surprise stairwells. Carefully, because my feet were bare, I stepped down into the darkness. I felt the walls for a light switch and thankfully found one. I switched it on, and the place flooded with light. I was at the start of a narrow co
rridor with doors on either side. Perhaps the house was old enough to have servants’ quarters.

  I checked each room. They all had four narrow bunks, small shelves, and a tiny wardrobe, but I found no clothes. Some of the rooms were musty, as though they had been closed up for a long time, but others still held traces of scents. People had lived there, and only recently.

  I heard Phoenix calling and went back up the stairs to find him. I startled him in the kitchen. “I need you to take a look at something,” he said. “What do you make of this place?”

  “I’m not sure. There are bunks downstairs, some of them definitely used recently, but the place has been cleaned out almost completely.”

  He opened the freezer. “There’s some food here.”

  “There’s no chocolate or ice cream,” I said. “And the freezer is restaurant sized. A lot of people could stay in this place, but as a place to live, it would be extremely dreary.”

  “Take a look upstairs,” he said. “There’s a room I need your thoughts on.”

  I followed him up the creaking wooden stairs. The bannisters smelled like furniture polish, and the carpet runner looked clean but well-worn. The building should have felt like the perfect example of a haunted house, but it was so empty and lifeless that it felt more like a show building, even if things were well-used. It made no sense.

  A couple of bedrooms were far more luxurious than anything else in the house. Oddly, though, there were no forms of entertainment. Phoenix pointed me toward a plainer room with a large bed in the middle and a sink to the side.

  “Can you smell something?” he asked.

  I sniffed. “Bleach, maybe. Cleaning materials. Wait.” Frowning, I moved closer to the bed. “There is something.” Something metallic and familiar. Not faded. Covered up. “Blood.”

  I ripped the white sheets off the bed. The mattress was stained with a rusty colour. I blew out a shaky breath. It could have been a death bed or a birthing bed. It was too hard to tell. Not that it mattered. Noodle could be anywhere, on her way out of the country even. I was too many steps behind to help her.

  A lump formed in my throat. I had failed her, and I had no clue how to make that right.

  To my surprise, Phoenix wrapped his arms around me and held me tightly. “We’ll find the child, and we’ll find who’s responsible.” He looked down at me. “Finding her is more important, though.”

  I tried to smile. “You aren’t completely hopeless, Phoenix.”

  He leaned down to brush a light kiss against my lips. We would find the baby together.

  “Did you look everywhere?” I asked.

  “I think so,” he said. “I found very little. Either this place wasn’t used frequently, or it was cleared out completely.”

  We went back out into the hall. I glanced at the rooms when I passed the open doors, but something didn’t make sense.

  “I feel like there’s a room missing,” I said. “Compared to downstairs.”

  “One bedroom is noticeably smaller than the rest. Perhaps I missed something.”

  I followed him into the box room. There was no window, but a draft came from the back of the room. There was little in the room to search, but we discovered a false back on the wardrobe, which hid a door.

  “Ready?” Phoenix whispered.

  I nodded and pushed open the door. My breath hitched when it opened into an office. We stepped through, and all of the coldness from the house disappeared. There was life in that room—warmth and sound, too.

  Books had been ripped from the shelves, mostly clearing out the room. Remains of burned books smoked in the embers of a fire. While Phoenix explored the shelves, looking through the little that remained, I searched the desk.

  It appeared to be empty, but lying under the desk was a book that had been missed, opened on a very specific page.

  The ledger mentioned tithes, and amongst lists of bloodlines and names was Helena’s. Even Lorcan and Lucia were mentioned. And across the page, linked by a number of relatives, was another entry on their maternal family tree—the recent birth of an unnamed baby girl. Someone in the family had traded away far too many years of their descendants’ lives.

  Chilled, I shoved the book away from me. The twins’ names were circled as important, just like Helena and the baby’s mother, Lavinia. Phoenix took one look at my face and grabbed the ledger. He read the pages, his expression hardening. And I knew then that the baby wasn’t as important as the person who’d stolen her. The person who knew all about Phoenix’s family. He would never let this go.

  I opened an envelope that had fallen out from the back of the book, and a pile of photographs slipped out onto the desk. I saw my face a number of times, along with the faces of my friends, including Phoenix and the twins. A couple of sheets of paper listed our regular comings and goings, times, places, and even the people we spoke to. Whoever the slaver was, this person was obsessed with us.

  14

  Phoenix dropped me home then went to fetch Icarus. He wanted to be alone with the werewolf, to do anything to find a trace of scents at the abandoned home where the baby had been born. He was angry, but I suspected that at least some of the anger was because somebody had ruined his neat little plans. Control was important to him, and a pair of invisible hands had taken all control from us. Worse, those invisible hands came with eyes that had been watching all of us when we hadn’t suspected a thing. We didn’t even know what to do next.

  At home, I couldn’t sleep, so I sat up reading through ledgers, making notes on everything that was weird and everything we had discovered. Maybe nothing was connected. Maybe I was trying to convince myself of something that didn’t even exist.

  There was a slave trader. There was a protection racket. There were loan sharks. There were protesters. Emergency services and the judicial system weren’t working as they ought to have. The newspapers were stirring up trouble on a regular basis. Bad luck was following around almost everyone I knew.

  Magic was involved in almost everything, being the one thread that linked different acts together. The random events were possibly the acts of someone trying to shine a spotlight on what magic could do. Shifters were the current public enemy number one, but how long would that last? Perhaps witches would be next.

  I didn’t know who was behind any of it—the shooting, the mischief, the little things that kept getting in the way and making every process more difficult. Why had nobody come to the aid of Wesley and the others when they rang for help? Why had so many people suddenly lost their jobs? Everything was a question. It was about time we started finding answers.

  And then I remembered something—something I should have recalled sooner. Once, back when we were seeking out Emmett’s fate, Peter and I had done a terrible job of questioning the brethni who lived next to Moses’s flats. They had said Emmett was in Hell, and we hadn’t believed them. We couldn’t—not then. But they had turned into allies of sorts, and I had never liked to bring up that first day because of the way Peter and I had behaved. But I had been digging into the past a lot lately. I had to keep going. If they knew anything at all that could lead me to Noodle, then it was worth offending them again.

  I persuaded Moses to set it up the next morning after I had grabbed a couple of hours of sleep. I met him outside the warehouse where the brethni lived.

  He wrinkled his nose at the smell. “I hate coming over here. I don’t know what that smell is, and I don’t want to know. I’m just glad we don’t get a bang of it in the flats on hot days.”

  “Think they’ll talk to me?”

  “They can be a bit off sometimes, but they don’t lie. If they do tell you anything, you’ll know it’s the truth.” He screwed up his face. “You have to ask the right questions. And they like… I don’t know, riddles or something.”

  I shrugged and followed him to the doors. “They’re not my biggest fans.”

  He looked at me in surprise. “What are you on about? They have a lot of respect for you. I don’t know why you thi
nk everyone hates you.”

  “Not everyone.”

  He sucked in a breath as we reached the door. “Right. We should get this over and done with.”

  He opened the door and let me in. The brethni were one of those hive mind species who all communicated directly, shared the same thoughts and experiences, and basically lived as an actual community. The succubi were similar, but while the women could easily pass as human, the brethni appeared distinctly alien, when they revealed their true selves. The succubi created a welcoming aura in order to feed, but anyone who wandered into the warehouse would see squatters and junkies and feel as though they should leave. To us, the brethni were slinky, reptilian looking creatures who didn’t die easily and were a great help in a battle.

  “All right, lads,” Moses said, and I could tell he was dying to light up a cigarette. “Ava has her questions ready.”

  “And will she listen to the answers this time?” the leader asked, walking toward us with half a dozen of his people at his back.

  I felt uneasy all of a sudden. “I did listen the first time,” I said. “Just maybe not as well as I should have until it was too late.”

  “And we’re back full-circle,” he said. “Another missing child.”

  “This one is a newborn,” Moses said. “Not quite the same thing, am I right?”

  The brethni leader nodded. It occurred to me that I didn’t know if they had individual names. I knew very little about them, and I hadn’t attempted to learn more. That might have been foolish.

  “Do you know if there’s a slave trade running in Ireland right now?” I asked. “Or tithes. Do you know anything about tithes?”

  “The world knows plenty of tithes. They are older than most beings on this island.”

  I bit my lip. “Are there any big rollers who might want to step into Fionnuala’s shoes—and have the means to do it?”

  “There are plenty of beings who could step into those shoes if they wished,” he said after a moment. “We know too much about tithes, and the time is ripe for slaves. Then again, it often is.”

  “Tell me about the tithes, please,” I said.