Blood Ties Book Three: Ashes To Ashes

“Nathan was never quite as secretive as some of us.” The way Max spoke the words implied he thought Nathan was an idiot for trusting anyone. “I do have a blood donor who’s pretty active in the city. I might be able to get some contacts out of him.”

“We may still be, in Nathan’s words, royally screwed,” Bella pointed out. “Of the four of us, I have the most experience with the occult, but divination has always escaped me. I may be able to pick up a few clues, but I will not know if they apply to our situation or not. Have any of you ever done anything like this?”

“I own an occult book and supply store,” Nathan reminded her, not a little sarcastically. “I’ve used tarot cards before.”

“Ah, good.” Bella’s face lit up. She reached for a box of cards and slid them across the table to him. “That can be your job. Since he has expressed disinterest in helping us, Max can try to reach other assassins through his donor.”

“What about me?” I eyed the pile of bones. I wanted to be included, but maybe not that included. “I’m a quick study. Give me something to do.”

She considered the array of objects before her and pushed a jewelry box toward me. I opened it to find a slender crystal dangling from a delicate chain.

“A pendulum,” Bella informed me. “Nathan, can you instruct her? I thought perhaps it could be used to try and pinpoint the Oracle’s location on an atlas.”

“I’m sure she’ll get the hang of it.” He winked at me.

“Good. We should all keep track of our results.” She sounded like one of my old professors explaining the etiquette of laboratory experiments. “Until we know specifics about our situation, everything is important.”

She reached for a bottle of what looked like ink and poured it into the glass bowl, which she lifted from its stand to swirl it a few times. Then, taking a lighter from her pocket, she lit the charcoal in the small, tabletop cauldron at her left.

“So, are we dismissed then?” Max asked, his tone dripping with sarcasm.

Caught up in sprinkling foul-smelling powder onto the burning block, Bella didn’t look at him. “Yes, of course. We need to get to work immediately.”

Max waited until we were in the foyer, at least, before he exploded. “You’ve got to be kidding me! She comes into my house, assigns us jobs, declares herself Dwight fucking Eisenhower of the occult, and stinks up my dining room with…whatever that was?”

“Honeysuckle and camphor,” Nathan supplied. “They’re powerful divination aids, but they smell better fresh than burning.”

“No shit.” Max’s face had turned a queer shade of red. “Listen, she’s got to go. I don’t care where, she’s just got to get out of my house.”

A terminally stupid person could see his problem wasn’t with incense and tarot cards. Still, I had to proceed cautiously. Any mention of his feelings for Bella caused a total shutdown, in which Max would storm off and nothing would be resolved. “I know you’re having a hard time with her here, but look at us. Three of us against the Oracle? Possibly against the Soul Eater, as well?”

He didn’t respond, but the muscle at the corner of his jaw ticked. He didn’t like what I was saying, but he knew I was right.

“Bella has an advantage over us,” Nathan added. “She can go out in the daytime. We need her for that, at the very least.”

It was clear from the way Max shifted his gaze silently between Nathan and me that he didn’t want to admit we were right. He groaned and tossed his hands up. “Fine. But you guys are paying for the air fresheners when she’s done in there.”

Nathan laughed. “It’s a deal. Now, where can we go to work?”

“In the library. Or the parlor. Or one of the fine guest accommodations, either upstairs or down.” Max shrugged. “Do it in the hot tub, I don’t care.”

A warm flush crept up my neck as I caught sight of Nathan’s lascivious grin. “That’s not a good idea. But thanks,” I said. “We’ll be in the library.”

“Do me a favor and keep her out of it. If it’s so ‘meager,’ she’ll have read everything already,” Max said petulantly. “I’ll be upstairs, trying to get answers out of Bill.”

“We could have done it in the hot tub,” Nathan groused as I led the way to Marcus’s library. “It would have been more fun than this divination business.”

The look I gave him made it clear “this divination business” was all we were going to be up to.

The library, situated at the front of the building, was by far the most impressive room in the condo. The ceiling reached to the second floor of the apartment. Books lined the walls. Iron spiral staircases led to the balcony that wrapped three sides of the room, holding the second tier of literature. I wondered how many personal libraries Bella had seen, and what they must have been like to make this collection seem unimpressive.

Nathan whistled in awe. He set the cards down on one of the leather armchairs near the enormous fireplace and scratched his head as he glanced around. “Not too shabby.”

“I’d offer to leave you two alone for a minute, but I fear what you would do.” I motioned him to the far wall. The huge windows overlooked Grant Park and the shore of Lake Michigan beyond. I pointed out the aquarium at the edge of the view. “Max has connections. He got us in after hours.”

“Weren’t all the fish sleeping?” Nathan chided. He stood silently, taking in the lights of the city for a minute, then turned to me. “You don’t…like him, do you?”

“No, of course not.” I suppressed the urge to tack on You idiot. “Not the way you’re thinking.”

He smiled, probably mentally adding the “you idiot” part himself. “I’m sorry. I know it’s stupid to think that. But you know, here he is, nice house in a big city, young guy—”

“You’re a young guy,” I reminded him. “Young looking, anyway.”

A faint flush colored his usually pale face. “I know that. But I’ve been alive a hundred years, and I’m starting to act my age.”

Starting to? “In all fairness, Max is technically in his fifties.”

“Max is a teenager, no matter how old he gets.” Nathan’s cool gray eyes scanned the street below us. “I understand why you came here. You wanted to be around someone you can identify with.”

“What I want is someone who can love me.” I studied him carefully to gauge his reaction. “Someone who can love me as much as I love him. But I wasn’t looking for that in Max.”

Nathan lifted a hand as though he would touch me. I brushed it aside and pointed toward the fireplace. “We have things to do.”

He taught me how to use the pendulum. First, he showed me how to hold the cord so the crystal hung perfectly still over a book. I asked two questions. The first, “Is this a book?” caused the pendulum to swing in tight, clockwise circles. The second question, “Is this a dead fish?” resulted in wide, counterclockwise swoops.

“That’s all there is to it,” Nathan explained. “Clockwise for yes, counter for no. At least, for you. It varies from person to person.”

It was much easier than Bella made it sound. She either had a gift for overcomplicating things, or she had greatly underestimated my intelligence. Probably the latter, as werewolves didn’t put much stock in the intellectual equality of other species.

I dangled the crystal point over a map of the world, moving it from area to area and asking, “Is the Oracle here?” while Nathan laid out one complicated spread of cards after another. As soon as I made inroads to the continent North America, I flipped to a new page in the atlas and started working on the states and provinces. Occasionally, the pendulum would swing erratically, and I’d have to go through the process of recalibrating it. Then I’d start over from my last reasonable answer, sometimes to find it had changed. Every yes I got, I wrote down. Though the Oracle couldn’t really be in all those places at once, Bella had said to write everything down. I would let her sort out the details.

We’d sat in silence for an hour before Nathan looked up and frowned. “Do you hear that?”

Now that he mentioned it, I did. Every few minutes, a rhythmic bang came from the upper level of the library.

I rose slowly, staring at the walls. The sound grew louder and more violent, actually shaking the crystal chandelier suspended high above us. “It sounds like it’s coming from—”

“The dining room,” Nathan said, breaking into a run toward the doors.

We were coming up the stairs to the foyer just as Max ran down from the third floor. “What the hell is that?”

Nathan didn’t answer, but rushed to the doors leading to the dining room.

Before he could touch them, they flew open, as if with a gust of wind, but as there were no windows in the dining room, the force must have come from an unnatural source. Nathan toppled back and I rushed to help him up.

“Holy shit,” Max whispered, his eyes wide.

I followed his gaze through the open doors. Bella hung lifeless, suspended in the air as though nailed to an invisible crucifix. A supernatural wind howled in a cyclone around her, the various objects she’d carefully spread on the table caught up in the maelstrom. They whirled around her like ornaments on a mobile, almost merry as they weaved and bobbed, the occasional chicken bone or rune stone flying free to smash into a wall.