Strange Fates (Nyx Fortuna) (19 page)

I shrugged and took a sip. “I’m living on borrowed time anyway.” But it bothered me, the way I’d suddenly become so cautious. I’d always been so eager to take chances on my life, because I figured I had nothing to lose anyway.

I was scared for the first time since my mother had died. Scared of losing something. Someone. I didn’t enjoy the sensation.

I unlocked the door and turned the sign from
CLOSED
to
OPEN
. “What should we do about the poisoned stuff?”

“Let’s take it to Dad,” Talbot replied.

I followed Talbot to his dad’s office.

Talbot pushed at the corner of the bookcase and it opened with a creak to reveal another, much larger room, this one furnished exactly as one might expect from a sorcerer.

Ambrose sat at an ornately carved desk, engrossed in what looked like a grimoire, but it could just have been a really old romance novel.

“Dad, we have something to show you,” he said.

I crossed to a long, low shelf full of clear beakers. I picked up the one labeled
DRAGON’S BLOOD
and took a cautious sniff.

Ambrose came and took the beaker away. “That is not for an untrained sorcerer.”

“Untrained? I’m lucky. That’s better than training.”

He gave me a severe look. “You possess certain natural gifts,” he said. “But I would bet that you do not use more than a tiny portion of your talents. And perhaps have forgotten much of what your mother taught you.”

I stared right back. “I’ve forgotten nothing.”

“Then you should be able to identify the poison in your cup.”

It was clearly a challenge.

“Can I borrow some ingredients?” I asked, but I already knew the answer. They’d never made a secret of their curiosity about me and my abilities.

“Help yourself.” He gestured to the beakers.

I took a small bowl down from the shelf. I moved slowly and methodically, not only because magic required precision, but because I was stalling.

What Ambrose had said was true. I had forgotten some of what my mother had taught me. It had been easy to tell myself that I’d never need for me to identify the rare poisons of a practiced assassin or to reverse a love spell. But I had been wrong. I needed all that knowledge and more, just to survive living in Minneapolis.

Talbot crossed his arms and leaned against the long table to watch me as I struggled to remember my mother’s lessons.

“I need something to neutralize it so I can identify the poison,” I finally said. “Like a clear quartz crystal.”

Ambrose clapped softly. “Very good. Anything else?”

Was it a trick question? “That’s it.”

I stood there in silence for a few minutes. I was stuck, but I was too proud to admit it.

He handed me a lighter. “This might help.”

The lighter was antique, silver, and engraved with a single peacock feather. It felt heavy in my hand.

I wasn’t exactly sure how to use it, so I decided on the simple approach. “Reveal.” I passed the lighter over the now cold liquid.

There was a hiss. A strange green plume rose from the coffee.

Talbot and I exchanged glances. “Poison from the golden frog,” I said.

Ambrose nodded. “Someone very much wants you dead.” The venom from a golden dart frog was the most toxic on earth.

“The Fates?” I suggested.

“Why would the Fates want you dead?” Talbot asked. “You work for them.”

Ambrose and I exchanged glances. It was safer if Talbot didn’t know my true identity.

“Who knows with the Fates?” I replied. “Ambrose, what do you think?”

“Possibly,” he said. “Although from what I heard, they prefer the more direct approach. Unless they have located a certain item.”

I weighed my options. Talbot was capable of taking care of himself, and even though he had a crush on my cousin, I didn’t think he would betray a confidence. I hated lying to him, but it was safer for him if he didn’t know my true identity.

Ambrose was alluding to my thread of fate. If the Fates found my thread of fate before I did, Morta’s golden scissors would destroy it and my life would end. That wasn’t going to happen, not if I could help it.

There was silence for a moment as we contemplated our near miss, but then I thought of something. “Maybe it wasn’t meant for me,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, maybe someone is out to get you,” I said. “Flirted with anybody’s girl lately?”

Talbot shook his head. “No.”

“Really?” I was just screwing with him. It was fun to see him blush.

“No,” he said again, more vehemently.

“No, it’s not possible, or no you’re not lusting after someone?”

“The only one I’m lusting after is Naomi.”

I didn’t want to think about
that
. I examined the two cups carefully. At first, I didn’t see anything unusual about them, just two environmentally unfriendly Styrofoam containers, but I noticed the two linked letters molded on the bottom of the cup. A
P
and an
E
, for Parsi Enterprises.

“Son of a bitch,” I said. “Did you see this?”

Talbot shrugged. “Parsi Enterprises manufactures a great deal of products.”

“It’s also where I work.”

“Who knew it would come to this?” Talbot commented. “The Fates have day jobs.”

“You can be sure there’s a reason for it,” I said. “Probably meddling in something that doesn’t concern them. Again.”

Talbot shot me a curious look. “You seem to know a lot about the Fates.”

I considered Talbot a friend, a good one, but knowing who I really was would put him in danger. So I lied. “Doesn’t everybody?”

“I’ve been thinking about that athame. What do you know of your father?” he asked.

“My father?” I’d heard him, but I was stalling. It hurt to even think of the nameless, faceless person who’d been nothing more than a sperm donor.

“Do you have any idea who your father was?”

I folded my hands across my chest. “I never asked.” It was a lie. I’d pestered my mother about my father’s identity constantly. The last time I asked, though, was the year I turned fourteen, when she gave me an answer. Of sorts.

The Wyrd Sisters had been hot on our trail and we’d had to flee the city, but this time there was a girl I didn’t want to leave, my first real crush, so I was digging in my heels.

Mother’s face was drawn and white and she kept casting backward glances as we walked along. Finally, she took me by the arm and yanked me along. That was not like her.
It must be bad, very bad
, I thought.

“What about my father?” I asked. “He could help us.” I had no idea what I was talking about. I had no idea who my father was, or if he was even alive.

“Your father abandoned us when we needed him the most,” she snapped.

She saw the protest on my face. “Please do not have any illusions about that man. Believe me, he would kill us as soon as help us. Now move.”

My mother had never been anything other than patient and gentle with me, but my questions had obviously touched a sore spot. I cooperated for the rest of the trip and we managed to evade my murderous aunties.

I tried to hand the lighter back to Ambrose, but he waved it away. “Keep it. It used to belong to a friend of mine. You remind me of him a little bit.”

“You’re sure?” The lighter felt right in my hand. “He won’t want it back?”

“Not where he’s gone.” The grim tone in his voice told me not to ask any more questions.

“If someone wanted me dead…” I didn’t finish the thought.

“
If?
There seems little doubt that someone is trying to kill you.”

“Not necessarily,” I replied. “Elizabeth was with me the first time. And the coffee could have been intended for both you and me.”

“What are you saying?”

“Maybe someone assumed the other cup was for her and it was Elizabeth they were trying to kill. Her parents died under mysterious circumstances.”

“Curious, but that happens in some families.”

“And the person who slipped us the poison put it in both cups. Either they wanted to kill us both or they didn’t mind an additional death on their hands.”

“That narrows it down a bit,” Talbot admitted. “There aren’t many people who would kill that indiscriminately.”

“Or maybe Bernie just got tired of your special orders,” I said, joking.

I could tell he was getting pissed off about my lame jokes, so I wandered over to one of the shelves while he pulled himself together. There was a hex sign on the top shelf. I hadn’t noticed it before so I took it down to examine it more closely.

“Careful with that!” Ambrose said.

“I’ve never seen one like this before,” I replied. Hex signs were common in Pennsylvania, but those were mostly decorative. This hex sign was the real deal. Malevolence radiated from it.

An idea was nibbling at the back of my brain, but it slithered away before I could grasp it.

I put it back in its place, but continued to stare at the hex sign until Talbot put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m not exaggerating to say that you’d have to sell your soul to use something like that.”

The image of my mother coughing up blood before her last breath flashed in my mind. “It might be worth it.”

“Trust me, it’s not. Revenge never is,” he replied.

“How’d you get that thing anyway?” I asked.

His face darkened and I caught a glimpse of some emotion hiding beneath the surface. “I wasn’t always the model citizen you see before you.”

“Citizens are boring anyway,” I said. “Especially model ones.”

The guy had been nothing but decent to me, had been a friend, and only wanted one thing from me: for me to keep my hands out of that deadly little cookie jar. “I don’t really have much of a soul left to sell anyway.” Or at least I wouldn’t when I was done in Minneapolis.

Talbot looked like he couldn’t figure out if I was joking or not. “Did you figure out who wants to murder you?” he finally asked.

“Murder
us
,” I reminded him.

“No one wanted to murder me before you came along,” he replied. He smiled when he said it, though.

I grinned back at him. “No one that you knew of anyway.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

The attempted poisoning had me on edge. There were already wards on the door to the apartments, the stairs, and the entrance to my place, but I added a tricky little booby-trap spell to discourage any unexpected nighttime visitors.

That night in my apartment, I couldn’t sleep. Most nights, I slept like a baby despite the ever-present threat of my aunts hanging over my head—and the attempts on my life and the lives of those around me. I felt like I was missing a big piece of some cosmic puzzle.

But sometimes, no matter what I did to avoid it, I’d lie awake and wonder: If they found my thread, how would they do me in? As gruesomely as possible, I supposed.

I finally nodded off and dreamed again about the night my mother died. We’d spent most of my life traveling through Europe, but we were on our way back to Rome, where my mother was born, when it happened.

I’d turned my back for only a second. A figure in the crowd reached for her necklace. My mother resisted and was stabbed. The dagger clattered to the ground, covered in her blood. But I recognized it anyway. My mother had been stabbed by her own dagger.

She’d started coughing up blood and I carried her to an inn where we could stay the night.

“We’ll stay here,” I told her. “Just for the night, I promise, but you need your rest.” I didn’t tell her I’d given the landlord all our money to bring a doctor, but the doctor never came.

She was delirious, calling out her sisters’ names, but she had a moment of clarity. She sat up and clutched at my arm. “I need to tell you something before I die.”

“You’re not dying,” I said. “You just need to rest.”

She put her hand to my face. It was so cold that I had to repress a shiver. “You know that’s not true,” she said. “I’m dying.”

I nodded because I couldn’t speak with a voice clogged with tears.

“I’ve hidden your thread of fate,” she said. “My charms. You’re a clever boy. I know you’ll find it.”

“But…”

“You’ll know which charm. You must…” She stopped and listened. “They’re here.” The delirium returned and she slumped back on her pillow.

“Who did this?”

“It was Fate,” she whispered. She coughed once and a spray of blood came out of her mouth and dripped onto her pillow.

Whenever I dreamed of her, I was always a wreck the next morning. I awoke cursing my aunts, my stomach in knots of hate. Maybe that’s how they always found me, by the scent of my pain and anger.

I searched the fridge for something edible. I’d grown used to eating at Hell’s Belles every day, but I didn’t feel like being around anyone, so instead I scrambled a couple of eggs and made toast.

I remembered the book I’d borrowed from Talbot and found it under the bed.

It wasn’t exactly light reading. The Greeks called Aunt Morta “the Inflexible,” which seemed pretty darned accurate.

I hadn’t seen much of Aunt Morta—or of Decima, for that matter. I wondered what that meant, if it meant anything. Gaston had been playing least-in-sight as well. It meant either that they’d given up, which wasn’t likely, or that something else was occupying their time.

I told myself I wanted to be the one who was their downfall, but the idea that someone was trying to topple the old broads from their seat of power bothered me. My mother would have said that no matter what, they were still family and it was my responsibility to help them. But she was dead and I was bitter. I wanted to see them without friends, powerless, hunted.

My first reaction when threatened was to punch something or someone, but I didn’t know how to fight an enemy I couldn’t see. My best bet was to flush him out.

*  *  *

There was a blaring in my ears, so loud that I couldn’t hear anything else.

I bolted up. I glanced at the clock and realized I’d overslept. I was supposed to meet Talbot, Naomi, and Elizabeth at Hell’s Belles over an hour ago for a Sunday morning breakfast.

I spotted Talbot and Naomi sitting on one side of a booth. I slid into the opposite seat. “Sorry I’m late,” I apologized. “Elizabeth here yet?”