Missing powers, p.12
Missing Powers, page 12
So she had learned to keep quiet about them. She had learned to pick up on the little things that differentiated the living from the dead to know when to keep her mouth shut. Over time, it became easier not to see them, though their voices were still in her head. As an adult, she rarely mistook a particularly vivid, recently deceased spirit for the living in the first few moments, but it did happen on occasion.
Davyn had still felt alive. Distant, separated from her by that dark, cold expanse, but still alive.
“If he is alive, we can get him back,” Julian said, trying to reassure himself.
Reg nodded vaguely. She had made contact with Davyn. Therefore, she should be able to go to him and find a way to release him from that in-between place. But how? She didn’t want to go back there and, if her first journey into the expanse was any indication, if she dove too deep into that place, she might not be able to get back on her own. Without Julian there to wake her up, how long would she have sat there on the ground in a trance? It had not felt like any time had passed, but it had been an hour. She could have stayed there for hours or days before she felt the passage of time. And would her body be preserved, or would it still be subject to the physical world and waste away if she didn’t have food or drink?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Reg’s pocket was vibrating. She moved slowly, feeling like a stranger in her own body. Her fingertips touched the phone in her skirt pocket. She wrapped her fingers around it and pulled it out, looking at the screen.
Corvin.
Reg groaned. It really wasn’t a good time for her to talk to him. She didn’t like an audience when she spoke to him on the phone. Friends listening in and criticizing her for even taking his call, telling her that she needed to stay away from him, cut off all communication. They didn’t understand that she couldn’t do that. She couldn’t keep him out of her mind. And it was easier to talk to him on the phone than to have him burrowing into her brain, which he would do if she refused to answer him.
Reg swiped to answer the call. She looked at Julian, directing the thought to him that he needed to walk away and give her some privacy while she was on the phone. Julian stood there looking at her, apparently impervious to the suggestion.
“Get out,” Reg told him tersely. “Give me some space.”
“What?” Corvin demanded.
“Not you.” She looked at Julian. “You. Go back to the car. Or go look around some more.”
Julian rolled his eyes, his lip sticking out in a pout like he was a five-year-old. But he did turn away from her and wandered a few feet away, looking up at the branches of the trees.
“What do you want?” Reg asked Corvin.
“Me?”
“Yes, you,” she snapped. “You called me. What do you want?”
“Who is there with you?”
“No one now. What is it?”
“Where are you? I need to see you.”
“I’m busy. Investigating—following up with a client. He needed me to go somewhere else to do a reading. You know, restless ghosts in his house or whatever. Why do you care?”
“I’ve been trying to get you. Where have you been for the last hour?”
She could feel him close to her. Not like he was across town in his own house, but like he was in the clearing with her.
Not in the clearing. In her brain.
Reg focused, trying to push him out. She had left herself too open after the disorienting journey into nothingness. She walled Corvin off, trying to shut up all of the cracks he could climb into until she felt like her thoughts were hers again.
“Reg…” Corvin’s tone was a growl, not the seducing, wheedling tone she was used to when he was trying to worm something out of her or get her to do what he wanted her to.
“It’s none of your business where I’ve been. I’ve been busy. I can’t always take your calls. I have work to do.”
“You’re not working.”
“I am too.”
“Who is your client?”
“None of your business.”
She could feel his anger rising. Whatever was going on with him lately made him irritable and easily angered. He could go from cold to hot in an instant. The Corvin she had grown to know was mellow, taking his time and using all of his wiles to persuade her to do what he wanted her to. Even when he got angry, it was controlled. But this new, short-tempered Corvin was the opposite. He was impatient and jumped immediately to threats and force rather than using his charms.
“Where are you now? When can I talk to you?”
“You’re talking to me right now. I’m not sure when I’ll be home, but I have appointments tonight. I don’t have time for… whatever.”
“I could not feel you here. You disappeared. Have you been off to Africa again?”
She had been a lot farther away than that. But Reg wasn’t about to tell him anything about it. “Yeah. I had some business to attend to.”
“Restless ghosts in his house,” Corvin repeated her own words back to her, “in Africa. Why would someone all the way over there expect you to come to deal with his restless ghosts? There are plenty of practitioners there to take care of such things.”
Reg couldn’t come up with a logical explanation. It wasn’t like she knew a lot of people across the ocean. The journeys that had taken her to the continent had been to little huts with no phones and no internet. Or to the tombs in Egypt. Those people would not be calling her about exorcising restless spirits.
“What does it matter to you?” she asked. “You’re not in charge of me. I don’t have to report anything back to you. I have my own life and my own business that has nothing to do with you.”
“I’m worried about you, that’s all.”
Said a hundred husbands and boyfriends to the women they tried to control and manipulate.
“You don’t need to worry about me. I’m fine, and it’s not your place to track my movements. Just stay out of my head and out of my way.”
“I will not—”
He was irritating her. Reg tapped the red button and cut him off mid-sentence. She wasn’t even sure why she had answered his call in the first place. She knew that he was going to be intrusive and overbearing. She didn’t have to answer his calls or report to him.
Of course he tried to call her back. Reg ignored the phone as it buzzed and buzzed. If he kept it up, he would run her phone out of juice. She sent the next couple of calls directly to voicemail rather than letting the vibration motor run down her battery. Her thumb hovered over the “block caller” button. The calls stopped. Reg put the phone back into her pocket. She straightened her legs and rose unsteadily to her feet. Her joints felt rusty after sitting on the ground for so long. She stretched her arms and shoulders and rubbed her knees.
Julian walked back across the clearing to her. “The power drinker.”
She shrugged. “Yes.”
“You should not talk to him.”
“My life, not yours.”
How many warlocks did she have to tell that she was her own person and didn’t need them to interfere with her business?
At least two, apparently.
Reg looked around at the ground, up at the trees, and scanned the ground again.
“What are you looking for?” Julian asked.
“Something for the altar. I think… If the altar helped me make contact with Davyn, I shouldn’t leave it bare. But I don’t know what to leave there.”
“Oh.” Julian joined her in looking at the plants growing in the clearing and deeper into the trees.
After a few minutes, he motioned to her and pointed to a cluster of small purple flowers. “Violets.”
“You think they would be okay for an offering?” She didn’t know much about what different plants and herbs meant or what they might mean. She could burn sage or another savory herb, but she didn’t see any growing wild and hadn’t thought to bring anything with her.
“They can signify wisdom.”
“Okay. That sounds good.” Reg bent down and pinched off a few small flowers, leaving the rest to grow there. She returned to the altar stone and laid them there. “Just like that? Or should I burn them?”
“Like that, I think.”
Reg nodded. She paused for a moment, thinking about Davyn and how far away and untouchable he seemed. She needed to find out more about where he was and how to reach him. She badly needed more wisdom than she already had, so the violets seemed appropriate.
“You should not have anything to do with the soul eater,” Julian said again, picking up on his earlier line of communication.
“Why? Because you think I can’t stand up to him?”
“Because… his kind and ours should not mix. That may go against the new enlightened ideas that excluding them from our society is unfair, but creatures like him should have their own communities. Should gazelles let lions join their herds?”
“Creatures like him?”
Julian nodded. “He may look like us physically, but his nature is very different. We can’t let predators like him infiltrate every part of our lives.”
While Reg had previously had some of the same thoughts, she wasn’t sure that Julian was right. Was Corvin really any different from her? Other than the fact that his hunger drove him to steal the powers of others, of course. Reg had called on Corvin’s powers more than once. It was different, because she didn’t intend to steal them all away from him. But she also didn’t have that big hole inside her that needed to be filled as he did.
She had felt Corvin’s hunger herself and she didn’t know how she would have survived having to deal with that pain all the time. She would have hunted to fill it too.
“He’s still human,” she said tentatively. “I know he is different in some ways, but he is not that different.”
“The soul eaters are not human. They are a very ancient race and have had years to learn how to imitate humans, but they are not human.”
Reg tried to reconcile that with what she knew. Corvin had said that his curse was usually passed from father to son. His mother had not been like him. Julian had said that there were female witches with the same affliction, so it wasn’t always passed from father to son. Corvin had admitted to having a wife a long time ago but had never said that she was one like him. How did that make any sense if humans and Corvin’s kind were incompatible?
“But… they can… uh… pair with humans,” she pointed out to Julian. “I mean… that’s the whole point to their glamour, isn’t it? To pair with witches—or warlocks—to steal their powers?”
“They are compatible,” Julian said, making an impatient gesture with his hand to push this argument away. “But they are not the same kind.”
“So if a human and a power drinker get together, what is the baby? I thought the curse was passed from father to son, usually.”
“They can have either one.”
“Then… they must be the same species. Right?”
Julian shook his head. “They are not the same. They are nonhuman. Predatory creatures that camouflage themselves to look human.”
Reg rolled her eyes. It was the first time she had heard this argument and she couldn’t reconcile it to what she had experienced. How could she get into Corvin’s head or he into hers? How could they reproduce? How could Corvin’s kind be allowed to mix in Black Sands society if he were not human? It couldn’t be true.
But then, she had learned that in the magical world, reproduction was not all the same as what Reg had learned on the playground and in science class. The fairies stole babies from other species and magically transformed them into fairies so that their nature was entirely different from what it had been and they had different physical attributes. It wasn’t just a change that could be attributed to clothing or diet or bearing. Calliopia was as different as she could be from Karol, her pixie sister. And then there was the whole thing about Norma Jean supposedly getting pregnant with Reg by an immortal, and all of the stories in mythology of the immortals bearing mortal children in bizarre circumstances and combinations.
“Corvin isn’t a monster,” she said tentatively. “He’s just like anyone else I know. Except for his curse.”
Julian closed his eyes and shook his head at her folly. “You are playing with fire,” he warned. “He is just waiting until you let down your guard. And when you do…”
“I can protect myself.”
“Until you can’t.”
“Well, I happen to like playing with fire,” Reg pointed out to him. “It’s kind of my thing.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It had been a long day. Reg let Julian drive her back home rather than transport herself directly there and let him find out about another of her powers. He knew far too much about her as it was. Julian opened his door to get out of the car at the same time as Reg.
“Stay put,” Reg told him. “I’m fine. I’ll let you know if I figure anything out. About Davyn. You’ll be among the first to hear.”
“I’ll walk you in,” Julian declared.
“I don’t need an escort. I’ll see myself in.”
Julian looked around. “How do you know that soul drinker isn’t close by, just waiting for you to come back home? He knows where you live. You cut him off; he will want to talk to you again.”
“He can’t come into the yard. He is barred from it. He can’t get into the garden or the cottage. I’ll be just fine there.”
“It isn’t safe,” Julian warned. “Associating with him, you open yourself up to all kinds of dangers. He could be here. You don’t know.”
“I do know. I would be able to feel him here.” Reg insisted. “Goodbye.” She slammed the passenger-side door closed.
Through the window, she could see Julian shaking his head at her. But he pulled his door shut and didn’t attempt to follow her or walk with her into the yard.
Reg was tired and riled up at the same time. First Corvin demanding to know where she had been and trying to control her life, and then Julian, her self-appointed guardian, trying to keep her from doing anything he might consider dangerous. As if Reg didn’t know what she was doing. She had a lot more experience than he did with Corvin’s kind. At least she assumed so. With Corvin, anyway. Even if Julian knew other power drinkers, he did not know Corvin. Warlocks were individuals, just like any other class of people. There were bound to be both bad ones and good ones. She couldn’t judge just by the reputation of the class. That was prejudice.
She paused at the gate to the backyard and took a quick look around. Corvin had startled her there before. It was as far as he could go before the wards would stop him. But looking around, she didn’t see him anywhere. He was probably pretty angry after Reg had hung up on him, but he hadn’t come to the house to confront her about it. She would already know about it.
Reg unlatched the gate, pushed it open, and entered the garden. She could feel the warm, welcoming glow of her home and the enchanted garden. It was a place she could be perfectly comfortable and at home. Safe from any outside influences. Julian had been able to enter the garden, but he wasn’t Corvin. And he wasn’t someone who had tried to enter with evil intentions. The fact that it was against the magical community’s rules to bar a magical investigator from entering was not something that Reg had ever discussed with Sarah. It had never come up. Sarah had not been cowed by Julian and his threats to arrest Reg or anyone who interfered with the investigation. Sarah knew people.
Reg didn’t sense that there was anyone in the yard who shouldn’t be there. She followed the stone path to the door of her cottage. Sarah appeared to be home in the big house. There were several lights on. Taking a moment to feel for Sarah’s presence, she knew that Sarah was there, along with a few guests. Maybe members of her coven.
Reg unlocked her door and let herself into the cottage. Starlight jumped down from the windowsill in her bedroom and came out to talk to Reg, meowing loudly about what he had seen outside and Reg being so late to feed him dinner.
“Oh, you’re just fine,” Reg told him sternly. She walked around the kitchen island to look down at the bowl on the floor. “You’ve even got kibble in your bowl, so it isn’t like you’re starving. You could have eaten that if you were hungry.”
Starlight meowed crossly a few more times, ending in a low vocalization that sounded almost like a growl.
“All right, food is coming,” Reg promised.
After feeding Starlight, Reg picked through the fridge, tasting a dish here and there, but not sure what she wanted to eat. Maybe she wasn’t really hungry. She should eat since it was suppertime, but it wouldn’t hurt her to skip a day. Her waistbands were getting tighter lately. It was nice not having to save and scrounge for food.
She sat down on the couch in front of the TV but didn’t turn it on. She stared at the blank screen, trying to decide what to do. She wasn’t sure she had made any headway on the case. She knew she had gotten close to Davyn, that he was there somewhere, but she didn’t know how to get him back or exactly where somewhere was.
But she really did know what she should do. She just didn’t feel like doing it.
Eventually, she picked up her phone and called Jessup.
“Reg!” Jessup’s voice was way too enthusiastic when she answered the phone. “Hi! I was trying to decide whether to call you.”
Reg cleared her throat and shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I was trying to decide whether to call you.”
“You… found something?” Jessup suggested.
“I don’t know. Not anything helpful. Nothing that the police can use.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. Tell me about it.”
“Well, I saw Julian today.”
“I talked to him on the phone. He didn’t seem like he had much to contribute to the case. He hadn’t heard from Davyn lately and didn’t even know he was missing. They hadn’t had any plans and hadn’t talked in the past few days.”
“Yeah. Doesn’t seem like he knows anything about it.”
“So you didn’t get anything from him either.”
“No. We went over to Davyn’s house together to see if there was anything out of place, or something that might suggest where he had gone or if someone had it out for him.”
