The clock on the wall tick, tick, ticked like the bomb’s timer counting down to explosion.
Danny crossed his arms and slouched against the counter. A bullish expression told me he’d convinced himself he had a fighting chance of winning this battle of wills.
Dumb kid. You’d figure he’d have learned never get into a silent standoff with a cop. Especially when the proof of his guilt had just been in his sweaty palms.
He cleared his throat. “I can explain.”
Bingo. Cop face one, the kid zero.
“Save it.” I held up a hand. Using the same tone I employed when interrogating a hostile suspect, I pointed to the table. “Sit.”
He looked taken aback that I hadn’t started screaming. He dropped into a chair with a sigh.
I lifted his game player off the table. “Do you know who bought this?”
His head tilted to the side like he suspected it was a trick question. “You?”
“Do you know what I do for a living to earn the money that paid for it?”
He crossed his arms. “I know,” he grumbled.
“Do you? I think I need you to say it out loud just to be sure.”
His lips puckered and he rolled his eyes. “You’re a cop.”
“Where am I a cop, Danny?”
A martyred sigh. “The Cauldron.”
“Right. I patrol slums filled with Arcane criminals who learned the tricks of their trade from that book.”
“I got it, Kate,” he snapped.
“No, Danny. You don’t fucking got it.” My voice rose and I leaned across the table. His eyes shot toward the curse jar, but he thought better of mentioning my slip. I rose abruptly, shoving my chair back, and stuck my hand in my purse. From it, I removed a handful of bills. As he watched with his mouth hanging open, I dropped probably ten crumpled ones in. His eyes widened. Without missing a beat, I continued, “Because if you fucking got it, there’d be no way you’d bring the motherfucking Alchemist’s Handbook under my goddamned roof!”
“It’s just a book. Jesus, don’t be such a fascist.”
“This isn’t just a book, Danny. There’s nothing in here that won’t get you into a world of trouble with the law.” I paused to get control of my temper. Releasing a great sigh, I dropped into the chair across from him to get on his level. “Where’d you get it?”
His eyes shifted left. “Found it.”
I snorted. “Please don’t insult me.”
He threw up his hands. “I found it in the attic!”
My mouth fell open. With trembling hands, I opened the cover. Sure enough, there was the familiar inscription.
Welcome to the magic game, Katie-girl.
My stomach dipped. Shit. He’d found my copy. The one Uncle Abe gave me on my birthday when I turned eight. I had clutched it to my chest like a precious treasure while I blew out the candles on my pink princess cake.
I shook off that nausea-inducing memory and frowned at my brother. “Why were you in the attic?”
His discomfort was palpable and not just because he knew what he’d done was wrong. There was something underneath the defensive posturing. His reddened cheeks hinted that he was embarrassed. “I needed to find a picture of Mom.” His gaze was hot, like he hated me for making him say that out loud. “In history class we’re doing a genealogy project and I needed a picture.”
I chose my tone carefully because this conversation was the verbal equivalent of thin ice. “Why didn’t you just ask me?” I sat down heavily because the turn the conversation had just taken made me feel sucker punched.
“Because you never want to talk about her. Or anything having to do with the past or the family. Whenever I try to bring it up, you give me that look.”
I pulled back and relaxed my face, knowing I’d just been giving him the look in question. Here I thought I’d been so clever and in control, but my little brother just managed to gain the upper hand. If there was one topic sure to cripple me it was a discussion about “the family.”
With a sigh, I placed my elbows on the table and looked at my brother. “Look, Danny, I—”
Before I could continue, he shoved his chair back. The wooden slats banged into the fridge. “Just forget it, okay? I’m sorry I took the stupid book. I was just … curious, I guess, since it’s, like, part of my heritage or whatever.”
I rose slowly, scrambling to think of the right thing to say. “No, I—”
“I already took the picture of Mom to school, but I’ll give it back to you after I get the assignment from my teacher.” He grabbed his books off the table and his backpack from the floor.
“No, it’s okay. You can keep—”
“I gotta finish my work.”
With that my little brother stormed out of the kitchen. I looked up at the ceiling for help. Luckily, I still had some credits left in the curse jar. “Fuck, fuck, shit, shit, damn it, fuck.”
Chapter Twelve
Two hours later, the argument with Danny chased me down the concrete steps into the basement of the Sacred Heart Church. Despite the Catholic setting, recovering dirty magic abusers of any faith could attend the weekly Arcane Anonymous group meetings.
I was late, so I slid in as quietly as I could and took a seat beside Pen. She glanced over with raised brows. I mouthed “Later.” A very loud, very pointed throat clearing sounded. I glanced up and shot an apologetic smile to our fearless leader, Rufus Xavier.
He sat in a blue plastic chair—the kind found in every school cafeteria in America. The other chairs were formed into a circle so you couldn’t really say he sat at the front, but his sheer size and bearing left no doubt about who led this support group. He wore a black T-shirt and jeans with a crocheted slouch hat done in stripes of red, green, and yellow perched on his braided hair. The meeting had only just begun, but already he was worked up into a feverish sermon as if he were standing in a pulpit on Sunday morning.
“Everyone has a hole in their center,” he said, placing a fist over his diaphragm. “A gaping shadow that demands to be filled. Some people fill it with faith and God. Others with money or fame. Then there are those who fill it with food, alcohol, nicotine or, yeah, potions.” He looked around the circle to each of our faces. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t keep much from Rufus. He had an almost preternatural ability to see through people’s bullshit.
I’d spent enough time on the streets as both a pseudocriminal and then as a cop to know his words were true. It was the eyes. No matter how tough you acted or how much you tried to disguise it with makeup or a strut or other masks, the eyes always exposed the void. Generally, it was whatever the perp used to disguise or fill the hole that got me called out by Dispatch, but I could always see the shadows in their eyes. The darker secrets behind the violence and addictions.