Hunt the Moon

Page 28

“That is . . . somewhat terse,” Mircea agreed. “Surprisingly so, considering the Circle’s intelligence network.”
I shot him a look. “Has yours done any better?”
He grinned. “Now, why would we be checking on your mother?”
“Because you check on everyone?”
“It’s Kit, you know,” he told me mournfully, talking about the Senate’s chief spy. “I can’t do a thing with him.”
I ignored that for the bullshit it was. “What did you find?”
“Little more than that, I’m afraid,” he admitted. “Your mother was extremely . . . elusive. My people even had difficulty finding a venue for tonight. She rarely went out, and when she did, it was usually to small dinner parties of ten or twelve people, which wouldn’t have allowed you to see without being seen.”
“What about her background?”
“She was adopted by the Pythian Court from a school in Des Moines, one of those for magical orphans run by the Circle.”
I nodded; Jonas had said the same. And it wasn’t too surprising. The Circle ran a bunch of those schools, and not just for kids with no parents. They also locked up—excuse me, benevolently housed—kids who had families but who also had talents of which they disapproved—necromancers, firestarters, jinxes, telekenetics, etc. I assumed the orphans got out at age eighteen or whatever; the others . . . sometimes they never did.
It was something I was working to change, and not just because it was appallingly unfair to be locked up simply for the crime of being born. But also because if I hadn’t ended up at Tony’s, I might have been in one of those pseudoprisons myself. Nobody was afraid of clairvoyants, most of whom were assumed to be frauds, anyway. But the talent I’d inherited from my father was another story.
Having ghost servants who hung around, feeding off you and occasionally doing an errand or two in return, was seen as Highly Suspicious Behavior. Maybe because my father had refined it to an art form. According to rumors, he’d had his own ghost army, which he’d used in an attempt to seize control of the notorious Black Circle. The coup hadn’t worked and he’d ended up on the run, but that didn’t change the fact that he’d been powerful enough to try. And power like that would have gotten me put away real quick.
But my mother hadn’t had it. Which made me wonder what she’d been in for. “What was she in for?” I asked Mircea, who was savaging some poor bunny, apparently with relish.
He swallowed. “Nothing. Her records merely said that she was dropped off as an infant by person or persons unknown, with a note giving her name and birth date. The administrators assumed that a teenage mother had wanted to get rid of an embarrassing responsibility.”
“And the name?”
“There were no magical families by the name of O’Donnell in the area at that time. There were several in other parts of the country, but Kit found none who fit the requisite profile. He thinks the mother might have given the child the father’s last name, and that the father might have been human.”
I didn’t have to ask why that was a problem. Humans outbred the magical community by something like a thousand to one. Even assuming O’Donnell wasn’t a wholly made-up name to begin with, sorting through the number of possible human fathers would be—
Well, it wasn’t likely to happen. Not to satisfy my curiosity, anyway.
“Okay,” I said, moving on. “So the court finds her, probably because they keep a lookout for particularly strong clairvoyants.”
Mircea nodded and stole a fry.
“And then she joins the Pythian Court. And then the record scratches, at least according to Jonas.”
“And according to Kit. The Pythian Court is a separate, self-governed entity and does not have to vet its members through the Circle—or anyone else. The court tells us what it wants, when it wants, and has traditionally been . . . less than forthcoming.” Mircea shot me a suspiciously innocent look. “I think Kit is waiting impatiently for your accession, when he will finally have a conduit to all that lovely information.”
I snorted. Yeah. He could keep on waiting. I wasn’t his freaking all-access pass.
Mircea smiled. “This should prove . . . entertaining.”
“Something like that.” I drank wine. “So, anyway, Jonas dated Agnes, or whatever you want to call it, for thirty years, yet he never got the story about what happened with my mother. He said she became angry whenever he brought it up, so he mostly didn’t. Which means the only thing I have to go on is what happened afterward.”
“When she and your father went to live with Antonio.”
“And that’s what I don’t get.” I said, swirling a rib around in the gooey sauce. “My father was some big-time dark mage, right? So how does someone like that end up working for a rat like Tony?”
He pursed his lips. “It wasn’t a bad choice. Many of the mages who work for us have needed to disappear for one reason or another. Admittedly, most of them are running from the Silver Circle, not the Black, but the same rule applies: if someone is looking for you in one world, go to another. And the Circle often forgets that our world exists.” He smiled a little ferally. “Or it would like to.”
“But Tony? He couldn’t have done better than that?”
“With his abilities, doubtless. But you forget, dulceata, a more prominent court would also have been more risky, as it might have come under scrutiny by one or both of the circles. Whereas Antonio . . .”
“Wasn’t worth their time.”
One muscular shoulder rose in a shrug. “He was to the local branch, but I doubt he so much as registered at the national level. It was why I left you with him, if you recall.”
I nodded. After Mircea had found out about my existence, he’d considered bringing me to his court. But as a senator, he was watched constantly, and he’d been afraid that the Circle might get curious about me. And since I was a magic worker, not a vampire, he could have been forced to hand me over.
“Okay, I understand that,” I said, chewing thoughtfully. “My parents wanted to fly under the radar, so they hid out with a loser nobody cared about. I just don’t understand why they chose him.”
“Ah, now, that I can answer.”
It was so unexpected that it took me a moment to react. I’d hit so many brick walls trying to find out something about my parents, that I almost expected it now. “You can?”
“Yes. Well,” Mircea hedged. “I can tell you what Antonio told me. He said that he and your father had had business dealings for some years before Roger asked him for refuge.”
“What kind of business dealings?”
“You know that Antonio remained in the money-lending business?”
“He was a loan shark,” I corrected. Among a lot of other things. If he could make a buck off it, Tony had wanted in.
“As you say. In any case, many of his clients found that they could not repay their debts, and he was ruthless about confiscating whatever had been put up for collateral.”
“Yeah. We always had stuff sitting around,” I said, remembering. “Cars, boats—even a light airplane once. And then there was all the junk from the houses. I got in trouble for finger-painting on a Chippendale sideboard once, but how did I know? It was just another scarred, old table.”
“But antiques—even finger-painted ones—are easy to move,” Mircea pointed out. “That wasn’t true of magical devices, particularly unstable ones. They had to be disposed of properly, and such disposal is not cheap.”
I nodded. “You have to call in a Remainder.” They’d occasionally come to the farmhouse, men in stained coveralls who carted away boxes of suspicious charms, amulets and potions before they blew up in anyone’s face.
“And you know how fond Antonio was of spending money,” Mircea said. “But he couldn’t leave the items in place and risk having them burn down his investments, and he couldn’t abandon them somewhere without possibly coming to the attention of the Circle, which monitors that sort of thing. For a long time, he had to pay up.”
“I don’t see what this has to do with my father.”
“Antonio told me that Roger contacted him offering to dispose of any such volatile devices for free.”
I frowned. “For free? But isn’t that work kind of . . . risky?”
“Very. One of my cooks likes to tell the story of the time he bought a growth charm to use on his kitchen garden. But he didn’t monitor it properly, and it went past the expiration date. Shortly thereafter, he woke up to a garden of giants—squash as long as canoes, watermelons the size of small cars, tomatoes as large as beach balls—all of which had burst because of too-rapid growth. He said the mess was . . . astonishing.”
“He’s just lucky he didn’t have it in his room,” I said, getting a vision of a head swollen to the size of a beach ball.
“Indeed. Remainders earn their money.”
“Yet my father offered the service for free. Didn’t that make anyone suspicious?”
“Yes. But Antonio was not the type to turn down a good deal. After your father came to work for him, he developed the theory that he was using the leftover magic to feed his ghosts.”
I shook my head. “Ghosts require human energy. Some old charm wouldn’t do them any more good than it would you or me.” Less, really. It wasn’t like they needed to grow hair or lose weight or whiten their teeth.
“Then it remains a mystery, I’m afraid.”
Like everything else about my parents. I sighed and contemplated my almost-empty plate. I couldn’t possibly eat another thing. Except maybe that one last rib . . .
“You met him, didn’t you?” I asked, slathering on the sauce.
Mircea nodded. “Antonio sent him to court a few times as his representative.” His lips quirked. “I think because his manners were somewhat more refined than those of most of Antonio’s stable.”