When Adam was nine and Aaron seven, word came that their father was dead. Samuel walked away from magic when he walked away from the family. He'd been working as a roustabout on one of the big oil rigs out in the Gulf, and he was swept overboard during a hurricane. The corporate lawyer who delivered the news also brought a waiver of liability that, once signed, provided a tidy income for each of the boys until they turned 21. Adam's last payment had been in January; Aaron's still had a year to run.
It was cold solace. Aaron bonded almost immediately with Daisy, but Adam drew into himself. He still kept the walls high, his father's abandonment preventing him from accepting love. He was the eldest son of the eldest son, but he made himself an outsider. Aaron would have to stand in the circle for them both. Before he took my hand, he wedged his late father's talisman upright in the sand in front of him.
Hazel began the ritual with a traditional remembrance song for Marie-Eglise. That brought us to the matter of the comb. The tradition is that, as her life nears its passage, the current owner of the tortoiseshell comb takes it from her hair and places it on the sand. With appropriate blessings and incantations, the family looks on as the new owner picks up the comb and binds her own hair, and so it is handed down.
Because my grandmother had died before the comb could be given to Daisy, a different ceremony must be performed. Marie-Eglise had bequeathed the comb, but the object had to give its permission.
My mother served as elder. It was the first and only time she would wear the comb. She removed it, letting her long braid fall to her waist. She knelt and laid the comb close to the swirling shallows.
Because the comb is very old and very powerful, the ceremony requires the attention of the entire family. One moment, the comb was at our feet, gleaming in the setting sun. Everyone was concentrating on it, working the incantation in unison. The next moment, an ancient sea turtle lay at the edge of the water.
We watched him in respectful silence as he made his way into the ocean. We could see his shell bobbing through the waves, and then, just as the sun dipped below the horizon, he was gone.
It was Aunt Daisy's responsibility to keep watch through the night, waiting – hoping – that the turtle would return. I offered to sit with her, but she just waved me off. Her eyes were open, but her focus was deep below the waves with the sea turtle. She knew only what he knew.
I left Daisy sitting vigil on the beach, her legs folded under her as if she was doing yoga, her eyes on the horizon.
My mother had arranged for a private dining room at a nearby hotel, and we spent the evening telling old family stories. It was a wake, of sorts, as the family settled into the new hierarchy with my mother as matriarch. People who had always seen her as a peer now showed more respect. Aaron, usually a wisecracker, was suddenly tongue-tied around her. Even in such a sad setting, Hazel was in her glory.
The evening had been chilly and I had been worried about Daisy, but my mother had told me to leave her alone, that she was safe and protected by our circle. The spell needed to be completed, and that it was Daisy's to do. I went to bed early, mourning Marie-Eglise. I dreamed of John.
The next morning I arose before dawn and walked down to the beach. The sun came up as I crested the dune. Aunt Daisy appeared not to have moved all night. She was still intensely watching the surf.
I was within a few feet of her when she suddenly stood. She didn't stretch or even brush the sand off of her skirt and legs. She walked quietly to the waterline as the ancient sea turtle emerged from the surf and hauled himself back up on the beach.
Daisy knelt before him and took his head in her hands as one might a beloved dog. She looked deeply into his eyes.
As a scientist, I understand that marine turtles excrete excess salt through glands at the corner of their eyes. Turtles do not cry. I know this as an objective fact, but it didn't keep my heart from breaking.
I know I didn't turn my head or look away, but I did not see what happened next. The next thing I knew, Daisy knelt alone at the waterline, a tortoiseshell comb in her hair.
Chapter Ten
That evening, when I went up to Daisy's room for nightly tea, I found my mother sitting in the other chair.
"I asked Hazel to join us," Daisy explained. "We need fresh eyes on this."
At that moment, my mother's eyes were shooting daggers. She was going to extract a heavy price for being left out of the loop, but that was a drama for another time.
"I've already brought her up to speed on what we know so far," Daisy said.
"It’s concerning to me that Adam has Samuel's journal,” Hazel said. “Samuel was very powerful, but he didn't always play by the rules. And if Adam has been studying Marie-Eglise's spells, then he may be trying to acquire her abilities, as well."
"We've been trying to figure out what Adam was looking for in the safe," I said, easing myself into the chair on the other side of the fireplace. I was keeping Daisy between my mother and myself. "Let's look at this another way. What if Adam wasn't just snooping?"
My mother dismissed the idea. "What else would he have been doing in there?"
"Hiding the comb."
Daisy shook her head. "But he was after Philippe's ring, not the comb."
"Was he?" I let the idea simmer.
"But he was holding the ring," Daisy protested.
My mother got it. "We have no idea how long he was in there. He had plenty of time to do whatever he wanted. It was actually rather brilliant. He hid the comb in plain sight, knowing we would never find it without doing a new inventory. That wasn't supposed to happen until the end of the month."
I nodded. "He thought he was safe, but, I think maybe once he got the comb put away, his curiosity got the best of him and he decided to see what else was in there that he could use. That's when we walked in on him."
Daisy figured out the rest of it. "That's why the ring bruised his hand. It knew that he was up to no good."
“Or maybe,” I said, “it was the ring he was putting back this time. We have no way to know how many times he accessed the safe.”
My mother and aunt looked stunned.
“But what would he want the ring for? And how could he use it?” Daisy asked. “He's not on the pawn declaration." She was right. Adam had never been permissioned into the magic that controlled the shop.
I thought I understood. "Did Marie-Eglise have that spell in her grimoire?"
"Of course she did," my mother said. "Her spellbook functions more or less as our employee manual."
My mother went pale. "So Adam is planning a coup."
"It would seem so," I said.
Hazel looked pensive. "I still want to know how he got in there. That boy..."
"... has been lying to everybody," I said. Both heads whipped around. "Frank told me..."
"Frank told you?" my mother exclaimed. "Since when does Françoise talk to you?"
Oops.
I'd literally let the cat out of the bag. I heard Frank snicker at my feet.
The heck with it. I met her gaze. "Since the day after the funeral. He thinks he belongs to me now." To confirm it, Frank hopped up on the table and snuggled up under my chin. Seriously?
"It wasn't my idea," I said. Frank started to purr.
Daisy suppressed a giggle.
My mother waved away the argument for another time. "Assuming I believe all that..." – and the look she gave Frank meant that the conversation was far from over – "what is it that your cat thinks he knows?"
I told her what Frank had said about Adam hiding his true abilities. Hazel turned to Daisy, murder in her eyes. "And you knew this all along?"
Daisy shook her head violently. “Absolutely not. I had no idea until Maggie told me.”
“You raised those two,” my mother shot back. “I can’t believe you didn’t notice anything.”
I jumped before Daisy could reply. “According to Frank, Adam has been very careful, at least around the family. He didn't seem to think Frank would snitch him off
.”
"He never bothered even to notice when I was in the room," Frank elaborated.
My mother noticed me listening to the cat and shot both of us a dirty look.
"So what does Frank think that Adam's true abilities are?"
"Apparently, he is at least as powerful as Aaron. He might even be stronger than you."
"But that doesn't make any sense," Daisy said. "Why would he hide it all these years? His whole childhood, he was miserable because he felt left out."
"According to Frank..." I saw my mother roll her eyes. " According to Frank, Adam believes that the family drove Samuel out. Adam believes we stole his rightful inheritance. The idea seems to be that one day he was entitled to a day of reckoning. He was orchestrating his own Armageddon, and he wanted the element of surprise."
"I'm surprised," my mother deadpanned. "So, what do we do about it?"
♦
Hazel, Daisy and I cleansed the house from top to bottom. We started with the apartment that Adam and Aaron shared. We did not find Samuel's journal, but then none of us had expected to. If Adam had it, he was keeping it off-site.
We finished up downstairs in the shop. Hazel reset all of the passwords while Daisy used new incantations to secure all of the magical objects in the vault.
The last step was to deal with Philippe's ring. We understood now what Adam was really doing in the safe. We believed then that he had just pulled it out of the safe after hiding the tortoiseshell comb, and we caught him in the act.
"He was putting it back, wasn't he?" I asked.
My mother nodded. "He'd already used it to kill your grandmother. What Françoise saw... that's the position one would take to invoke the evil eye."
"But wouldn't Frank have mentioned it if he saw the ring?" Daisy asked.
"Not necessarily," my mother said. "Adam would have turned the ring around on his finger. His cupped hand helped focus the energy of the curse."
Daisy removed the box containing the ring from the safe. The eye was open, but the shell looked dark and cloudy. She slipped the ring onto her own hand.
"Poor baby," she murmured gently to the ring. "Did that bad man hurt you?"
The eye closed. The three of us joined hands as Daisy began her incantation to absolve the ring of any guilt in the death of Marie-Eglise.
Organic-based magical objects have no power in themselves, and they bear no moral weight in the human sense. They are neither good nor evil. But they do understand when their derivative objects are used in ways that conflict with the innate nature of the once-living animals or plants from which they came. In short, the ring was upset. The living snail had grazed on algae. They do not kill. That's why Adam's finger had been bruised. The ring had resisted him.
We finished the ritual, and Daisy held her hand up for us to see. The ring's eye slowly opened. The shell had returned to its bright green color. We all breathed a sigh of relief.
Daisy placed the ring back in its box and secured it in the safe. Adam had done a lot of damage. His murder of Marie-Eglise was unspeakable, but she at least had been a witch in her full powers who knew the rules and risks. The shell in the ring had never asked to be involved in magic. For that matter, neither had John. Adam had used his powers to hurt the innocent. He would pay. The balance of the universe demanded it.
Chapter Eleven
Staying in New Orleans felt wrong to me, but so did leaving my family – abandoning them, as I'm sure my mother would say. Daisy and I had nibbled around the idea for a couple of days, whenever we had a private moment, but we needed to have a serious talk. We decided to go for a drive.
I rented a car, and we drove down to Metairie for lunch. It felt right to talk about ending my time in Louisiana in the place where it all began for my family. We found a little crab shack that looked out over Lake Pontchartrain and took our food out onto the patio that overlooked the causeway in the distance. In front of us, an old dock was crumbling away. It was the new layered over the old, as it was everywhere in the South.
Daisy nibbled at her shrimp po' boy and I wolfed down my gumbo. The food here was amazing, and we concentrated on our sandwiches, neither wanting to start the conversation.
Daisy finally pointed at the causeway. "They were just starting to work on that when the family got flooded out," she said.
"It's really something," I said, and it was. The causeway is the longest continuous bridge over water anyplace in the world.
Daisy nodded at the ruined dock at our feet. "I remember that. The old house was only a couple of blocks from here." She leaned over the rail of the restaurant patio and glanced down the street. "It all looks entirely different now." She sounded wistful.
"How old were you when it happened?"
"The hurricane? I was very little." She sat quietly with the memory.
"But y'all evacuated, right? You were gone before the storm came through."
Daisy slowly shook her head. "There had been storms before, and we always rode them out. My grandparents were determined to stay; they were afraid of looters. But then the lake started rising. We couldn't get the car out because the road was flooded. We knew then that we were going to lose the house. They made all us kids go up to the second-story gallery. After a while, the water got up to the bottom of the gallery. All the women were crying. And then one of our neighbors came up in a little boat, and he took us off."
I’d never heard that story, but I'd seen the devastation from Katrina and I knew what that day must've been like for them. "You were very brave."
"We were lucky. Most folks lost everything except what they were wearing. A lot of people died."
She squared her shoulders and took something from her pocket. She handed me a tiny silver locket. Inside was a picture of herself as a child and a lock of red hair. “I was wearing this the night of the hurricane. I want you to take it with you. It will help you weather storms wherever you go.”
I swallowed down the lump in my throat. She didn’t give me time to say thank you. "Like I said: we were lucky. The family had put some money away in a bank in New Orleans,” she continued, “and they were able to hire a boat and go back and get some things out of the upper floor – clothes, mostly, and some family pieces like my grandpa's desk and the book cabinet. They pulled the boat right up to the dormer windows and tied up to the galley rail. It was quite a sight, I expect. We were able to start over. There's always been an emergency fund, ever since the family left France. I'd hear the men talking about it: they were determined that we would never again be forced to flee in the night with nothing."
I finally put it together. "So that's what Adam has been after," I said. It wasn't just about Marie-Eglise's comb. Adam still wanted it, all right, but it was just a symbol, the beginning of his push for control as he unfolded his powers. This wasn't about John at all – he had, indeed, been collateral damage. It broke my heart. "It's all about the money."
Daisy sipped her sweet tea. She took a long moment before she nodded. "Adam believes he is the rightful heir. I'm afraid he'll do anything to make that happen."
I placed my hand over hers. "No way," I said. "No way." It was all the comfort I could offer.
After lunch, Daisy and I strolled along the Lakefront Trail for a few blocks in the direction of the old house.
"Everything's gone," Daisy said. "I don't remember any of this."
Ahead of us was the new Bonnabel Boat Launch complex. We wandered out onto the fishing pier, a beautiful new structure that reached 200 feet straight out into the lake to form a "T" with hundred-foot extensions on either side.
Daisy turned and faced the houses that lined the shore. "The old house was just about here, I think," she said. "We were a block or so in from the lake – that's the only thing that saved us." She passed her hand in front of her face, brushing the memory away.
We walked out on the fishing pier, looking down into the waters of Pontchartrain. Small fish were schooling just under the surface of the water next to the pylons, but the few fis
hermen we passed didn't seem to have caught much. Even so, the day was glorious, the green water of the lake reflecting the clear blue sky. The breeze was light, so the water was calm. I was happy to be outside, away from the house on Royal Street.
We leaned against the rail and waved to a young couple cruising a bright orange pontoon boat away from the launch ramp. I realized that Daisy was watching my face.
"I need to go," I said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes, mon trésor, you do."
My treasure. That was how Daisy had always treated me, even though in my bratty teen years I didn't always recognize it. How could I possibly leave this woman behind?
Daisy read my mind. "Your darling John," she said. "He understood. He was right about Arizona. You need to make your own life now."
"But..."
She smiled. "It's not like when our family first came to this country. You aren’t leaving everyone and everything behind. We can Skype every day if you want."
Skype?
Daisy blushed. "You know what I mean. You and I, we will always be together, even when we are apart."
"It won't be the same."
"But isn't that exactly the point?"
We were deep in our conversation, our eyes focused on the water instead of on our surroundings. Neither of us saw the jogger running toward us from the end of the peer.
He hit Daisy at full speed.
The man was moving so fast that he threw both of us off-balance. Daisy sprawled face down on the wooden decking, hitting her forehead hard. The jogger careened into the aluminum railing, grasping for the top rail as he fell to his knees.
I dove for Daisy just as the jogger sprang at her again. I got there first. I sheltered her with my body as he came at us. He was grabbing for her, reaching for her hair. As he lunged forward, his hoodie slipped off his head.
It was Adam.
Daisy was trying to rise, but Adam placed a hand in the middle of her back and pushed her back down to the deck. With the other hand, he snatched the tortoiseshell comb.
Pentacle Pawn Boxed Set Page 6