Out of Mind

Chapter 23

Ben had woken up to find Willow sitting on the edge of the bed. Try as he might, he had not managed to lure her back between the sheets with him.

In the heat and passion of the night Willow had accepted his certainty that her sister was safe. With the cool of early morning, she wanted to see Marley for herself.

With Mario gamboling beside, they had jogged through the quiet city to get to Royal Street, and Ben had done what he had to do to get a meaningful kiss before they went into the Court of Angels. He hauled Willow off her feet and persuaded her with his mouth that she should wind herself as close to him as she could and give everything she had to the effort.

“It wasn’t enough,” he had whispered to her, referring to their repeated lovemaking earlier. “There will have to be more, and soon.”

Her great, sleepy green eyes had turned a darker shade before she nipped his bottom lip and he set her down.

They tiptoed through the side gates, leaving them ajar to avoid more noise, and made their way into the courtyard. Willow put her finger to her lips and pushed Ben into the cover of an oleander bush. She picked Mario up and put him into Ben’s arms. “Give me time to make sure Marley’s there,” she whispered. “If she is, I need to talk to her. As soon as I’m inside…well, whatever you decide to do, look after Mario.”

She walked a few steps and glanced back. “When I’m finished I’ll check Sykes’s flat to see if you’re there keeping the bed warm.” She hovered again. “I wish Nat would let us know they’ve found Chris.”

Ben flared his nostrils and nodded. He stepped deeper into the shade of the bush. With exaggerated care, Willow climbed the green-painted iron steps to Gray and Marley’s flat and tapped lightly on the door.

He fantasized that the Fishers might not be at home and Willow would be in bed with him, where she belonged, within minutes.

Wearing a long pink robe and with her titian hair mussed into a madly curly mop, Marley opened the door—peered out at Willow, then pulled her inside and closed the door again.

So much for getting Willow back as soon as he’d like. He leaned against the wall, one foot crossed over the opposite ankle, and contemplated the lengthy shower they had taken together at one point—Willow’s idea. He turned up a corner of his mouth. The girl had a fertile imagination.

Mario gave one of his “down” wriggles and was soon trotting from planting bed to planting bed, angel to griffon, on his major pleasure in life: reestablishing territory.

Five in the morning was not Ben’s favorite time to be abroad, but as he grew more awake he began to enjoy the piquant snap of cool air.

His phone vibrated in his jeans pocket and he worked it out. His sister, Poppy, was calling. “Yes,” he said, keeping his voice low. “It’s a bit early, sis.”

“I need to talk to you, Ben. It’s way overdue.”

Ben glanced toward the Fishers’ flat. “We’ll do it. Just not right now, okay?”

“Is Willow with you?”

He frowned. “You sure you meant to ask me that?”

Her sigh whistled on the phone. “Maybe not. Not that way.”

“If you want to talk, talk. I’ve got a few minutes but if I have to go I’ll call you later.”

She was silent.

“It’s not that I mean to rush you, Poppy. Stuff’s happening.”

“Dangerous stuff?”

His sister had an unnerving history of knowing when Ben hit rocky roads. “It could be dangerous,” he told her. Lying wouldn’t put her off. “But under control.”

“Let’s be straight with each other. The Millets just went through some weird stuff. The police tried to cover it up, but we’ve all known.”

“Who is we all?”

“The obvious ones. Montrachets, Fortunes—all the families.”

All the paranormal families in New Orleans. Of course the underground they shared was quietly humming—and gearing up for a potential all-out attack by a hostile force.

“Now there’s this new flare-up with Willow,” Poppy said.

“Where are Liam and Ethan?”

Another silence followed before Poppy said, “What is it? Aren’t I up to dealing with this as well as they are? I used to be good enough to confide in, Ben.”

“Oh, God, not now with the equality phobia. It was just a question. I’m going to want to talk to all of you.”

“I haven’t seen them this morning,” Polly said stiffly. “But I’m available now.”

“Okay.” He had to navigate these waters with care. “I’m in the middle of something. As soon as I’m free, I’ll get in touch with you—could be a bit later. That okay?”

Poppy didn’t answer immediately, then said, “You didn’t say if Willow is with you. I want to talk to her, too.”

Ben didn’t like the sound of that. “Willow isn’t here. When I see her I’ll give her the message.”

“I’ll wait to hear from you.” Poppy didn’t sound happy.

When he hung up, he looked around for Mario and up at Gray and Marley’s flat. The door was still closed and there was no sign of Mario.

The courtyard seemed especially green this early in the day. A subtle breeze quivered through the leaves and flowers, ferns resembled lacy swords and the sound from the fountain was like a thin stream of finely crushed ice.

Ben started an anticlockwise circuit of the many stone sculptures. He had the thought that at some time the Millet children might have made a game of knowing exactly how many there were and hunting for them—maybe racing to see who could be first to find all of them.

He located four very quickly. One of those was so old the face had worn smooth, but the stone had a pink tint that wind and weather had polished to a sheen. Willow had tried to sketch a duplicate of the picture in the book she believed she had seen at her office so he knew what he was looking for.

She had seen it. He wasn’t dealing with someone who might fool around and make up stories, not anymore. She never had, but neither had she shared visions or other phenomena. And that brought him to last night’s bizarre drama. He hoped Marley would be able to talk Willow through what that had meant. Their talents were closer to each other’s than his were to either of them.

Changing sound slightly, the water fell as if it were individual small chunks rather than crushed ice. Each one plinked. Ben turned to the fountain, where the water looked the same as ever—except for a phosphorescence that emerged from the base of the fountain in fragile puffs the color of cloudy, blue-green crème de menthe.

He worked his way toward a corner of the courtyard where the foliage was dense. Three figures, no more than six inches high, surprised him. He hadn’t noticed them before.

When he crouched to study them, he found they resembled pointed-eared fairies rather than angels.

Not an elegant angel among them, but they made him think that he had no idea of the dimension of the figure they were looking for.

Keeping an eye on the Fishers’ front door, Ben continued on. He was halfway around the courtyard when he encountered Mario tucked behind an appealing griffon even more red than the dog himself. “Hey, buddy,” Ben said. “Think you’ve found a brother there?”

Mario sat up, sentry-straight, his whiskers twitching back and forth.

“I see why she likes you,” Ben said, bending over to scratch the dog between his ears. Mario’s front feet danced on the soil, and Ben could just about feel the little critter’s agitation.

“Come on,” Ben said. “Let’s finish up. At least I’ve got a few new candidates to report.”

His phone vibrated again. Feeling irritable, he answered, but not before seeing Nat Archer’s contact. “Nat,” he said. “What’s up?”

“It’s a frickin’ nightmare,” Nat said darkly. “Willow’s not answering. D’you know where she is?”

“I might.”

“Obstructing—”

“Okay, I know where she is and she isn’t going anywhere. What’s on your mind?”

“Has Chris contacted her?”

Mario ran a circle around the griffon and sat behind it again. Ben frowned. “No, he hasn’t, and she’s worried sick about him.”

“If anything was normal here I wouldn’t be spilling my guts to you. But Bucky and I don’t have a support system, other than a couple of cops they’d probably certify if they found out what they believe. We’ve got a new weird case, possibly two.

“A woman name of Caroline Benet came to New Orleans to get on a cruise to the Caribbean. She checked into a hotel overnight so she’d be here in plenty of time. That’s it. End of story. Her baggage is gone, she’s gone, her bed was never slept in. She never got on the ship. They didn’t even realize it at first. Somehow she was checked in for boarding and the baggage put in her cabin—only that was forty-eight hours ago and if she isn’t overboard, she never got on in the first place.”

Ben rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “And that ties in with our issues how?”

“Damned if I know for sure. No one remembers seeing her get on the ship. The hotel does say she checked in for sure, but not out. She’s gone off the face of the earth and from reports we’re getting we could have a similar story about a female dealer at Harrah’s. Someone called in to say she was sick. Twenty-four hours ago. She’s not at her apartment, not anywhere we can find out about. Lives a quiet life. No family or significant other. Oh, and the Benet woman doesn’t have any family, either.”

“I still don’t see any connection.”

Nat cleared his throat. “We found something.”

Ben waited, and he didn’t feel so hot.

“Did Sykes tell you about the eggs the Embran use to restore themselves—sort of? They eat them—including the young inside—to slow their own deterioration.”

“Huh?”

“It appears that the Embran who have visited earth—we know of only a few for sure over a lot of years. But they bring the eggs of some of their young—that’s the young Embrans who are hatched from eggs—”

“Whoa—gimme a minute here. Eggs?”

“Dammit, Ben. This isn’t easy. Just believe what I’m telling you and have Sykes and Marley—and Gray—explain it to you. Embran eat the egg, including the young inside. End of story. It makes them stronger for a while.

“Look, I’ll go slow. Apparently, the Embran bring a supply of the eggs with them when they come—the eggs they’re all born inside wherever they come from. They keep them handy all the time. I guess they have a selection system, and some eggs get to hatch, others are used to give the mature Embran an infusion of strength. So they believe. The dragon that attacked Marley tried eating some to stop himself from falling apart. Either it doesn’t work or it was too late.”

“Okay,” Ben said slowly. “That sounds crazy and sick.”

“Forensics came up with unidentifiable fragments at the Baker and the Green murder scenes, and now at Chloe Brandt’s.”

“Yes,” Ben said, striving to sound patient.

“Now we’ve got more of the same from a reception room at the hotel where Caroline Benet checked in, and in Chris’s apartment. They match the stuff the dragon left behind.”

“Oh, my God,” Ben said, looking skyward. “You mean we could have the first real connection?”

“Same thing with the woman from Harrah’s. Only now we know for sure what the fragments are—we think. Minutely crushed bone—not human.”

Ben slumped into a crouch again. “That’s useful.”

“They think it’s birdlike, or small animal of some kind. Probably crumbs that fell from Embran eggs.” Nat let out a long sigh. “Will you listen to me? Sounds as if I’ve lost it.”

“Sounds perfectly reasonable to me,” Ben said.

“It would.”

“Isn’t there a bird of some kind that crushes bones?” Ben said, speaking his thoughts aloud without meaning to.

“Yeah,” Nat said. “What do they call those?”

“I don’t know… Ossifrage! Bone crushers. They let the bones fall to crush them, so they can get at the marrow.” Willow had called what she thought she had seen a raptor. A big birdlike creature. He wished he knew how much he could trust her vision.

“Shit,” Nat said with a lot of feeling. “First bats, now birds of prey. One word and we’ll clear this city of everything but the gangs. We gotta keep this under wraps.”

“Shouldn’t be hard until the first little kid gets snatched.”

“Cut out your tongue,” Nat exploded. “I’m waiting for Blades’s report on Chloe Brandt. Molyneux will have to know about it—don’t know what else to tell him. All he does is hold press conferences and order me to keep my mouth shut. He’d fire me if he wasn’t afraid I’d start singing all over.”

“Are you safe?” Ben asked.

“Meaning?”

“How badly does Molyneux want to keep you quiet?”

Nat laughed humorlessly. “Badly. But he’s a man beyond his Peter Principle. He’s thick enough to think he can control me.”

“I hope he keeps thinking that.”

“Me, too. Wait for my next call.” Nat rang off.

While Nat finished his call, Mario had been hard at work digging, and he was an accomplished digger. A hole at the back of the griffon was deep enough to show that as much of the stone piece was set beneath the earth as above.

Ben scraped away more dirt, expecting to find a dog bone. No luck with that.

He wiped the back of a forearm across his eyes. Dogs dug holes—didn’t mean a thing. Ben got up and parted a stand of bamboo.

Mario went back to excavating the griffon.

“You can’t take it home,” Ben told him. “You’d get mud on the rugs.”

The dog only grew more determined.

Ben stood back and watched while earth sprayed between Mario’s back legs.

With a single, muted bark, Mario plunked his bottom on the ground, tail still wagging, and gave Ben a doggy grin.

“Very nice hole.” He gave Mario’s shoulders a good rub and got pants of ecstasy for his efforts.

“Okay, Sherlock, let’s move on.” He skirted the bamboo and gave a sleek angel a cursory glance. He had seen her before and wouldn’t call her beautiful.

His little buddy hadn’t caught up, and when Ben looked for him, Mario sat where he’d been left, in front of the deep hole he had dug by the griffon.

He whined.

Ben narrowed his eyes and went closer. He got down on his knees to explore.

Excellent eyesight was one of his blessings. All he saw here was the dirty base of the griffon and a hole he had better fill in.

Mario started jumping, all four feet leaving the ground at one time.

“Settle down,” Ben said. “You’ll get us attention we don’t want.”

He brushed soil from the griffon’s base, admiring the way the sculptor had curled the creature’s lion tail tidily around its feet.

Competing with a wet, black and snuffling nose, Ben felt along the stone, noting that it was smoother than he would have expected.

Apparently impatient, Mario tried to help by scratching, and catching Ben’s fingers in the process.

“Hey, hey,” Ben said, wincing but laughing at the same time. “Ease up. I’ll look it over carefully, okay? But I don’t think you hid your treasure here.”

The nails on his right middle and ring finger slid into a crevice no wider than those nails themselves. He dug at it and mashed both nails for his efforts.

A small section of the stone dropped down and back, revealing a little black space behind. With his hands on his thighs, Ben regarded the tiny concealed space.

Mario wasn’t nearly as calm. He ran back and forth, stuffed his nose into the opening, looked at Ben with eyes that just about crossed.

“You managed to hide a goody in there?” Ben said. “I don’t think so. I also don’t like reaching into places that could have something nasty inside.” But he would do it.

Only one finger fitted. He felt around and thought at first there was nothing there. The pad of the finger came to rest on a small, smooth thing that felt metal. Several efforts later, Ben eased a tiny piece of amazingly shiny gold high enough up to grab it with his other hand. He checked the space again but it was definitely empty now.

In his palm rested a gold key no more than an inch long.