by Chloe Neill
Page 24
“Close enough. ”
Jeff, Damien, and Nick walked into the kitchen together. Jeff and Damien looked significantly better than they had when I’d seen them before. They’d changed clothes and their superficial wounds were gone, probably because they’d shifted and let their magic do its work.
Nick walked to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of water.
Jeff carried Aline’s box, which he set on the counter, then smiled at me. “You all right?”
“Fine. You?”
“Feel like I lost another life or two, but I’m okay. ” He nudged Damien collegially, but Damien just offered back a mild blink.
“Nothing?” Jeff said and, when Damien continued to stare, turned to me with a crooked smile. “Alrighty. ”
“Boo’s okay?” I asked.
“Boo?” Ethan asked.
“Damien’s babysitting a kitten we found at Aline’s,” I explained.
Damien nodded. “Was sleeping in the car. Now sleeping in a box in the living room. Any developments here?”
“Ethan’s calling Paige and the librarian to check for any connections between Aline and Niera. ”
“That seems unlikely,” Damien said.
“Agreed. But it’s also unlikely that harpies attack shifters, and hours later someone pulls mojo on the elves. ”
“You’re thinking they come from the same source?”
“We don’t have any evidence either way, yet. But I’m thinking two major magical attacks in a five-mile radius in the span of twenty-four hours cannot be a coincidence. ”
“Put that way,” Damien said, “I can hardly argue with the conclusion. ”
I rose, picked up the box. “We had a to-do list,” I said, reminding Damien and Jeff. “This part was my assignment. ”
Jeff nodded. “I’ll see what I can do with her hard drive. ”
We looked expectantly at Damien. “I suppose I’m going to make some phone calls. ”
I glanced back at Nick, who stood quietly beside the refrigerator, bottle in hand. “Can I borrow a room to look through this?”
Ethan looked worried. “Don’t you want to rest?”
I shook my head. “Too much adrenaline. And irritation. I need to work. I’ll be fine,” I added, when the line between his eyes didn’t disappear.
“Use the drawing room,” Nick said, as if it would be obvious to everyone which room that would be. It was to me, as it turned out, because I’d been there a thousand times.
• • •
If Papa Breck’s office was one of my favorite rooms in the Breck house, the drawing room was one of my least favorite. The office was a place of adventures and hidden secrets. The drawing room was a place of manners and sitting quietly. It was where Julia, Papa Breck’s wife and the Breck family matriarch, would spend a quiet afternoon with a book and a cup of tea, or where she’d make me and the boys endure a time-out if we’d been too noisy in the hallways. “Your father did not make his money by letting out the bought air,” she’d tell us, and demand we spend an interminable half hour sitting on hard, uncomfortable furniture until she was satisfied that we’d calmed down.
I was hardly “just a girl he knew in high school. ”
I carried the box into the drawing room. It was prettily arranged—lighter and more delicate than Papa Breck’s study—with butter yellow walls and tailored furniture. A round pedestal table sat on one side of the room, with several hard wooden chairs (learned from experience) and a leather case that held two decks of cards. Both decks were missing their one-eyed kings, because we’d decided the cards held secret codes and deserved saving.
I put the box on the table, walked to the shelves that lined the other end of the room, tracing my fingers over the linen-covered hardbacks that were placed in groups amid bud vases and family pictures.
I found the copy of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale—because a book about James Bond with a casino in the title obviously had to relate to our one-eyed kings, and slid it from its home.
Tucked inside, back to back, were two aging kings of spades.
So many memories in this house. Each time I came back, I built new ones, even if they weren’t always pleasant. I tucked the cards back into the book, slid the book back onto the shelf, and moved back to the table. I shoved the leather box of cards aside and made space on the table while I opened the box.
Just as the house had demonstrated, Aline wasn’t one to throw things away. Anything. Receipts. Greeting cards. Lists. The paper wrappers that held silverware inside restaurant napkins. I assumed every scrap of paper and receipt in the box had meaning for her, some emotional weight that kept her from throwing them away, that bound them to her as the years went on.
I looked through the piles, separated them into groups, and when that didn’t reveal any universal truths, put them into chronological order.
By the time Jeff knocked on the door, I had several tidy piles of paper and absolutely no clues whatsoever. Maybe he’d had more luck.
“Hey,” I said. “What did you find?”
“Nada. ” He pulled out a chair and took a seat. “She plays a lot of solitaire, which just seems extra-sad. ”
“Travel plans?”
“The ticket looked completely legitimate. But there was nothing in her Web history that indicated she booked it on that computer. ” He shrugged. “Could be someone else booked it; could be she used a faster computer. ”
“So that doesn’t really help us narrow anything down. ”
“It does not,” Jeff agreed.
I frowned down at the box. “Honestly, I don’t know anything at all so far. I’ve looked through everything in this box, stacked and reordered it, looking for a pattern. ” I gestured at the receipts I’d organized. “These piles are geographical. I was hoping something would hit. But I’m not seeing anything. ” I glanced at him. “Do you want to take a look? Maybe there’s shifter significance I don’t see. ”
“I doubt that,” he said, but settled in to peruse.
Chapter Ten
PAPER MOON
We worked quietly, deliberately, searching through the only potential bit of evidence we had. And it wasn’t much.
“I think keeping all this stuff would weigh me down,” I said, pulling out a grocery receipt for utterly innocuous items: milk, eggs, cookies, paper towels.
“Yeah,” he said, flipping through a stack of greeting cards. “But you have Ethan, a family, friends. You have connections. ” He flipped open a card, grimaced at whatever he found there, and closed it again. He put the card in the pile and looked at me. “I don’t think she does. I mean”—he spread his hands over the stack—“all this stuff would be relatively meaningless to us. Cards from people who don’t sound like they know her at all, bills, receipts. Photographs of other people’s kids. It’s almost like she was trying to build a life from paper, from the stacks of stuff that she kept in the house. ”
That was both poetic and sad, and it made more sense than I preferred to admit. If Jeff was right, Aline led a sad and lonely life that had been capped by a potentially sad and lonely end. We just weren’t sure yet.
“So where does that get us?”
He pushed his hair behind his ears. “I’m not sure. ”
I stood up, getting a fresh perspective on the piles we’d made on the dark wood table. “Okay. So she’s missing. The question right now is whether she’s missing on purpose, or because she’s a victim of the mattacker. ”
“The ‘mattacker’?” Jeff asked, blinking.
“The magical attacker. I shortened it a little. ”
Jeff chuckled. “Shorten it all you want. But nobody else in the house is going to refer to the perp as a ‘mattacker. ’”
“You’re probably right. But they aren’t in the room right now. So—we know a flight was purchased for Aline—whether or not by her. ” I looked back at Jeff. “I don’t suppose you know anyone with an airl
ine connection?”
“No,” he said, frowning. “Why?” But before I could answer, his brows lifted in understanding. “Because if she got on the plane, she probably wasn’t kidnapped. I don’t know anybody offhand, and I’d prefer not to hack into transpo databases. That kind of stuff gets you flagged. ”
“I think that’s a legit reason,” I assured him. “So she gets a storage locker, buys a flight, comes to Lupercalia. Leaves right before or right after the attack. ”
“There’s just nothing here that touches on any of that,” Jeff said. “At least, not that I can see. But that’s part of the problem—it could all be relevant, and we wouldn’t even know it because we don’t really know what’s going on here. ” He picked up a faded and water-stained receipt. “She got gas. ” He picked up a strip of three yellow tickets. “She went to the carnival. ” He picked up a small wax paper bag with a logo on one side. “She bought cookies at Fran’s Delights of Loring Park. That has got to be the most pretentious name for a cookie joint I’ve ever heard, but I’m getting off track. ”
I was proud he realized that. He didn’t always.
“None of this stuff means anything without context, and shifter context isn’t helping much. None of it, as far as I can see, is shifter related. She lived like a human. Bought things like a human. ”
“Could that be the reason she’s gone? She pretended to be a little too human?”
Jeff shrugged. “I don’t think we can rule it out. It might be time to call your team. ”
I smiled at him. “I think we can arrange that. ” I pulled out my phone and started up the program Luc had created for the House’s guards. It had timers, alarms, alerts, and, according to him, a “slick” little videoconferencing setup.
I set up the phone on the table and turned on the app, selecting the option to connect with the Ops Room.