“You okay?” A sharpness speared his usually kind eyes.
No, and she wasn’t going to be ever again.
“I’m fine, Professor Lennox.” She straightened a pretend bow tie at her neck. “But I’m busy putting together a list of everything I do so when you and poor Egan inherit this job, you won’t want to put a hit out on me.”
His expression softened. “You can’t help it, can you.”
“Is that a question?”
“It’s a statement. You can’t help thinking about everyone but yourself.”
She tried to exude a no-big-deal vibe she was far from feeling. “Some people in our family make that damn near impossible. If staying focused on not leaving you in a giant sinkhole keeps me from worrying about Lach and wanting to kill him, consider it a lucky break. I haven’t heard from him, and he won’t answer my texts.”
Ross snorted. “He thinks he can hide from me, but I always find him.”
“You know where he is?” She sat forward.
“He’s at the southernmost point of Argentina. He stayed at the gala for five minutes, then headed straight for JFK.”
Her brain stalled. Lach hadn’t replied, yet he was okay enough to take a long-ass trip? “What’s he doing there?”
“My guess is he’s meeting with Isidora and they’re about to leave for Antarctica. They see each other three times a year. The person who pays the bills knows all the secrets. That’s how I know where he is.”
“Do I want to know why he’s meeting with the Antarctica leader? Isn’t she in her early fifties?”
“I hear she’s quite the hellcat. Looks like a tall Halle Berry with ice-white dreads and a voracious appetite for sex. What’s not to like?”
She wanted…needed to believe Lach had taken his playboy ways on a global tour despite her every instinct screaming the truth was much bigger.
“Isidora has what elements?”
“She’s an Earth and Water Dual and scary powerful. Trust me, my Earth energy’s glad she lives far away. Isi’s got a sense of…let’s call it swamp justice.”
“Swamp justice?”
“If you piss her off, she’s not gonna wait for a council or judgment to fix things. She’s gonna put you somewhere you’ll never be seen again, and all without a trace.”
Ooh-kay. She’d had zero experience with the woman, but it couldn’t be a sex thing with her and Lach, as her elements could do absolutely nothing to boost his Dual Fire and Air. So, if it wasn’t sex—
Why couldn’t it be?
A rush of heat bloomed in her breasts and between her legs. She’d never thought to ask, and why would she since she had no elements to recharge? Once Naturas came into their power, did they have ever sex without an energy exchange being involved?
“You’re right. I don’t want to know.” She conceded if Lach had been seeing the woman on the regular and returning home, apparently unharmed or turned into an ice sculpture, he was being his most charming self.
Ross headed for the reception area. “Be back in a—”
“Wait.” Her nerves got the best of her about the quest for info about the mysterious coup. “Shouldn’t you be the one doing the searching in the hard-copy archives, and not Egan? I know he’s tasked with more than his on-paper responsibilities so Seanair’s spies won’t report that he’s serving more than coffee and answering phones, but this information’s not in the system for a reason.”
Disappointment cut across his expression. “I would never do anything to jeopardize this family.”
“Of course you wouldn’t. It’s…you know how Seanair is about the coven classes.”
“I thoroughly vetted his family before I gave Egan the internship. It takes miracles to pull off what Seanair expects of me, and our warlock is a miracle worker.”
Something told her that unearthing buried information about the Winter’s Hail Coup could be devastating.
“If you trust Egan, then I trust Egan.” She wished her instincts would take a lunch break. The sense of something looming even worse than the Astrux wouldn’t go away.
“I trust him with you, and you’re not someone I’d ever risk. Be back in a few.” Ross disappeared into the reception area.
She looked down at the next line item on her transition list. Birth plan.
She had no human prudishness about the contractual conception timeline. It was simply logistics and legalities. But, Goddess, she had a few days until she met Yuri. The man who was going to be screwing her from the moment they said, “As the Goddess wills” to each other until she popped out the required superbaby.
Why couldn’t the Naturas have some advanced in-vitro thing that made this all as cold and clinical as the contract?
Egan stepped into her doorway and cleared his throat.
“What’d you find?”
He set a large accordion binder on her desk. “Five days and eight hours later, I found a box stashed in the back of the file room. We’re talking the dusty, musty, moldy part in a dark corner with cobwebs, which this warlock doesn’t dig. But, Ms. L, there is some serious stuff in this file.”
“You’re supposed to call me Elspeth.”
“Baby steps.”
She eyed the caution creeping into his expression. “Whatever you read, you can’t tell anyone. This information was deliberately removed from the database long before I took over Kindred.”
Egan made a zipping motion across his lips. “I’m not particularly happy that you know I’ve read what’s in there.” He nodded toward the file. “I’m off to the back office to print some other things I found but wanted to get this to you first.”
He left without another word.
She opened the binder, pulling out a picture of three handsome young men, their shirt collars unbuttoned, beers in hand, the guy on the end with a fat cigar in his mouth.
She turned over the photo.
Jacques Foussé. Seanair Lennox. Gregor Kralj. 1972.
The pose was so…schoolboy. So…dudes having a good time. Jacques…wait. She’d seen Aleron’s grandfather’s name in the database. How long had the Foussés known her family?
Her eyes stopped on the image of Gregor Kralj as she thought about their forty-five-minute video call yesterday, negotiating the timeline for his granddaughter’s eligibility in Kindred. The Texas farmer’s request had been simple enough. He didn’t want Jette to have to quit her job as a nurse. Work wasn’t a valid reason for deferring an eligibility listing, but Elspeth hadn’t hesitated in agreeing to postpone the woman’s listing for an additional five years.
Somebody needed to be able to chase their dream. Might as well be Jette Kralj. And she’d gotten an incredibly grateful farmer pledging to help her whenever she needed.
She couldn’t quit studying the picture, her gaze moving to Jacques Foussé. The height. The build. The eyes. He towered over the other men. The Foussés obviously had a long history with Seanair. Jacques had died a long time ago, but why weren’t his son and grandson listed in her supposedly accurate database?
“What happened?” She pulled out some papers, all of them Bill Foussé’s. Birth certificate. Report cards. Natura Academy exam scores. Solid hundreds across the board for one, two… She thumbed through page after page of test results. Perfect scores for eight straight years on all his Fire exams.
“What happened to you, Bill Foussé?”
She took out a small manila envelope, turning it over and bending open the brad. Reaching inside, she pulled out several uniform service patches. Five years. Ten. Twenty. She stared at the last one. The one for thirty years read Guillaume Lucien Foussé, Elite One commander-in-chief. Aleron’s father, who was also deleted from all mention in the records…
Had there always been a Foussé protecting the Lennox line?
Panic clogged her throat and churned into a coil of dread. Why did Seanair have so many of Aleron’s father’s personal effects? She flipped through the remaining pages to a stack of pictures at the back. Two boys, about thirteen, the
big brute’s arm draped over the shoulders of the scrawny kid with the smartass expression. She turned over the photo.
Jacques Foussé. Seanair Lennox. Fire punisher crew.
Looking through the rest, she watched two lives unfold and a friendship grow, from boys to teens to young men. How could a friendship between two families just fall off the map? By all appearances, Seanair and Aleron’s grandfather had been best friends.
On her desk, she noticed the corner of a page with an embossed seal. She pulled the paper from the stack. A death certificate. Two handwritten notes were taped to the back, the edges frayed like they’d been ripped from a book. She recognized the beautiful cursive as Seanair’s.
Fire Magnus Log. Year of our Goddess 2010. January.
I write this entry late, for I still know not what to make of the death of my best friend’s son. Jacques Foussé was family to me, his son, Bill, becoming one of my own after Jacques passed. Bill violated the sanctity of my worship during Winter’s Hail communion to beg me to appoint him emissary for the Fire cuff. He beseeched me to fix the Fire element and search for the true bearer. I always took his counsel, just as I took Jacques’s. I was startled, and then my vision burned red with suspicion. For the first time ever, I lost control of my power. I recall talking to Bill through the haze of my anger, but what followed is a blank. All I do know is that I killed Bill in front of his own son, Aleron. Bill died at my own hand, but I cannot offer amends. The other Magnuses are weak, and war is coming. I will not step down when there’s so much to lose.
Aleron is mine now, in service to me for the rest of his life, because the Oracle forbade me to kill him. I marked the boy’s face. I have beaten him to within inches of his life in the name of strengthening him. I do not recognize this dark side of myself since my wife passed.
Dear Goddess, since Mathair left this earth, it seems I know only death. My heart is numb, my chest a void, a black, graceless space into which I’ve fallen. I fear the dark side of my elements are overtaking me, for I do not understand this new, constant craving to hurt Aleron and mold him into my harbinger of death.
I pray the Goddess forgives my sin of killing in her sacred chapel.
The two guest chairs in front of her desk blurred. Her mouth dropped open. The piped-in music faded until she became only a thing that breathed.
I marked the boy’s face.
Her eyes stung, welled. A faint laugh surfaced in her mind. The old Seanair. The one who’d been married to Mathair. Yes, the grief of losing his wife had changed him, but there wasn’t so much as a shadow of his former self. Death changed people, but her grandfather had murdered a man.
She couldn’t believe Seanair had put such a stark confession in writing, and knew if, in his wildest dreams, that someone would find it, her grandfather would have rendered the pages into the finest ash.
A great weight hung heavy in her chest, the mass a tombstone, the truth a grave, the facts unspeakable and plain. Seanair had irreparably harmed the man who’d barreled into her world and stripped away the illusion that her duty-bound life would be enough.
If she could blame only Aleron’s kiss, this growing cloud of agony would eventually pass. He was getting paid to protect her, but his quiet kindnesses were choices. She understood the conflict in his eyes now, those red flashes of anger. Yet, he still kept her coffee the perfect temperature, chased the drafts away in her apartment, made her stretch in comfort instead of shivering in misery. She looked to her empty coat hook on the wall, and the knot in her throat grew. The high temperature today would be in the twenties. The wind made it seem colder, but from the moment they’d stepped from her apartment building, the fifteen-minute walk to her office had felt like it was seventy-five and sunny.
Her warrior guard had a discreet stillness to him, an innate goodness for which he didn’t want credit and he’d never admit. Beneath the blazing shields of his Fire lay a good-hearted man. A man who cared for her and didn’t expect anything in return.
A man she desperately wanted to know.
She covered her face with her hands, wishing she could make sense of the horror. What did she do now? Seanair’s malicious crime was unfixable.
“Food’s here.” Ross walked in with a small tray, his gaze wandering for a place to set it.
She jerked, swiping at her face, and stuffing pictures and papers back inside the binder.
“What happened?” Ross nearly dropped the tray on the chair. “Elspeth?”
“Wedding jitters.” Her thoughts jumbled and blurred like a shaken snow globe. “Is Aleron still in the lobby?”
“Yes. Do you want me to get him?”
“No.”
Ross squinted so hard his eyebrows almost met. “You look like you just witnessed either a miracle or a massacre.”
She yearned to tell him what she’d found out, but she needed to talk to Aleron first. This was about him, about his life. He must have gone through absolute hell after losing his father so violently—right in front of him—and then being forced to serve the very murderer who’d taken his dad from him. She swore her body weighed a thousand pounds, the weight of the information too much to bear. How the hell was she going to figure everything out before the wedding?
Egan came in at a jog and stopped behind one of her guest chairs, close to a ream of paper clutched in his hands. “I’ve got something else to show you.”
Ross looked between the two of them. “Do I need to know about this, or can I go back to the piles of work threatening to crush me? I have the final couple’s shower details to approve and a wedding I still need decisions on, like location, flowers, food.”
Irritation rose at his demands, but she could remove the wedding bullshit from the list.
“The Carlyle Hotel. Irises. Heavy hors d’oeuvres, no dinner,” she rattled off. “Full open bar and a custom dessert selection for every table.”
“Lemon everything?”
“No.” Her thoughts drifted to a scarred man. Change that—a scarred boy who’d become a good man. Yuri wouldn’t get lemon. “All chocolate. White, dark, whatever’s most expensive to feed our fake friends.”
“I can work with that.” Ross waved and strode from the room. “Later, kids.”
Her gaze locked on Egan. “Did you show this binder to anyone?”
“No.”
“Where did you find it? Specifically.” No way would Seanair let this reign-ending information out of his personal files. How did everything get from the Savannah house to here?
“In a box with Lach’s things.”
Oh, shit. Her brother’s favorite saying exploded in her mind.
Knowledge is power.
Lach had stolen the file and put it in a place most people wouldn’t think to look. Brilliant move, but now that she’d had a second to think, it was pretty easy to see that what Lach wanted was leverage.
To stop Seanair from killing him before the disease did.
She looked at Egan’s stricken face. “It’s all right. I know this is a lot, and I appreciate you bringing it all to me. I’ll protect you, Egan. I promise.” She took a deep breath, but no way were her nerves anywhere close to settling. “What bomb do you have there to drop?” She nodded at the papers he held.
Egan handed them over. “In the witch and warlock world, this information’s worse.”
She flipped through the pages, all of them copies of receipts dating back over ten years. “Who is Magdalena Wiedzma?” She checked again. Every dollar amount was the same. “And what does my grandfather pay her to do for twenty-five hundred dollars a pop?”
She did the math, noting the stack represented over a million dollars.
Egan walked over and closed the door, then took a seat in one of the empty chairs, bracing his forearms on his knees. “She’s a witch you don’t want to cross. She’s a witch no one admits to knowing. Most of all, she’s a witch you don’t want knowing you.”
“Why not?” She hid her embarrassment that she knew next to nothing about the co
vens. She tried to excuse herself because her world consisted entirely of Alpha- and Beta-level Naturas, but that was the bullshit every privileged class told themselves about those they deemed beneath them.
“Magda only deals in darkness. The white witches won’t even speak her name because of the shit she does, the experiments. Many have tried to take her out and failed.”
“Tried to kill her?”
“Without hesitation. Some would settle for binding her, no matter how grotesque that is to even think, much less do. But if we could bind her? Yes, we’d do it.”
“Why would my grandfather associate with her?”
“The only reason anyone goes to her. They need something brought back to life, or they’ve got a massive problem and aren’t squeamish about how they fix it.”
Seanair’s diary entry had been filled with regret. Her conclusion clocked her between the eyes. Surely Seanair wouldn’t try to resurrect Bill or Mathair, or both.
She stood and went to the windows behind her desk and looked down at all the oblivious humans scurrying on the sidewalks below. For a moment, she longed to be like them again, to go back to before an invisible mass had filled her lungs and tried to destroy her.
“How does she bring something back to life?” Her cheeks heated at her ignorance.
“It’s not physical. That’s TV. But there are some who believe the spirits of the dead can be called back to this dimension.”
Goddess on the rag, could this day get any worse?
A knock sounded, and the door snicked open.
“Excuse me,” Aleron said. “You have visitors coming up the elevator.”
“Tell them I’m out of the office.”
Aleron’s gaze was a cold, empty beam over her left shoulder, his arms stiff and pulled back, hands clasped behind him. Like a soldier. Just doing his job. “It’s Yuri. With three others. The Russian delegation, I suspect.”
Her eyes cut straight to his scar, her heart thudding so erratically, she feared it might up and quit.
“That’s my cue to go.” Egan stood and picked up the tray. “I’ll put the food in the kitchen for later.”
She gave him a smile and a nod of thanks. They had more to discuss, a lot more, but there’d be no more revelations about the witch world today.
The Call of Fire: A Natura Elementals Novel Page 16