She gave a short, harsh laugh. Kenner had done just that. “For a while it got better. Moran took some units down in Building Four, and kept to himself. Mr. Kenner told me to stay clear of his units, and I did.
But then it got bad, real bad.”
“Bad, how?” I asked.
Flora shut her eyes and wrapped her arms around herself, but I could see a determination in her features to keep on talking. “I started seeing things, hearing things when I’d close up at night. I thought it was just my eyes playing tricks on me, but it kept happening.”
She let out a long breath. “Mr. Kenner started to act real strange, got mean as a junkyard dog. His eyes went funny, like he wasn’t in there anymore.” She shivered. “I didn’t watch many horror movies, but it was like something got in his head and made him someone else.”
She shook her head. “Not my imagination. Ghosts. Haints. And creatures that shouldn’t be. Like on TV, except real.” She was quiet for a moment, still rocking back and forth. “Then one day, I heard something that sounded like a man moaning, like he was gonna die. I went looking to see if someone got hurt, and I come around the corner and see Mr. Moran and this monster, and a whole lot of blood.”
Her voice got soft. “So much blood. Blood everywhere. And Mr. Moran looked at me, and his monster looked at me, too. Ugly as sin, with big sharp teeth like a shark and skin like a lizard, like what it might be if you crossed a man with a crocodile. And it was covered in blood.”
“Where was Mr. Kenner?” Teag asked gently.
Flora opened her eyes and met his gaze. “He was where the blood was coming from. They killed him.
They… took him apart. I ran.” She shook her head.
It was the same story she had told the court, the story no one believed. She hadn’t killed Fred Kenner, but what she saw had damaged her. Maybe she was safer in here. I counted her as one more of Moran’s victims, someone else to avenge. And I had one more question left to ask. “There was a man who came to the trial,” I said. “Who was he?”
Flora nodded. “Clockman,” she said. “He tried to warn me. He knew… He knew…”
The aide tapped Anthony on the shoulder. “Your time’s up,” he said. “I need to take her back to her room.”
Anthony, Teag and I rose. I leaned over toward Flora. “Thank you,” I murmured.
She seized my hand so suddenly, Teag jumped and the aide moved in to protect me. “Stop him,” she begged. “Stop him.”
The aide interposed himself, removing her hands from mine and hustled her away. I stared after her.
Stop Moran. Stop the demon. Silently, I made her the same promise I had made to Jimmy Redshoes. We’d make it right. Come hell or high water.
Chapter Twenty-Two
ANTHONY HAD TO go back to the office, so he dropped Teag and me off at the store after we were done interviewing Flora. Teag headed to his place, with a promise to do magically-enhanced Internet research in order to follow up on the information Flora had given us. I was looking forward to having a quiet evening at home.
I knew when I walked up to my door and Baxter wasn’t barking that Sorren was there. Sure enough, he and Baxter were sitting on the couch together in the dark. He lifted Baxter down to the floor and my little Maltese scampered over to greet me.
“You’re going to scramble his circuits if you keep glamoring him,” I said.
“If it counts to ingratiate me, I fed him.” Sorren’s face was halfway in shadow, but from what I could see, he seemed to be in much better shape than the last time I had seen him.
“How are you?”
He shrugged. “I’ve been worse. Immortality often means you can’t die, even when you want to.”
There wasn’t really any response I could make to that, so I let it go. “Any news from your sources?”
“People in my circles tend to move around a lot. Not all of them embrace modern conveniences, like cell phones. I have left messages. Whether or not we hear in a timely matter is hard to say. Over the centuries, one’s view of timeliness changes.”
“I saw an oil painting at the Historical Archive,” I said. The meeting with Mrs. Morrissey seemed like forever ago. “There’s a man who looks a great deal like you.”
A ghost of a smile flitted across his face. “I tried to be inconspicuous.” I chuckled. “Do you remember when it was painted?”
Sorren nodded. “It’s a curious thing about immortality. Mortals forget so much, yet live such a short while. We live so long, and forget nothing.” He met my gaze. “I’ve come to believe that’s part of the curse.”
“Is immortality a curse?”
Sorren’s expression grew pensive. “Sometimes I think so. Other times, not. I haven’t decided yet.”
“What do you know of white magic?” I decided an abrupt change of topic was appropriate.
“You mean, like you’ve been able to call on, using the stored memories in an object as a source of power?”
I nodded. Since I was self-taught when it came to my touch magic, I was always eager to learn. I hadn’t had a chance to discover what Uncle Evanston knew, and most of the time when Sorren was in town, there was too much going on for a lesson. I’d been making it up as I went, and I was coming to the conclusion that might not be a good thing.
Sorren paused. “I was fortunate to have Alard as my maker. He mentored me in the Dark Gift. Those whose makers are not so generous, or who lose their makers too young, are not so lucky.”
He shook his head. “Your ancestors were able to pass the store down from one generation to another with enough overlap to ‘train’ the incoming owner of Trifles and Folly. You were born with your gift, but how to use it doesn’t come naturally. Unfortunately, your Uncle Evan didn’t have the chance he’d hoped for to show you what to do.”
“The family said he had a heart attack,” I said quietly. “But that’s not true, is it?”
Sorren and I were long overdue for this conversation.
Sorren pressed his lips together and then shook his head again. “In a manner of speaking. His heart stopped abruptly.”
“Because someone – or something – killed him.” He nodded. “Yes.”
“Tell me.”
Sorren looked at me, and I saw the full sorrow of the centuries in his eyes. “Evan had your heart for adventure. And like you, he was a gifted psychometric. He inherited the store from his father, who also had your gift. But he had the chance to work with his father for a decade before the store fell to him.”
“Did any of my ancestors – the ones who owned Trifles and Folly – die of disease or old age?”
Sorren shook his head. “No. Although members of your family believe otherwise.”
I felt like the world around me was spinning. Baxter pawed at my leg to be picked up and I lifted him into my arms like a fuzzy little anchor to reality. Sorren’s words took my breath away, but at the same time, they weren’t a complete surprise.
“What happened to Uncle Evan?”
Sorren looked past me, as if he were reliving the memory. “We went looking for a particularly dangerous item, a watch that could enable the wearer to ‘jump’ into the skin of another person. The search took us to an old lunatic asylum in West Virginia,” he said quietly.
“Psychiatric hospital,” I corrected without thinking, then remembered that six hundred year-old vampires weren’t always politically correct.
He shrugged. “Words change, but not the beliefs of those who confine people.
“The Alliance wanted to return the watch to a safe storage place,” Sorren continued. “We were up against a very powerful enemy who wanted the watch for himself. I fought the enemy, and Evan went after the watch. He was supposed to just keep it out of the line of fire but he touched it –”