“As for the three daughters . . . Sharon is still alive—she lives in Canada and has never married. She became a schoolteacher and is eighty-two now. Eve is in Ecuador and she had two children, and five grandchildren. She never returned to the United States after her parents died. She’s seventy-eight. And Tansy was born in 1938. She had two children, and lived in Shoreline. She died in 2005 of cancer. Her husband died in 2008 of a heart attack.”
“So our aunt Tansy . . . she lived here. We could have met her . . .” I frowned, staring at the words on the page.
“You said we have cousins in the area. Are they Tansy’s children?” Camille straightened her shoulders and took another cookie.
He nodded. “Hester Lou and Daniel George Fredericks . . . Hester Lou was born in 1961. Daniel George was born in 1965. They are older than you, relatively speaking, though you outnumber them in actual years lived. But they’re both still quite healthy and happy. And they both live in this area.”
Camille stared at me, a question in her eyes. I could only answer it one way. I turned back to Carter.
“Do they know about us?”
He shook his head, then handed me a sheet of paper. “Walk softly, girls. This is bound to be a shock for them. They know about their aunts and uncles, but they don’t know about Maria. And they do not know about you. I cannot tell you what to expect in the way of a greeting from them. There are too many variables.”
Nodding, I took the piece of paper. “For good or ill, I think . . . it’s time for a family reunion.” I glanced at the sheet. Hester lived in Kirkland, and Daniel lived in Bellevue. We were sitting within half an hour’s drive of two cousins we hadn’t even known existed twenty minutes ago.
Camille shook her head. “This is one hell of a turn of events. I think I’m mildly in shock. But before we run off, hunting down family, we need to ask you a few questions about another matter.”
I tried to focus on what she was saying, but it was hard to turn off my thoughts. Would they resemble our mother in any way? Had Mother taken after her father in looks, or Theresa? Would they welcome us in, or freak out and push us away? I tried to clear my thoughts and turned my attention back to the matter at hand.
“We need to know whatever you have on the Farantino building. There’s daemonic activity going on there. Also . . . what was his name, again, Kitten? The man you were sent to . . . oblite? Is that the word?” Camille gave me one of her buck-up-and-get-with-it smiles.
I coughed, clearing my throat. “What we do to the souls we are ordered to cleanse is referred to as oblition. How we do it . . . is to obliterate them. Doesn’t sound very nice but that’s pretty much the long and short of it.”
She shrugged. “We’ve all done a lot of not-so-nice things. It is what it is.”
“True, that. And his name was Gerald Hanson. He was a lawyer at the Farantino Building, Carter.” Quickly, we outlined what had happened during the evening, starting with my orders to take out Hanson, and ending up with Grandmother Coyote’s visit.
Carter crossed to his desk, where he typed something into his computer. After a moment, he motioned us over. “I have a long history on the Farantino Building. I didn’t realize that actual gargoyles were in stasis there, but I will annotate that little fact. Let me see what we have here . . . yes, the building was built over a hundred years ago by Michael Farantino.”
“Hmm . . . hence the name of the building.” Camille leaned over his shoulder and he glanced at her with a look that I hoped she hadn’t noticed. Carter was part daemon, his mother a succubus, and there was a refined sensuality to him that bordered on scary.
“Yes, hence the name of the building,” was all he said. “I’ll note that Gerald Hanson was his great-grandson, and that Gerald died today.” As he quickly typed in the information, I slid the dossier on our relatives into my messenger bag, and refocused my attention.
“Let me see . . . we have a lot of ghostly activity taking place in that area of the city—”
“Please don’t tell us that the building is in the Greenbelt Park District!” A good share of our time during the last six months or more had been spent fighting ghosts and demons in that nasty little division of Seattle. The last thing I wanted was to troupe back there and deal with another haunting.
But Carter shook his head. “No, not at all. It’s up in the U-District, actually. Near Forty-fifth Street, off of Eleventh Avenue Northeast. Old brick building.”
The U-District? We had a center of daemonic activity hanging out in the University District? Oh wonderful, and how many college students had decided to go check out the weird-assed energy around the building? Just what we needed: amateur ghost hunters getting themselves in trouble. We’d already had that happen before and we didn’t need it happening again. My thoughts must have shown on my face, because Camille snorted.
She stood, arching her back in a stretch. “Delightful. And how many humans have gone missing over the years around the area? Especially the college kids out to prove the spooks exist?”
Carter’s answer surprised us. “Only a handful, and most of them were accounted for by all-too-human miscreants. Whatever the daemons are up to, I don’t think it’s the college kids who are in danger. There is a record of daemonic activity here, but so far, nothing is showing up on the radar as to what they’re after.”
“Well, that seems odd. No missing virgins? No gutted sacrifices lying around?” Daemons were cannier than demons, over all, but still . . . they were pretty ruthless and bloodthirsty.
“Nope.” Carter grinned at me. “You want I should give you a long gory list of victims?”
Snorting, I shook my head. “You know I don’t want that. You just surprised me. So if they aren’t out to subvert or sacrifice the FBHs, then what do you think they doing?”
“That seems to be our job to find out.” Camille accepted the printouts of the information Carter handed her. “Who owns the building now? We know that it doesn’t belong to Hanson anymore.”
Carter tapped a few more keys and up popped the info. “That would be Lowestar Radcliffe. There’s not much here about him. He appears to hold a degree from Yale in business management, but background info is sketchy. Information says he was born somewhere in India. I have no idea if that’s true. Picture of him looks odd but for the life of me, I can’t tell you if he’s mixed heritage or just an ordinary FBH.”
We took the packet of papers and thanked him. As we headed for the door, he stopped us. “Girls, be cautious in approaching your cousins.”
“Yeah, they may not welcome having mixed-breed relatives.” I stared at the papers in my hand. We’d been called Windwalkers all our lives—a derogatory term in Otherworld, used for someone with no roots, often used for half-breeds.
“That’s not the only reason.” Carter limped over to us. He winced and I had the feeling his leg was hurting him more than usual tonight. “There are other reasons to be cautious. They may embrace you, but they may also want to use you. Or they may be no-good low-life types. You never can know, until you meet them. I didn’t have time to vet the information.”
Camille cocked her head. “So, how did you come by this in the first place?”
Carter blushed then—I’d never seen the demigod lose his cool and it kind of tickled me. It was his turn to stare at his feet. “I . . . it was a gift. Someone paid me to look into your background as a gift to you.”
“Who?” The only person I could think of that might do so was Chase. “Was it Chase?”
But Carter shook his head. “The party in question asked to remain anonymous. And unless you feel like testing my powers, let it be. There was no ulterior motive. I would never do anything to deliberately hurt you, know that.”