I remembered the body rolled in the carpet behind the couch. And the girlish bedroom, dusty and closed off. Neither husband nor daughter had lived there in years. I did a search for Stone but he had disappeared off the map. So. Hubby might be wearing a carpet, but he wasn’t alive.
Reach had provided me with a file on Shiloh. The contents were thin. Shiloh had been a mediocre student, better at art and poetry than math and science, and had disappeared at age fifteen. And reappeared in New Orleans, in a shelter for runaway teens. Crap. Shiloh had run to New Orleans—Leo’s city. The chill I’d been fighting settled in my bones.
Shiloh disappeared from the shelter before her mother could get to her. The police report said three of the girl’s friends had watched as she was yanked into a dark car, maybe a Lincoln or a Park Avenue. The car squealed off before the friends could do anything. Shiloh had been kidnapped. In New Orleans. In Leo’s main power base.
Quickly, I minimized the screen and opened a different file, one provided by NOPD, listing all the witch children who disappeared in their city, kidnapped and never found. Shiloh E. Stone was on the list. I compared the date of Shiloh’s kidnapping to the dates other witch young had vanished. Three others had gone missing in the same month. “Oh crap,” I whispered. I knew what this case was about, now. As with most things vampy, this situation went back a lot of years, the originating event buried beneath the weight of time. But now I had the single thread that tied the disconnected parts together. Shiloh Everhart Stone.
I opened more of my own files and discovered that the policeman who had taken the report was R.A. Ferguson; he had filed the report as a runaway, not as a kidnapping. Shiloh was a witch kid. He hadn’t cared about a nonhuman child who disappeared, had, in fact, hated them. I had met Ferguson, just before an ancient vamp had rolled him and sucked the hatred out of him along with his blood. I hadn’t tried to stop the vamp.
Evangelina had lost a witch daughter in Leo’s city, in Leo’s territory, likely to the vamp witches who were sacrificing witch children to the pink blood-diamond. They’d been trying to create a cure for the long-chained—scions who never found sanity. Evangelina had known that. She had claimed that her appearance in New Orleans was for parley—to negotiate peace between vamps and witches, and compensation to the witches for the loss of their children, not that there could ever be sufficient compensation for the loss of a child. But she had really gone there to kill the man she held responsible for her child’s death. Leo Pellissier.
Evan hadn’t known about Shiloh running away and being kidnapped, which meant it was likely that Molly hadn’t known either. Evangelina had kept it all secret until she spelled her sisters to enact vengeance on Leo. Shiloh had run away from home. Had Evangelina killed Marvin by accident, later? Or had Shiloh seen Evil Evie kill her father and then run away? Crap. I’d never had a family, but as an investigator, I knew that family secrets were the very worst. They destroyed so much. Sometimes they destroyed everything, as if, after decades in the grave, the dead reached out to shatter the living.
Molly had never told me the story of Shiloh, so Evangelina had likely not told her sisters. Probably because she had killed her husband. I called Evan and left the info about Shiloh on his voice mail. He needed to know. They all did. But for some reason, I didn’t mention what I feared had happened to Marvin Stone. Coward. I was a coward.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Eat Humans When They Go to the Dark Side
Staring at the computer screen, I put it all together. Evangelina knew that Leo’s now-true-dead scions killed Shiloh. The witch was trying to get back at Leo for the decades of murders, but she wasn’t stupid enough to try to kill him in open confrontation. She had appeared in New Orleans, allied with the wolves, tried to help them kill Leo in his lair by creating a modified hedge of thorns that let the wolves in. Unrelated, but associated, I took a gig in my old hometown and came to Asheville. When the weres got out of jail, they had followed me here from New Orleans to exact their own brand of vengeance. Evangelina—who had been kicked out of New Orleans by Leo—found out that weres had followed me to Asheville and lured them to her home, her place of power. And there she created a spell or upped the power on an existing one, with their two-natured blood. The spell was intended to kill Leo, who was dead and undead—one of the two-natured. It all made sense.
I dialed Bruiser. When he picked up, before he could say more than hello, I said, “Tell me who suggested to Leo that Lincoln Shaddock was ready to be master of his own city.” When he didn’t answer, I said, “Was it you?”
“Yes.” He sounded bewildered, and just a tad defensive. “I recommended that he go to the Appalachians and meet with Lincoln. Amy Lynn Brown had come out of the devoveo in record time. It was a good call. Why do you ask?”
Instead of answering, I asked a question. “And Leo was going?”
“At first, yes. Then he changed his mind. Why. Do. You ask?”
I closed my eyes. “I ask because Evangelina had you spelled and open to suggestion. She set this whole thing in place, to get Leo here, in her hometown, where her coven gave her power to draw on. And she thought you could force the issue.” The main reason Leo had agreed to the parley was because of the location of her coven, though he never knew that.
I heard Bruiser’s slow intake of breath. I almost felt his shock through the airwaves. My cell beeped. It was Molly’s number. “I’ll get back to you.” I cut Bruiser off and said, “Hi.”
“I’m sorry,” Molly said. Before I could reply she went on. “For not believing you about my sister. For not trusting that you knew what you were doing. For not standing up to Big Evan when he was an ass about you.”
I heard Evan in the background, say, “Hey. No fair.”
“Jane is my friend. You were an ass. Don’t let it happen again,” Molly said, her words muted, her mouth turned away from the phone. I heard Evan grumble in the background. To me she said, “The ass says he’s sorry.” I didn’t believe that Big Evan had apologized, but I would accept it.
“My sisters and I are meeting at two p.m. at Evangelina’s to take a look at the demon she trapped, and bind it back to darkness if we can. Evangeline is teaching a cooking class at the Biltmore House all day, and won’t be back until after dark. Big Evan analyzed the photos you sent and he thinks that daylight is the best time for us to neutralize the working. Can you be there?”
I thought about taking Derek and the boys to take Evie out, and about all the collateral damage that might result if she fought with demon-backed witch spells. I discarded the idea. “I’ll be there at one forty-five,” I said. “And Molly? I used Evangelina’s hair and one of her scarves to get inside without the spell taking me over.”
A long silence followed before Molly sighed into the phone. “I still can’t accept that she used blood magic,” Molly said. “But if you got in with her genetic material then, well. Oh hell.” Her voice was clotted with tears. “See you soon, Big-Cat.”
Satisfied that I had done all I could, I set my phone to wake me by twelve thirty, pulled the covers from the foot of the neatly made bed and fell asleep. Hard.