I excused myself and went back to see how he was doing. When I opened the door, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, his hair tousled, his T-shirt wrinkled.
“My place was destroyed, wasn’t it?” he said as I walked to the bed and sat beside him.
“I think we can repair it, but yeah, it’s in pretty bad shape.”
“And I suppose everything else I think happened last night really did happen.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“I remember a coyote killing someone and Elliott Hesslan’s daughter lighting herself on fire.”
“That all happened.”
“Damn.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “You know, I do fine with the phasings on my own. If that’s your idea of a good time, you can count me out next month.”
I laughed, though only for a few seconds. “How are you feeling?”
“Not too bad, considering. Hungry. You got any food?”
“Yeah. Kona and her partner are in the living room. They needed a statement on what happened last night.”
He nodded and looked around the bedroom. “I don’t suppose anyone thought to crawl inside my place and get me a change of clothes.”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Oh, well.” He stood and followed me out into the living room where he greeted Kona with a hug and introduced himself to Kevin. I fixed the two of us some scrambled eggs and toast, and, as I cooked, finished my conversation with Kona and Kevin. When they left, my father and I went outside and sat on the front steps to eat our breakfast.
I expect that he felt as muddled as I did, and for a time we ate in silence.
Then Saorla popped into view in front of us, and we both dropped our forks, just about in unison.
I cast a quick warding to protect both of us. The necromancer laughed at the touch of my magic.
“You still believe that your wardings can stop me?”
“I have no idea. But as long as I can cast, I’ll keep protecting myself.”
She shrugged, as if she didn’t care one way or another. “I did not come to kill you, though kill you I will.” She smiled. “Yes, Namid’skemu protects you still as part of the bargain we struck. But with time his vigilance will slacken, and then I will have my revenge.”
“Well, until then,” my dad said, “why don’t you leave us the hell alone?”
“I miss you, Leander Fearsson. I miss being in your mind. I miss hurting you.”
“Forgive me if I don’t say the feeling’s mutual.”
“Perhaps you would miss me more if I looked like this.” Her body flickered like a dying light bulb, much as it had the night before, and she stood before us in my mother’s form, her hair down, the same cornflower dress bringing out the blue in her eyes.
“Get out of here,” I said. “Before I summon Namid.”
“You sound like a child. You will call for Daddy if I don’t leave you alone?”
She was right, that was exactly how I sounded. But I didn’t have the power to drive her off on my own. My father’s face had gone ashen, but he continued to stare at her. I don’t think he was capable of doing anything else.
“Go,” I said, putting as much menace into the word as I could.
She laughed and faded slowly, still in my mother’s body. “Until next time,” she said, the voice and accent all Saorla.
Once she was gone, my father took a long shuddering breath.
“Sorry,” he said. “I should have . . . I don’t know. I should have done something.” He set his plate aside.
I did as well. Neither of us had finished our meals, but my appetite was gone, as was my dad’s, I’m sure. I stood, walked a few steps down the path toward the street, to the place where Saorla had stood. Then I turned.
“What happened, Dad?”
I blurted the question, not even bothering to explain what I meant. He knew: my mom’s death, and that of Elliott Hesslan. The question had been burning inside me for years, through all the accusations and whispered rumors, through all the dead, silent moments we had spent together. God knew I’d wanted to ask a thousand times, and always I swallowed the words. It was none of my business, I had told myself, though of course it was. He’d tell me when he was ready. But I had known that he wouldn’t. Only now, after all that had happened in the past few days, had I finally given voice to that desperate need to know. And again, I had sounded like a little kid, unable to contain myself any longer.
He regarded me from the stairs, his eyes sunken, his shoulders slumped. Already, I regretted asking. No matter how much I wanted to know, he didn’t deserve to be put through having to tell me.
I opened my mouth to say as much, but he held up a hand, stopping me. A tear spilled down his cheek and then another.
“I should have told you a long time ago,” he said, emotion roughening the words. “But I didn’t know how, and I’m not always able to . . . well, you know.”
“I do know. You don’t have to tell me. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“Of course you should have. You should have asked me when you were a kid, but I understood that you couldn’t. That was my fault. I shouldn’t have waited for you. But I was chicken.”
He buried his face in his hands, and I thought he was crying. But when he lifted his head again a few seconds later, his eyes were dry.
“She should have left me. The phasings were wearing me down, and I was drinking too much, afraid of what the moon was doing to my brain. She should have left. But she loved me, I guess. And she was nuts about you, and she knew I was as well. ‘A boy needs his father.’ She said that to me the one time I asked her why she continued to stick around. She wouldn’t leave because that would have meant taking you, and she didn’t want to do that.
“But she was angry, and hurt, and she needed someone. We’d met the Hesslans a couple of times-mutual friends, I think. It’s funny, I don’t remember the name of the couple who introduced us. But Elliott and Mary seemed nice enough. I didn’t give them much thought. Dara did, though. She was friends with Mary first, but she and Elliott both liked to garden. That was what did it in the end. Tomato patches and marigolds.” His laugh tipped over into a sob. But after a moment he went on in a low quaver. “I don’t think she was out there searching for someone to replace me. Not really. But like I say, she needed more than I could give her, and he was the one she found.
“Thing was, he was looking for her in particular.”
That I hadn’t expected. “What?”
Dad nodded. “He was after her. After me, really. But through her. Hesslan was into dark magic, and even then there were beings like that one.” He pointed to where the necromancer had been standing.
“Like Saorla?” I said.
“Yeah, like her. For all I know, it was her. He started the affair with your mom and made her believe that he loved her. But then he started asking questions, trying to make her tell him stuff about me and my magic. At least that’s what I think happened. I pieced most of it together after the fact. But I’m right. I know I am.”
“So he was asking questions,” I prompted.
“That’s right. And she got suspicious. Smart lady, your mom. She figured out that he was a weremyste, too, and she was pissed. When she worked out that he was using her to get to me, I think she tried to break it off. He must have threatened to expose the affair to everyone, including you, because . . .” He took a long breath. “Because she killed him. And then she killed herself.”
“She killed him,” I repeated in a whisper.
Dad nodded. “That much I know for certain. I know how to read a crime scene, and I was the one who found them.” His voice had gone flat, and his gaze was unfocused. “They were in a hotel. I’d followed them there a week or so before, and that night I was going to confront them. Never got the chance. She stabbed him in the heart, and then used the same knife to cut her carotid artery. She was dead in minutes.