I dipped my chin. “Does his mother know he’s involved?”
“The Grande Dame has been kept out of the loop for obvious reasons. She’s aware of the disturbances, and she’s been informed there are Elite on the ground in Savannah, but she’s not privy to the specifics.” He rubbed his thumbs over my knuckles. “The only way this works is if we catch him red-handed. There can be no mistakes. Not with a Lawson. Our case must be airtight. We only get one chance. The Grande Dame will vanish her heir to protect him.”
The Grande Dame’s fury if her son was exposed was too great for me to contemplate so late in my day. “How do you know the dybbuk will come to the Cora Ann?”
“We’re hedging our bets. We’ve been seeding the local papers for weeks with updates on the supernatural disturbances in the hopes we might flush out our perp. We’ve secured television and radio coverage to get the word out about the poltergeist aboard the Cora Ann. We’ve done everything but tack up a neon sign that says All You Can Eat, but we haven’t gotten a nibble so far.”
“That explains a lot, actually.” I hauled myself up by the chains and wriggled free of Boaz. The urge to pace struck me as soon as my feet hit the ground. “But it doesn’t explain why Timmy chose now to lose his marbles. He was a benign entity by all accounts until recently. The escalation of his behavior from spooking guests in empty halls to impaling them with silverware isn’t normal progression, even for a poltergeist of his strength.”
“We amped him up,” Boaz admitted. “It was a last resort.”
“Timmy will die.” I whirled on him. “Okay, so he’s already dead, but this will vanquish him for good.”
There was no guessing if his energy would burn out before the dybbuk finished the job, but it felt cruel.
“We had to bait our trap somehow.”
“He’s a little boy.” A scared little boy who had no explanation for his wild fits of violence.
“He’s not sentient,” Boaz protested.
That argument was holding less and less water with me these days. Cletus was more. Why couldn’t this little boy be too? I had no idea what made them different, but they were not just electrical charges and smoke.
“He told me the devourer was coming.” That counted for something. He hadn’t been stuck in a loop murmuring stock phrases. He heard me, and he responded. “He understands he’s going to die. Again.”
“I’m sorry, Grier, I really am, but I’m a cog in the machine, and the machine only cares about the bottom dollar. Vampires are worth more to the Society than ghosts. This operation will move forward, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“I need to get back home.” Giving up Linus felt like a betrayal, even if Boaz had already locked him in his sights. And learning the violence about the Cora Ann had been orchestrated to lure in the dybbuk made me sick when I thought of poor Marit and all the other victims viewed as acceptable losses because they were human. I backed toward the path. “I have a big project to finish tomorrow.”
“Don’t walk away angry.”
I shook my head, unable to articulate the problem. “I’m not angry.”
His fist closed around one chain, and I imagined it gasping for breath. “Will you still call me?”
“Yeah.” I wrapped my arms around my middle. “I will.”
“Help us get him on that boat, Grier.”
“Help you…?” The true reason for this meeting smacked me in the face with enough force to turn my cheek. I should have known a career soldier wouldn’t break cover during a stakeout for anything so paltry as a kiss. “How am I supposed to do that?”
“He trusts you,” he coaxed. “The sooner we end this, the better it will go for him.”
“I have to go.”
The walk back to Jolene did nothing to improve my mood. I had forgotten to mention Russo to him, and I regretted not hugging Boaz goodbye or telling him to be careful. His job was dangerous, and there were no guarantees in life, but either I was going nuts or there was more to this than met the eye.
Twelve
I slept so deep not even the dream could touch me, and I woke without fanfare in my own bed.
A flashback of the last time I’d woken in a bed hit me between the eyes so hard I whimpered.
I’m home. I’m safe. I’m home. I’m safe.
I was in my own bed, in my own room, wearing my own clothes. No eager maid dressed in frilly strawberry layers was poised to burst through the door to feed or water or pet or brush me. Volkov was locked away. The master was in the wind, but he wasn’t in my house, and right now that felt like a small victory.
Woolly started the shower, and I didn’t fight her over the necessity. I got clean, dressed, and then clutched the grimoire across my chest like a talisman as I went in search of Linus.
The carriage house door stood open, and the smell of coffee coiled around me in the entryway. “Linus?”
He appeared, immaculate as always, and passed me a brown paper bag with the vulpine logo of a local coffee shop. “I had a craving for horchata and brought kolache for you.”
“Thanks.” There was no horchata in sight, and I wondered if melding with a wraith meant you no longer had to eat or drink to survive. “I haven’t had kolache in…a long time.”
The circular pastries came in a variety of flavors, and he had selected poppy seed and cream cheese for me, two of my favorites. One day I really would stop being surprised by what he remembered about me.
“Eat up.” He poured me a glass of milk, sank into his spot at the table, and began flipping through a notebook. “You need to get started soon if you’re going to finish Woolly tonight.”
I joined him and forced myself to bite into the sweet dough, to chew, to swallow. All the while I examined him for signs of Ambrose lurking beneath his skin and came up empty. Other than the dark circles under his eyes, there was no evidence to suggest he wasn’t simply a tutor enjoying a sabbatical in his home town.
“You’re staring,” he mused without glancing away from his papers. “Do I have milk on my upper lip?”
“No. Sorry. No.” I redoubled my efforts to stuff my mouth so full I couldn’t let the cat out of the bag. I crammed in the last bite and chased it with a gulp of milk. “Done.”
Linus startled at my chipmunk cheeks and the dribble on my chin. “All right.”
He gathered the remaining box from yesterday, and we walked to Woolly together. I was gripping Eileen so hard, the grimoire squinted. I willed my fingers to relax and settled on the ground in the spot where we’d left off last night.
“Are you sure this is soft enough?” I smoothed my hand along the foundation, but it felt solid to me. “I should have sucked it up and finished this yesterday.”
Ambrose would still be a mystery if I had, and Timmy would be just another ghost, and I wouldn’t feel so torn.
“You couldn’t have finished it in a single night,” Linus assured me. “I was overly ambitious when I suggested it was possible.” He snapped his fingers. “I almost forgot. I bought us a few items that ought to make this go more smoothly.”
“Oh?” I sat in the grass and started arranging my workspace while he disappeared back into the carriage house. “Are you ready for this, Woolly?”
The nearest window opened and shut in an affirmative.
“The design is a bit loud,” Linus was saying as he approached, “but it ought to do the trick.”
I twisted to see what he was talking about and goggled. “Oh, um. Wow.”