Bree, familiar with her mother’s loving—if confusing—illogic, said patiently, “Of course you’re my parents. My question is, are you my parents?”
“I did not bear you in the same way I carried Antonia, that’s true,” her mother said. “But you were a gift in the same way that all babies are gifts. You just came to us a different way.”
Bree waited.
“What your mother is trying to say ...” Her father stopped, patted his blazer pocket for his long-vanished pipe, and repeated, “What your mother is trying to say is that you are my father’s brother’s child.”
“Great-uncle Franklin?” Somehow, she wasn’t surprised. “But he never married, did he? I mean, not that I’d expected to be legitimate ...”
“Bree!” her mother said.
“... but it does seem strange he didn’t want to raise me himself.”
This time her parents did look at each other.
“Franklin did marry.” Francesca’s face was solemn. “Very late in life. A very beautiful girl, dear Bree. And very young. He met her in a church, of all places. But she died. And before she died she made him promise to give you up.”
“Give me up,” Bree repeated. The words had no meaning.
“I don’t know if it’s because he was so much older—he was seventy when you were born—although he lived to be ninety-eight, wouldn’t you just know it? Although if he’d known he was going to live so long, he wouldn’t have let us raise you, and then where would we be?” Her mother took a breath. “But she did. Make him promise. And your uncle Franklin never went back on his word.”
“And of course he was with you every minute he could be,” Royal said.
“So that’s it,” her mother said airily. “Case closed, end of story, no more to say except that”—she leaned forward and wrapped her arms around Bree—“you are half a Beaufort. And if you’re not half a Carmichael, by blood ...”
“Yes, Mamma,” Bree said. She and Antonia had grown up with stories about the Carmichaels. Her mother’s side of the family was notorious.
“... you’re a Carmichael through ties of my dearest love.” She kissed Bree affectionately.
“Do you know much about my mo—my uncle’s wife?” Bree asked. “Are there pictures of her? Do you know where she came from?”
“He promised, promised, promised her to leave all that alone,” her mother said frantically, “and we agreed. If we hadn’t agreed, he wouldn’t have let us take you. And we wanted a baby so much, darlin’. Most important, we wanted you. You were such a wise little thing.”
Francesca was on the verge of tears. Bree thought she might be on the verge of tears herself.
“So, we’ll try to answer any questions you have, but...” Francesca bit her lip, dashed the heels of her hands against her eyes, and said, “I’ll just go to the bathroom and wash my face. I’ll be right back.”
Royal watched Francesca leave the room. He looked as if he’d give anything to go with her. He’d never been comfortable in the face of emotion. “Let’s pretend this is a case,” Bree said suddenly.
Royal tightened his hand around his drink, but he said, “Excellent idea. I’ll try to be a little more objective.” He gave her a lopsided smile. “It’s difficult, though.”
“For me, too.”
“It doesn’t change anything,” he said stubbornly. “We’re your parents. We’ve been you’re parents since you were two days old.”
“Nothing could change that,” Bree said. “Ever.”
The air was heavy with unasked questions.
“Are you regretting we didn’t tell you this before?” Royal asked.
This obliqueness was so characteristic of her father’s style that Bree had to laugh. “Not regretting exactly, no. But I’m very curious, Daddy.”
He covered her hand with his own. “It was a curious situation. Franklin had his reasons, very compelling ones, apparently. And his stipulations—that you not be told unless you asked—weren’t legally binding, of course. But he asked for my word, and I gave it.” His face softened. “We both loved you from the moment Leah put you into your mother’s arms. We would have promised almost anything to keep you.”
“That was her name? Leah?”
“Yes.”
Neither one of them broke the silence that followed. Her father kept his thoughts to himself. Bree wondered about that young girl, that image of herself, determined to keep her daughter set apart. The question was, set apart from what?
“Why the secrecy?” Bree demanded suddenly. “Why couldn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know,” her father admitted. “It was the price we paid for making you our own. And to be truthful, until Franklin died and I probated his will, we’d almost forgotten about it. It was nearly thirty years ago. We were happy. We’re still happy. There didn’t seem to be any need to go ferreting around in the past.”
“Until Unc—until Franklin’s will?” Bree prompted. “Leaving his practice to me?”
Sasha dropped his head on his paws with a huge sigh and closed his eyes. Bree frowned at him, then leaned down and stroked his nose. He rolled his eyes up at her, licked her cheek, and yawned. “Yes,” Bree said. She straightened up and looked at her father. He would always be her father, no matter what the past had been. “About Uncle Franklin’s will?”
“I was his executor, as you know. His original will divided his estate among the Beth-el Synagogue, our local mosque, and St. Peter’s Church. He left nothing to you. The week before he died he added the codicil that listed his outstanding cases and left his practice here in Savannah to you.”
“Do you know what changed his mind? About putting me in his will?”
“I have no idea, Bree. But when I went to get his signature I did ask.”
“What did he say?”
Her father shrugged. “He said, ‘You can’t fight City Hall.’”
Sasha rolled his eyes up at her. Bree started to laugh. It was infectious, and Royal began to laugh, too. “It means something to you?”
“Oh, dear. I’m afraid it does.” Bree searched her pocket for a tissue, couldn’t find one, and accepted her father’s handkerchief. “Oh, well. I do wish I’d known him better before he died. I need some answers to a couple of questions. More than a couple.” She closed her eyes briefly, against a rush of sadness. “Most of all, why he didn’t want a daughter.”
Royal looked at her with such love that Bree leaned over and hugged him. “Of course, it turned out to be the best piece of luck a girl could have.”
Her father nodded. He wasn’t able to say anything.
“Anyway,” Bree continued cheerfully, “it’s nothing to bother you, Daddy. His client list, for example. I haven’t had a chance to do more than send them all a letter that I’m taking over his practice.” A brief, horribly unwelcome thought about the nature of his clients sprang to her mind. She shoved it away with a shudder. Time enough to look at that when the Skinner case was finally over. “I’d like some background on them.”
“I’m sure you would.”
“So if he left any other papers, anything at all, I’d like to see them, if I may.”
“Nothing, I’m afraid. You know there was a fire in his office the day before he died.”
“Yes,” Bree said. “I knew that.”
“Everything he had went up in the fire.”
“Not even a picture ...” Bree trailed off uneasily.
“Of Leah? No, not that I recall.” Royal thought a moment. “As a matter of fact, I’ve never seen one. Not while she was alive. Not after she died. Odd, that.”
Sasha sat up as if galvanized and began to bark.
“What the devil?” her father said.
Bree looked at Sasha’s ears, which flopped eagerly forward. And his bark was a welcoming one. “It’s probably Antonia.”
The front door slammed. Francesca shrieked, “Antonia ! You’re home!” Antonia shrieked back. Bree unfolded herself from the sofa. “I’ve got to get back to the
office. I set my paralegal onto the financing for Island Dream. I’m hoping he’ll have dug something up by now.”
Her father cast a rueful look in the direction of the kitchen. Antonia was talking a mile a minute at the top of her voice. Francesca’s voice kept rising as she tried to get a word in edgewise. “I don’t suppose ...”
Bree dropped a kiss on the top of his head. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours. We’ll all go together to the Mansion, shall we?” She paused, and bit her lip. “And I need just a little time alone. To think.”
“Bree? You headed out, darlin’?” Francesca called out. She bustled out of the kitchen, an envelope clutched in one hand. Antonia slouched after her. “Wait just a minute. Tonia!” she added, with sudden exasperation, “I want you to go right on into the bedroom and pull out that nice dress I brought for you. We all want to look good for Bree’s party. Go on! Go!”
Antonia rolled her eyes dramatically at her sister, kissed her mother, and ambled off to the bedroom.
“There!” Francesca said in a conspiratorial whisper. “Your sister doesn’t have to know everything quite yet.” She smoothed the envelope between her fingers. “I wanted to show you this. Leah wasn’t one for taking pictures, but I did catch her once, when we were all here for a picnic. I’ve never even told your father. I’ve kept it in the back of that old junk drawer, along with this.”
She held a pendant on a chain. She took Bree’s hand in hers, and coiled the necklace into her palm. It was cold and heavy. Bree stared at it. The chain was short, perhaps eighteen inches, and made of fine gold links. The pendant was small, perhaps an inch long and half an inch wide.
It was a talisman. Two wings surrounding the scales of Justice.
“Ah, honey,” Francesca said. She smoothed Bree’s hair. “And then there’s this.”
Bree took the envelope and opened it. The photograph was faded to orange and brown. Leah Beaufort sat on the top of the stone wall just outside the town house. Bree would have known her anywhere.
She was the pale-eyed, dark-haired woman from the nightmare, the Rise of the Cormorant.
She wasn’t angry. Nor was she filled with grief. Something lay ahead of her.
It was time to find out what.
Twenty-one
Tous pour un,
Un pour tous.
—The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
The sky was sullen with clouds, but the rain had stopped. She grabbed her raincoat, left Sasha with her family, and walked to the office, turning her parents’ revelation over and over in her mind. She needed to see Professor Cianquino. It was all very well and good to tell her that she would only know her own reality when she had experienced it. She was experiencing it now, and she didn’t have a clue as to what she was or why she was here.
She jogged across West Bay, turned onto Houston, and wasn’t surprised to find Gabriel Striker at her elbow. “You,” she said.
“That it is,” he agreed.
She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. She hadn’t really looked at him before. His skin was smooth and tanned, as though he spent a lot of time under a beneficent sun. Here, on Houston, in the middle of this old but very real city, his eyes were a clear, untroubled gray. He moved like a dancer, or maybe a boxer, although what she knew about boxing she could put in a very small bucket. He was balanced, that was it, despite the heavy muscles of his chest and arms. Balance was the key to his peculiar grace, as if he could move instantly in any direction with the slightest provocation.
He’d sought her out twice; she’d found him once. “Each time you’ve come to me,” she said, “it’s been to keep me from harm.” She thought about that, then added, “Or to keep me from whacking somebody.”
He smiled. “So you know a bit more.”
“I know way too little,” she retorted. “I knew Uncle Franklin; at least, I thought I did. And I haven’t a clue about my mo . . .” she stumbled over the word, and said instead, “Leah.”
She’d fastened the talisman pendant around her neck. It lay against her skin, cold and disproportionately heavy.
He didn’t say anything, just continued to walk beside her with a warrior’s ease as they approached the cemetery. They rounded the corner at Angelus. A whirl of magnolia leaves eddied around her feet. The sky darkened with a furious rise of black storm clouds. The wind gusted suddenly. Rain fell in a vast rush, as though a giant spigot had opened in the heavens.
The house stood solidly firm against the wind and the rain. Bree shaded her eyes with one hand against the rain and broke into a run. She ran smack into Gabriel’s broad back.
“STAND BEHIND ME.”
Gabriel’s voice. And not Gabriel’s voice. It had grown to a vast echoless sound that filled her head with nothing else. The sound of it blocked the wind and the rain. She put her hands to her ears and shut her eyes for a long moment.
“DON’T MOVE.”
“I’m getting awfully wet,” Bree protested. She stepped around him and fell back with a shout. A thin, questing stream of pustulelike yellow light poured from the grave beneath the live oak tree. As it had before, the river rose, snakelike, turning this way and that. Bree stared at it, engulfed with a terror that came from outside her own mind and spirit. She choked, “What? What does . . . ?”
“Run now!” Gabriel shoved her hard in the small of the back. She stumbled as he shot past her and faced the yellow light and the great horned figure that slowly rose beyond it, beneath the tree.
Gabriel seemed to grow in size, until his white, shining form blocked the river and its attendant spirit from sight.
“Bree!”
She staggered toward the sound of the voices: Ron, Lavinia, and Petru.
“Bree!”
They called again, and again, and she stumbled past the front door into the safety of the foyer. Ron slammed the door shut behind her.
“You are wet,” Lavinia clucked. “Come into the bathroom and let me dry you off some, chile.”
Gently, Bree pushed Lavinia’s hands away and faced the door. Petru stood in front of it, his arms folded. Bree stepped up until his face was inches from her own. “You have to let me pass, Petru.”
“Striker’s just fine out there,” Ron said. “C’mon. Lavinia’s right. You can’t meet new clients with your face wet all over.”
Bree ignored them both. “Petru!”
He cocked his head, as if listening. Then, with a satisfied nod, he opened the door and backed away. Bree sprang to the front porch. The rain was coming down in warm, thick sheets. The hideous river of light was gone. She could barely see the outline of the oak tree through the rain, but no presence lurked there.
Gabriel was gone.
Bree whirled around and went back inside. “What happened out there?” She looked at each of them in turn. “You work for me, don’t you? It’s Beaufort & Company. It’s my name on the door ...”
“My Lord, you’re right,” Ron murmured. “I forgot all about an address plaque. Somebody remind me about that.”
“... so, dammit, report to me!”
“Of course,” Petru said, nodding his head. “Of course you want to know. There has been some ...”
“Opposition,” Ron supplied.
Petru thumped his cane on the floor approvingly. “Excellent word. That is correct. Opposition to the opening of the law firm.”
Bree didn’t think she wanted to ask who the opposition was. She had a pretty good idea. “So we’re ruffling some feathers?” she said. “Is that good?”
Petru spread his hands wide in a “what do I know?” gesture. “We believe this is why you have been harried more than is usual. That Pendergast, for one. A Tempter, that one, and sly as they come. And the horned one, too. Metatron.”
A short, cold silence fell over the company.
Petru, looking inward, sighed and came to himself. “Yes, you have been harried by the Hounds of Hell. That, in Russia, would be alliteration. Harried,” he repeated with some satisfaction, “is an excellent
word.”
Bree shuddered. “Not if you’re the quarry.” She glanced over her shoulder involuntarily. “Gabe is all right, isn’t he? Should we go look for him? Would he have been ... um ... injured in some way?”
Petru’s broad belly shook with laughter. “Gabriel? Injured by that thing? Not a happenstance.”
“He means not likely,” Ron said. “You, on the other hand, ducky, are not so invulnerable. You keep an eye out in the future, okay?”
Bree led the way into the reception area. “But why now? Is it to keep me from going to the open house?”
“Open?” Ron said. “Oh! No! Why would they care about that? It’s a temporal thing, nothing to do with them. I mean, I care, of course, but purely because I love a party. And,” he said after a moment’s reflection, “your mother.”
“Which one?” Bree said flippantly.
“So they tole you,” Lavinia said. “About time. She would have wanted that, Leah would have.”
They looked at her, their faces warm and welcoming.
“You knew my mother?” Bree said.
Petru chuckled. “George wrote of her that she had a face that launched a thousand ships. Like yours, Bree.”
George? George Gordon, Lord Byron? Petru’s casual references to long-dead poets and artists as if he’d met them personally were just a character quirk. Weren’t they? He couldn’t really have met them all.
“And brave like you, too,” Lavinia said. “We missed her a good bit, until you came to head us up.”
“But why ...” Bree stopped, and began again. “What is all this? What am I? Who are you, really?”
Petru smiled benignly. “We’re a Company of angels, with a temporal leader. The leader is you, now. It was Leah, in the past. And it will be your daughter, in the future.”
“Angels,” Bree repeated. Then, “My daughter?”
“Assumin’ things go as planned,” Lavinia said. “You just never know.”
“Right,” Bree said.
Defending Angels Page 23