“You might be right,” he said. “But that’s the one thing you could have done that would probably really have helped me. And you didn’t. So forgive me if I feel like I’m in this totally alone. I love Ty, God, believe me, I want him to have what he wants. But say I told Ty how harsh the Scholomance was, and he wanted to go anyway. Could you promise me that he’d be fine there? Could you swear he and Livvy would be all right separated when they’ve never spent a day apart in their whole lives? Can you guarantee it?”
She shook her head. She looked defeated, and Julian felt no sense of triumph. “I could tell you there are no guarantees in life, Julian Blackthorn, but I can already see you don’t want to hear anything I say about Ty,” she said. “So I’ll tell you something else instead. You may be the most determined person I’ve ever known. For five years, you have kept everything and everyone in this house together in a way I wouldn’t have thought was possible.” She looked directly at him. “But this situation can’t hold. It’s like a fault line in the earth. It will break apart under pressure, and then what? What will you lose—what will we lose—when that happens?”
“What is this?” Mark asked, picking up Tavvy’s stuffed lemur, Mr. Limpet, and holding it gingerly by one foot. Mark was sitting on the floor of the computer room with Emma, Tavvy, and Dru. Dru had a book called Danse Macabre in one hand and was ignoring them. Tavvy was trying to get Mark, wet-haired and barefoot, to play with him.
Cristina hadn’t yet returned from changing out of training clothes. Ty and Livvy, meanwhile, were manning the desk—Ty was typing, and Livvy was sitting on the desk beside the keyboard, issuing orders and suggestions. Stanley Wells had turned out to have an unlisted address, and Emma strongly suspected that whatever they were doing to try to track it down was probably illegal.
“Here,” Emma said, reaching out to Mark. “Give me Mr. Limpet.” She was feeling anxious and unsettled. Diana had wrapped up the testing shortly after Arthur had left, and had called Julian to her office. The way he’d thrown his testing gear into a corner of the training room before following her had made Emma think it wasn’t an interview he was looking forward to.
Cristina came into the room, running her fingers through her long, wet black hair. Mark, holding out Mr. Limpet to Emma, looked up—and there was a tearing sound. The lemur’s leg came away and its body thumped to the ground, scattering stuffing.
Mark said something in an unrecognizable language.
“You killed Mr. Limpet,” said Tavvy.
“I think he died of old age, Tavs,” said Emma, picking up the stuffed lemur’s body. “You’ve had him since you were born.”
“Or gangrene,” Drusilla said, looking up from her book. “It could have been gangrene.”
“Oh no!” Cristina’s eyes were wide. “Wait here—I’ll be right back.”
“Don’t—” Mark began, but Cristina had already hurried from the room. “I am a clodpole,” he said mournfully. He reached to ruffle Tavvy’s hair. “I am sorry, little one.”
“Did you get an address for Wells?” It was Julian, striding into the room.
Livvy held up her arms in triumph. “Yep. It’s in the Hollywood Hills.”
“No surprise there,” Emma said. Rich people often lived in the Hills. She was fond of the area herself, despite the expensiveness of the neighborhood. She liked the twisty roads, the massive sprays of flowers climbing over walls and down the sides of houses, and the views out over the electric, lit-up city. At night the air that blew through the Hills smelled like white flowers: oleander and honey-suckle, and a dry promise of the desert, miles away.
“There are sixteen people named Stanley Wells in the greater Los Angeles area,” said Ty, swinging his chair around. “We narrowed the possibilities down.”
“Good work,” Julian said as Tavvy sprang up and came over to him.
“Mr. Limpet died,” Tavvy said, tugging on Julian’s jeans. Jules reached down and lifted him up in his arms.
“Sorry, kiddo,” Julian said, putting his chin down on Tavvy’s curls. “We’ll get you something else.”
“I am a murderer,” said Mark gloomily.
“Don’t be dramatic,” Emma whispered, kicking his bare ankle.
Mark looked cross. “Faeries are dramatic. It’s what we do.”
“I loved Mr. Limpet,” said Tavvy. “He was a good lemur.”
“There are lots of other good animals.” Tiberius spoke earnestly; animals were one of his favorite subjects, along with detectives and crime. Tavvy smiled at him, his face full of trust and love. “Foxes are smarter than dogs. You can hear lions roar from forty kilometers away. Penguins—”
“And bears,” Cristina said, reappearing breathlessly in the doorway. She handed Tavvy a stuffed gray bear. He looked at it dubiously. “That was mine when I was a little girl,” she explained.
“What’s its name?” Tavvy inquired.
“Oso,” said Cristina, and shrugged. “It means ‘bear’ in Spanish. I was not very creative.”