FOURTEEN
I went back to Iris’s studio, replaced the cover over the nightmarish triptych, and looked around the room. Even my witch’s eye couldn’t notice anything that might alert Iris to the night’s activities. I knew I had to tell Iris what had happened. It was her right to know, and I would tell her. I would. In the morning. But I didn’t want to risk her stumbling across the truth in the night. I turned off the light and closed the door. I climbed in the shower and stood in the hottest water my skin could stand. I wanted to wash off even the memory of Connor’s residue touching me. As I slid between my sheets, I remembered to undo the charm I had placed on the entrances; I didn’t want the charm to wake me as my family came creeping in.
I was exhausted both physically and spiritually, but sleep did not come easily for me, and when it did, it brought dreams of a faceless creature that slithered on its stomach even though it had the shape of a man. Obelisks shooting lightning and stone circles humming to life surrounded me, making a sound that constantly rose in pitch and intensity. Shattering glass fell, raining down on the whole wide world, and then I heard my mother screaming. I was up and out of bed before the approaching sun could ripen the morning sky.
I sent my thoughts out as I went down the stairs, checking to see who had made it home from last night’s wake, and who had found a better place to spend the night. Given the way Adam and Oliver were getting on last night, it surprised me to sense that a sleeping Oliver lay beneath our roof. I was a little more surprised, but also kind of relieved, to pick up no sign of Iris’s presence.
For some reason, I couldn’t get a clear reading on Ellen, so I stopped by her room and cracked the door open. The bed had been slept in, and the twisted sheets and pillows that spilled onto the floor told me that Ellen had not passed a much more relaxing night than I had. Unless, of course, she had brought Tucker home with her. If so, then the bedclothes told a very different story. Her absence bought me a bit more time before I had to make an already overdue apology.
I went to the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee for the others. After last night, I suspected that Oliver would welcome a cup when he awoke, and Iris might too, whenever she came dragging herself home. In spite of the news I had to share with her, a small and mischievous part of me felt glad that I was up early enough to witness her walk of shame. Of course, the whole unwed mother thing made it impossible for me to give her too hard of a time. Besides, I didn’t want to do anything that would discourage her from getting out and living her post-Connor life. In the bright light of day, my resolution to inform her about last night’s encounter was wavering.
I made myself a cup of decaffeinated tea, and headed out to the garden to greet the sun. I suddenly realized that my psychic headcount hadn’t marked Emmet as present. Maybe he had taken off early this morning, or perhaps he hadn’t come home last night, either. Emmet was a full-grown golem, though, so I had no doubt he could take care of himself for one night. Or maybe someone else had taken care of him. I felt an odd and unwelcome twinge of jealousy at the thought that some other woman might have welcomed him into her bed. I pushed the feeling away and told myself that it would be the best thing for all of us if Emmet moved on. But then another thought hit me. Maybe Claire had scared him off? No. That was unlikely.
Again I felt anger and misplaced jealousy toward the faceless and most assuredly imaginary woman who had seduced him. “Get a grip,” I said to myself. I truly did love Peter. I forced myself to look at this possessiveness I’d begun to feel toward Emmet. Was I just being protective of him? In spite of all the years of knowledge and experience lent to him by the witches who had created him and his manly body, he was somehow still an innocent. I wanted to go along with that rationalization, but then my more honest side spoke the truth. This jealousy I felt truly had nothing to do with Emmet or his emotional well-being . . .
I might have learned that I was not the odd woman out when it came to magic, and Peter had never failed to make me feel beautiful and special, but I still struggled with a poor self-image. Emmet’s declaration of love had flattered me, bolstering the unhealthy side of my ego. I could follow these emotions where they might lead me and break Peter’s heart—again—ruining my life, and both of theirs, just to feed an emotional black hole. Or I could own up to the fact that I still had a lot of growing up to do. I sighed. Self-awareness sucked. I thought about what my mother had done . . . how she’d had an affair with Ellen’s husband. Maybe that choice had sprung from a similar place?
My thoughts drifted from my mother to Peter’s mom. I was worried about Claire. I had no idea what had set her off against Emmet. Perhaps Claire herself had a strong enough psychic ability to sense his otherworldliness? But that didn’t explain the history she seemed to think she had with the golem, who she thought his people were, or, most importantly, what had happened to Peter’s brother, the son she had turned over to them for safekeeping. I felt certain of one thing: It was a pure fiction that the old man was some long-lost Great-Uncle Peadar. This man, this “dried-up husk,” as Claire had called him, was somehow Claire’s son and Peter’s brother. Logically, I couldn’t account for how Peter’s brother could be older than his parents, nor could I imagine the circumstances that had inspired Claire and big Colin to give up their boy, but there was no question that Claire believed him to be her long-lost son. “Peadar,” the name of the missing uncle, was only a convenient label to hang on the body that had been found. Something for Detective Cook to chew on.
After Claire and I had returned to the bar, Colin came and whisked her upstairs to their living quarters. She hadn’t made another appearance. I had joined Peter behind the bar, and we’d worked together until last call. “This is nice,” Peter had commented at one point, his mismatched eyes, right blue and left green, misty with drink. I knew without asking what he meant by “this,” and part of me agreed. Even so, the revelation that the Tierneys—a family I had always thought of as being the most normal family in the world—had been touched by some form of magic was making me ask the same questions Emmet had raised. How could it be that Peter was never bothered by my family’s magic, and now by my magic, for that matter, when most normal people were at least a little unsettled by it?
The sound of a car pulling into our drive pulled me from my thoughts. A door opened and softly closed, and then the car reversed back onto the road. High heels moving cautiously across stone told me one of my aunts had returned.
Iris’s eyes widened, and she stopped in her tracks, clutching her purse to her chest, when she registered my presence in the garden. In spite of her air of guilty surprise, she looked radiant in the rosy hues of early daylight. I knew it meant I was both a hypocrite and a liar, but I realized in that instant I’d never speak to her about Connor. I couldn’t bring my heart to do it. I couldn’t risk the fragile renaissance I was witnessing any more than I could rip the wings off a butterfly. I would take this secret to my grave. I made this decision in the full knowledge that my own weakness would make it a heck of a lot harder for me to judge either of my aunts. I raised my cup. “Morning.”
“Good morning.” She gave me a smile that tottered between embarrassment and hubris. “I guess this old girl still has it in her,” she said just in time for Oliver to arrive, shirtless and wearing baggy sweatpants, a mug of steaming coffee in hand.
“Well, she sure did last night,” he said with a smirk, “and by the looks of you, all night long too.”
“Oliver,” we gasped in unison, and he let loose with a full-throated laugh. He came over to the table and joined me.
“When do you close on your new house, again?” Iris asked before shaking her head and going inside. In spite of her embarrassment, there was a sly and satisfied look on her face.
“Surprised you are home,” I said.
“And why do you say that?” He held his mug in both hands and leaned in as if I were about to tell him the juiciest of secrets.
“Well, you know. After last night. You and Cook. I mean Adam.”
He feigned a look of shock. “Well, my dear, we don’t all have the alley cat morals of your Aunt Iris.”
“You’d better not let her hear you say that,” I said.
“Point taken.” He took a sip of coffee and leaned back in his chair.
He grinned. “We danced a little. Drank way too much. Talked a little. Then I walked home. I was in no shape to drive, I’ll tell you that.”
“Wait, that’s it?”
“We are having lunch today,” he said. “I want to take our time and make sure this is right. We were kids . . . before. I don’t want to rush things. I want to go slowly and enjoy it.”
“You, Oliver Taylor, want to take things slowly?”
“Is that so unbelievable?”
“Yes. Who are you, and what have you done with my real uncle?” He blew me a very wet raspberry in response. A question rose to my mind. “How is it that Adam doesn’t react poorly to your magic?”
Oliver raised his eyebrows and frowned at the same time, considering the question. “He did at first, when we were young, back when we first met. But I suggested that he not ‘react poorly to it,’ as you so quaintly put it.”
“You compelled him?”
Oliver nodded. “Yeah, but that was the one and only time. I owned up to him that I had done it, and I promised us both I’d never suggest anything to him again.” He took a sip of coffee and then looked at me over the rim of his mug. “Adam is worried about you, you know?”
“Worried about me? Why?”
“?‘Gut feeling,’ he says. Peadar Tierney showing up with a hole punched through him. You’ve been acting all cagey around him, he says. Don’t worry; I didn’t say anything about the old guy.”
“Is it hard for you, keeping secrets from Adam?” I found myself piling up secrets in my relationship with Peter: my mother’s return, the truth about Maisie, the incident with Peadar, Emmet throwing himself at my feet, my liking that Emmet had thrown himself at my feet.
“Honestly, I don’t know, but the way things happen around here, I am sure I will have many opportunities to find out. Tell me, Gingersnap. What was all the commotion with Claire last night?” He sat down his cup and leaned his chair back so that it balanced on its hind legs. “No, I was neither too wasted nor too preoccupied to notice.”
“You tell me. Claire thinks she knows Emmet or at least ‘his people.’?”
“People?” he rocked his chair back on all fours and tilted his head.
“She says he isn’t human. She thinks he is something otherworldly, but other than that I don’t know more than you do.”
“But you will get to the bottom of it?”
“Of course. I have ideas, but they sound crazy, even to me.” My instincts told me to hold off on sharing more than I had to, at least until I knew the full story of what was going on with Claire. “I love Peter, and I want to marry him, but I want to know what I’m getting into with the Tierneys. You know?”
“Indeed I do. Let me know if I can help.” The sun had made its way high enough in the sky to illuminate the whole of our garden. “Lord, doesn’t that feel good?” Oliver asked as he stretched up into the golden light. He stopped mid-stretch and stood, walking over to where he had placed the sundial. He held out both hands, palms down, toward the marker. “Someone has been messing around here.” He turned and regarded me, his right eyebrow raised. “You have been messing around here. Just what have you been getting up to, Gingersnap?”
My mind breezed over a thousand lies, none of which I had the heart to tell. I rose and rushed over to his side. “Connor,” I said and gave a slight nod toward the dial. So much for taking the secret to my grave. “I was trying to resurrect a memory of Mama,” I said. “He hijacked the energy.”
Oliver’s face turned gray, somehow understanding the whole of the situation from these few words. “I’m sorry. I had no idea. Say nothing . . . to anyone. I’ll handle this. Okay?”
I felt myself begin to tremble in spite of the sun’s warm rays. I drew my arms up around myself and nodded once. And with that began yet another Taylor family conspiracy. That’s all it took. A secret and a shared desire to protect the ones we loved. Oliver put his arm over my shoulders and led me back to my chair.
“I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what the Tree of Life told us about your sister’s situation,” he said in an obvious attempt to pull my thoughts away from Connor. “I think we ought to consider borrowing from your mother’s bag of tricks. We need Tillandsia.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I think it’s what the Tree of Life was trying to tell us, you, when you saw the doorway to the new Tillandsia house.” He leaned in toward me. “We need power. Big power that the families cannot trace, power that the anchors can’t just switch off if they figure out what we are doing.”
“And you think we can get this power through Tillandsia.”
“Think about it. We may not know what Emily intended to do with the power she was summoning, but we know that she spent years using the Tillandsia ‘gatherings,’?” he said, and I felt grateful for the euphemism, “to build up a battery of power. Power that the united families could not control.”
“Assuming that power still exists, that it hasn’t all been used up or dissipated, how would we access it?”
“If I knew my Emmy, and I do believe I did, that power is still locked up tight somewhere. We, however, don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of getting at it.”
“Then why even bring it up?”
“Because we don’t, but you, Gingersnap, do. I’m sure Emily put some kind of lock on it, so that only she could access it, but you carry a bit of Emily in you. I’m willing to bet that it will make itself accessible to you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No, I don’t, but don’t you think it’s at least worth a try? For your sister’s sake?”
I turned my face toward the sun and closed my eyes, letting myself hide behind the flamingo color of my eyelids. “Of course I’ll try, but I don’t have a clue as to how I’ll do it.”
The brightness faded, Oliver having stepped between me and the light. “’Fraid there is only one way to get ahold of the Tillandsia power.”
“And that would be?” I asked, opening my eyes to see him standing there, haloed like some earthbound angel.
“The only way to access the power built up through Tillandsia is by ‘participating’ in their activities.” This time I didn’t appreciate the euphemism. Not one little bit.
The thought of participating in a Tillandsia gathering—or, throwing all niceties aside, orgy—was repellent. Growing up, I had thought Tillandsia was merely a private group where public people gathered to get their party on without having to worry about headlines. Now, I knew it was oh so much more. My heart broke at the thought that my lovely Ellen had been a willing participant in the group during the years after Paul and Erik had died. She said that even though she knew it was wrong, Tillandsia had somehow eased the pain of her loss. Still, I doubted she had ever used it as more than an anesthetic. It seemed unlikely that she had a hidden agenda like my mother had had, or possibly still had.
A freshly showered Iris rejoined us in the garden. I forced my full focus on her, not daring to let my eyes even stray toward the sundial. Her hair was damp and pulled back into a ponytail. She wore no makeup, but in spite of that fact, she looked younger than I’d ever seen her. She had on her favorite yoga pants and my favorite T-shirt. “Hope you don’t mind,” she said, noticing my noticing.
It had grown way too tight for me these days anyway. “Not at all. It looks cute on you.”
She smiled and blinked slowly, like a happy cat. “Thank you. I thought so too. Have you told her?” she asked Oliver.
“No, not yet. We were discussing other things.” He winked at me.
“Told me what?” I felt a tingle run down my spine.
“We have a plan,” Iris said, “to deal with the situation with the demon at the old hospital. Well, actually, it is Emmet’s plan, but I think it’s a good one. I’ll fill you in later, but clear your calendar tonight, because we are going demon hunting.”