“There was more than one?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, her eyes glazing over as she remembered. “They were like miniature suns, fireballs covered in eyes, lighting up the darkness of the swamp.”
Remy physically reacted. The Thrones. What the hell did they have to do with this?
“They weren’t happy with my daddy at all,” she mused with a smile. “Wasn’t long after that he disappeared . . . but not before telling me to watch out for folks looking for my mother . . . and to show them that it wasn’t healthy for them to be doing so.”
Remy’s mind was buzzing as he tried to keep up.
“What was your father’s name?”
“Pearly,” she said with a huge smile. “Pearly Gates.”
A gaping pit opened in Remy’s stomach.
“Pearly Gates?” he repeated, just to be sure he had heard correctly, although he knew he had.
Izzy nodded. “I don’t remember him as good as I’d like, but what I do know is that he was something special.” She paused, lost in a memory. “I remember him being kinda sad,” she said after a moment. “Like he had done something bad, and he was trying to make up for it. But he was good to me and my mama, and he made me promise to be strong when Mama, and then he, had to go away.”
Tears had started to leak from her eyes, trailing down her high cheekbones, and Izzy quickly wiped them away.
“And I have been strong,” she said. “Strong for a very long time.”
Jon set his half-drunk mug of coffee down at his feet.
“Is that it then?” he asked, obviously exasperated. “The vision I was given goes no further. If she’s not here . . .”
“Don’t give up just yet,” Remy said, cautiously optimistic. Things were suddenly . . . strangely, falling into place. “Your mother and father,” he said to Izzy. “You wouldn’t happen to have any photos of them, would you?”
Izzy stared at him, her demeanor very still. It was almost as if she didn’t want to share what little she had of her parents with them.
“I don’t have much,” she said. “It’s practically nothing.”
“That’s fine,” Remy said. “I would just like to see them . . . if that’s all right.”
He could feel Jon staring at him, anxious to know what he was up to.
Izzy hesitated.
“Please?” Remy flashed her a smile that he’d been told once or twice was quite charming, although that had come from his wife, and she’d had a tendency to lie to make him feel better, or to get what she wanted.
But it worked this time too. Izzy got up from her chair, leaving the cramped living room space and disappearing through a doorway into what Remy figured was her bedroom.
“What’s this about?” Jon asked. “How could her pictures help us in—”
“Trust me,” Remy told him, as the woman returned carrying a wrinkled paper bag.
“I’ve been meaning to get a book,” she said, plopping down into her seat and opening the bag. “Y’know, one of those books you put pictures in?”
“A photo album?” Remy suggested.
“Yeah, yeah, a photo album . . . I need one of those.”
She removed a stack of old photos and began to shuffle through them. “Most of these are just friends who helped raise me after my folks were gone.”
And then her face lit up with a smile as she stopped at one photo in particular. “Here it is,” she said. “I guess she was quite the singer when she was young.”
Hesitantly, she handed the picture over to Remy.
Remy recognized the woman at once—much younger, of course, but there was no mistaking Fernita Green.
“This is your mother?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Your mother is Fernita Green,” he said.
Izzy’s face scrunched up. “No.” She took the picture back. “My mother’s name is Eliza Swan.”
Remy’s heart began to race. His mind immediately went to his many visits with the old woman he knew as Fernita Green, her missing memories, how she was looking for something very important that she’d lost.
Now Remy knew what that something was. And he also knew that he might just have put a very good friend in a lot of danger.
Jon was staring at him, trying to read the expression on his face.
“What is it?” he started to ask, but was interrupted by Izzy, who was handing another photograph to Remy.
“This is the only one I have of my dad,” she said. “I don’t know what it was for, or who even took it, but one of the Daughters gave it to me to remember him by.”
The picture was old and grainy. It looked as though it might have been taken inside some sort of club. All the patrons were black, and Remy recognized a young Fernita Green—Eliza Swan—singing on a stage.
“Daddy’s the one in the front row staring at Mama as if there wasn’t another living person on the planet,” Izzy said proudly.
The photo was black-and-white, and the man whom Izzy pointed out as her father was a tad blurry, but he looked pretty much the same as the last time Remy had seen him, other than having a little bit more hair—and being black.
Remy knew Pearly Gates by another name.
He knew him as Francis, and suddenly things became a whole lot more interesting.
And dangerous.
“We have to leave,” Remy said, standing quickly. “We have to get back to Massachusetts right away.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Hell
The memories actually helped to lessen the pain.
Francis let his mind go, allowing the buried recollections to float to the surface as they attempted to squeeze themselves between what he did remember, changing the past to something altogether new.
Brockton, Massachusetts: 1953
Eliza was crying.
She understood why it had to be this way, but it didn’t make it any easier to accept.
“How much will it take from me?” she asked softly.
Pearly knelt at the base of the wall, drawing strange symbols with a black paint that he’d made from crushing hard-shelled beans grown inside a dead man’s skull, and mixing the powder with a bit of blood from each of them.
“Most,” he said, working on the symbols from memory. They had to be laid out just right, or they wouldn’t work.
“You?” she asked, her voice trembling. “Izzy?”
The mention of their child just about broke him. He had never imagined he could feel such pain.
“I’ll mostly be gone,” he said, feeling as if the blade of his Enochian dagger had been thrust through his heart. This whole situation was killing him, but he kept telling himself over and over again that it was for her own good—it would keep her alive.
If he didn’t . . . if they stayed together . . . she was as good as dead.
“You’ll remember me as somebody you knew . . . but little more than an acquaintance.”
The forces of Heaven wanted Eliza Swan dead, and Pearly was going to do everything in his power to see that they didn’t get their way. The magick originally used to hide her from the Thrones would work on beings of that power level for only so long, which was why Malachi had suggested something more . . . permanent.
Eliza began to sob, and Pearly had to fight the urge to go to her, to take her into his arms and tell her that everything would be all right.
Because then he’d be lying.
Everything wasn’t going to be all right.
When he finished this spell, her memory would be incomplete; huge gaps of her past would be missing; characteristics that defined her as who she was as a person, gone.
In effect, she would be somebody else.
The elder had told him to take her away, to hide her from the eyes of those who would do her harm. He still wasn’t sure why Malachi was so keen to protect her, other than the fact that he had said she was special . . . and important for the future. It made Pearly a little uncomfortable, but he would do anything to protect Eliza.