Bound Powers Page 8

  Mrs. Windebury looked as if she’d found a lamp and been granted all three wishes at once. She shared a sly smile with Joy. “You,” she said. “I like you.”

  Joy wasn’t sure why this pleased her so much. “I’ll talk to Gabi about the sea,” she promised, though Gabi couldn’t do anything about it if the fae were churning it up.

  Mrs. Windebury patted Joy’s arm and, without bothering to look, walked into the road. Darryl’s van had already stopped a few paces away as if he knew the daredevil ways of old women and was waiting. Joy gave a little laugh and went on her way, dropping off the water with Mor Margaret, getting gas and electric from the post office—whose machine would always refuse to read Joy’s electric key unless she brought a luck charm in her pocket—and avoiding more people who wanted her to solve their problems, or worse, who wanted to offer their congratulations.

  Her bag filled up again, this time with milk and bread and chocolate mousse—essentials—she thumbed her phone out of her pocket and sent a text to Gabi.

  The whole world thinks we’re married. You serenaded me on the beach. It was SO romantic, and then we eloped.

  It was only a minute before her phone buzzed and Gabi’s response read:

  Oh fuck no. Your poor ears.

  Joy snorted, glancing up to make sure no cars were coming as she crossed the road. No cars but a fae with long dark hair and a broody expression was storming down the lane. Joy texted, Can I come around later? I need to know which awful song you sang at me, and waited on the pavement for the elven personification of a bad mood to reach her.

  “You look cheery,” she said, smiling, as Peregrine stopped to scowl at her.

  “I’m not in the mood,” he said flatly and continued walking. A long fall of hair concealed his face as he dropped his head, assuming that would be enough to get rid of her. It was clear he hadn’t known her long.

  “So, what’s wrong?” she asked, changing direction and keeping pace with him.

  “I have a pink-haired gnat flying after me is what’s wrong,” he muttered.

  “Ouch.” He slanted a look at her, and she grinned back. “Nope,” she confirmed. “Not enough to get rid of me.”

  He growled under his breath in Elteri.

  “Seriously. I’m concerned. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Ah,” Joy said. “The famous nothing.”

  “I hate your good mood.” If possible, his eyebrows had come even lower over his eyes.

  “And it hates you. But really—we bonded in town hall and you looked after me in your home. I’m allowed to ask what’s wrong with you.”

  “I told you.”

  “Yeah, nothing. I heard that lie really clearly.” She smirked, remembering him calling out her own lies yesterday. “But thinking in a more truthful way…”

  “No.” He glared at a car that dared to interrupt his straight, stomping march. Joy noticed he was only in a thin jumper and wondered how he wasn’t freezing. Had she remembered to give his coat back? Oh, darn it.

  “Peregrine,” Joy sighed, looking at his angular profile. Those cheekbones were so sharp. “Can I call you Perry?”

  “No you can not.” His voice was gravelly with anger—or Joy suspected, underneath it, a great amount of hurt.

  “Just Peregrine. Got it.” She caught his elbow once they’d crossed the road, pulling him to a stop. “You don’t want to talk, that’s fine, and if you want me to leave you alone I will, one hundred percent. But do you maybe want company with your brooding anger? ‘Cause I can do brooding anger.”

  His sulky face did not change, but a shadow did lift from his eyes. “Fine.”

  Pride

  Gabi sat frowning at the map of the UK with it’s odd arrangement of thread and pins. She’d tried rearranging it into some semblance of order several times this afternoon. But there was no central spot all the new pins led to like a sunburst. It was a scattered order of deaths, and it was bugging Gabi. She’d returned the thread to its original arrangement, a sort of path from Agedale to Ironbridge in the Midlands, and then Kilve, a small village further south. The new deaths Gus had found deviated to Ireland where several pins walked a short diagonal line from Limerick to Lough Fea.

  A straight, diagonal line…

  Gabi sat up straight, itching her right eye—her contact was irritating it, or her constant blinking, hoping the board would change, was irritating her contact. She reached for a handful of pins, yellow instead of the blue already in the board, and squinted, estimating where other points may follow, filling the gaps, extending the line. What if she’d had the pattern in front of her all morning? It wasn’t a dial revolving around a city. With the vaguely vertical line through England and this new one... What if she should have been looking for a triangle?

  It was a long shot. A really, really long shot. But Gabi tried to plot where the right corner would fall anyway—and failed. She didn’t know which way the triangle faced, if Limerick was its base or its tip, if it was equilateral or any old triangle. She needed maps. Lots of them.

  “Please,” she begged the printer, breathless, having run upstairs. “Please don’t be difficult today.”

  She already had a large map of the country, but to get all the ideas out of her head, to see if her hunch was right or a complete diversion from the truth, Gabi needed ten disposable ones, at least. She found a large map of the UK on Google and sent it to the printer, whispering a litany for it to work. The printer groaned, shrieked, made a fuss about taking the paper—and began to print. Gabi exhaled and ran for a red marker pen and a ruler.

  She grabbed the first printed page and couldn’t wait, sprinting back downstairs to the room she’d set up the boards in. Gus poked a head out of the kitchen to enquire what she was doing but she must have looked wild enough for him to decide against asking; his head disappeared back around the wall and the sound of him and Victoriya bickering resumed.

  Gabi couldn’t waste time putting dots on the printed map to represent the pins on her board—literally couldn’t, her body wouldn’t let her. The ruler helped her connect the locations in Ireland, and she extended the line to the edges of the map in red pen. Chewing her lip, she used the ruler to calculate the other sides as if they were equal lengths and angles.

  Wrong, all wrong. It skipped not only Agedale but the death in the Midlands. She ran back upstairs for the three pages that had done printing, ran back downstairs. Gasping for breath, she again drew the line through Ireland, her eyes picking out potential places for other deaths along the line.

  She drew a second line, connecting Agedale to Ironbridge and extended the line. It cut close to Swindon, one of Gus’s new locations, and continued up, past Agedale, to … Glasgow.

  Alright, that was no coincidence. And it seemed to confirm Edith Merrow was linked to Gabi’s case. She squinted at the printed map. It was clear she needed to link the two diagonal lines, but where? Limerick seemed an assured bet for the left corner, but where to lead it to? Bournemouth? Southampton? Gabi rubbed her eyes, shook herself, and just drew the damn line. She could print off twenty more maps until she got it right—it was just paper.

  Just paper and her sanity.

  She drew the line, and then remembered the death in Kilve, Somerset. She tossed that map aside, redrew the two diagonal lines, and made sure the bottom line ran through Kilve. It put the final corner on the Isle of Wight.

  Gabi reached for her tablet and the map app, quickly finding out the biggest town on the Isle of Wight was called Newport. She made a note in her book to check the local news … actually she had no idea how long ago. She needed an exact timeline for this whole triangle, written precisely in her notebook, and she needed it soon. Once she had that, and now she had what was a very likely triangle of deaths—she didn’t even think about what the triangle meant, only that it got her closer to something concrete—she could figure out where the next death would happen, and what it meant.

  What it meant for Joy’s mum to have been a v
ictim. Because now it was undeniable—Mrs. Mackenzie was a victim. Agedale lined up with the map. If it fit with the pattern, the shape, that was the last speck of doubt gone. And Gabi had to tell Joy.

  She reached for the case file, dreading that conversation but not enough to put this off. Her mind was frenetic and demanding, and she was alive with the thrill of progress. She could be completely wrong about this triangle, which was painfully likely, but the bare hope that she could be right … it was energy and electricity and excitement. It was driving her on.

  She arranged the deaths she had on record from oldest to newest, as she’d done in the beginning, and instead of only working out the space between deaths in her head, she wrote them down, noticed the gaps in the timeline. As soon as she set her thoughts out in a sensible line, she found a snag in her assumptions.

  If Glasgow was the tip of the triangle, it was the last of the deaths. Which meant the triangle was closed, finished with the woman Santiago Atteberry found dead. She thumped her head as if to jar the answer loose.

  The final point had to be Glasgow, didn’t it? If the killing had started there, years ago, and had passed through Agedale on its route to Newport, then across to Ireland, that meant … it meant this latest death was the last of them. It meant the killings would stop. Which was a good thing, she told herself, people would stop dying—

  But.

  But Gabi was getting somewhere. Her mind had automatically assumed it would need to predict the location and date of the next death and had already started preparing for that. But if the killings had ended... She came up short.

  No more deaths, nothing to predict, no village to go to and wait out the killer, no chance at all of finding them.

  But no more deaths, she told herself, no more deaths. That was good. But the triangle ... what was it for? Nothing good, her gut told her.

  She groaned, rubbing her eyes again. It wasn’t done, she reminded herself. No case was shut until she had the culprit. With that purpose, she dropped her hands, sat up, and looked over her timeline.

  An hour later she had them in order, perfectly spaced exactly five months apart except for gaps of ten months where Gabi had a hunch an unrecorded murder fit. Unless the killer planned to make another sweep around the triangle—which Gabi couldn’t rule out even though she thought it was unlikely—it was complete. Whatever its purpose was, there was no point her puzzling it. Triangles and shapes were witch work, and she didn’t want to go down that road of thinking just yet after what had happened months ago.

  Gabi contemplated the triangle being the first half of a pentagram, but the bottom point would end up in the water. Gabi doubted the killer would just wait around for a boat or ship to pass by that exact point with someone to kill, not when they’d been so precise about the five-month gap between deaths. Which ruled out a pentagram.

  She slumped, absurdly relieved to just have the triangle. Even though it could still be harnessing the death energy. She assumed. Really, she had no clue. She needed to ask a witch, and one in particular.

  But not just yet.

  “Right,” Gabi said to herself, pushing off her doubts and fears. “Timeline. Triangle. Gaps in between. I can work this out.”

  It might take days, but she could do it. She could find the deaths she was missing.

  Joy

  “So here we are,” Joy said, sitting in the library—the tiny public one, not Paulina’s personal, supernatural hoard—with her back to a metal bookshelf straining at its seams, bowed in the middle. “Brooding.”

  Peregrine shot her a look that said he didn’t want to be messed with.

  “It’s fine,” Joy said quickly. “It’s nice. This is nice.”

  He kept scowling, this time at the mottled carpet under them, as worn as his jeans. His hair had slid forward, hiding most of his face, an unruly fall of black that was shot through with blue and green in the sun coming through the blinds. Joy had been friends with Gabi most of her life—most of what counted anyway—and had known Victoriya, and Gus, and Eilidh for years; she knew when someone was truly angry and when they were hiding a deep hurt behind a cover of wrath. Peregrine was upset, and Joy now considered him one of her people. As her person, she would not let him suffer alone.

  She took a book from the shelf at random—Agriculture For The Modern Witch, published in the seventies and in a pristine condition that summed up how much Agedale cared about agriculture—opened to a page, and began reading. It was fascinating, riveting stuff. Joy just stared at the pictures.

  “Thannaeus is going to college,” Peregrine said suddenly. When Joy looked up, he was running a hand through his hair, his expression open and raw.

  She set the book down. “Is that bad?”

  “He’s fifteen.”

  “That’s amazing. He got in early?”

  Peregrine glared at her. “He’s fifteen. He’s going to college at fifteen. He can’t wait to get out of the house, away from me.”

  Oh, Joy thought. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  Peregrine glared harder.

  “Why do you think he wants to get away from you?” Joy asked in her softest voice, her heart tightening in sympathy.

  “Because—” He threw his hands up, his eyes hard. “His mum died having Dell—Kordell, my youngest—and dad … we lost him ten years ago, and—” He exhaled hard, his hands flexing at his sides.

  Joy scooted across the aisle to sit next to him, close but not touching. She didn’t know what to say, didn’t really understand what he was trying to tell her. It was more than their parents dying, she knew, but couldn’t figure what was unsaid.

  “I meant what I said before.” He shut his eyes, veins threading through the pale of his eyelids. “I’m jealous of you, for being an only child. Having five brothers, all of them younger … it’s just us. And I love them, don’t misunderstand. I wouldn’t want them gone, not ever, but—sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it’s so damn hard.”

  Joy still wasn’t getting it.

  “Dad’s supposed to be here, holding it all together, not me. I shouldn’t be getting judgemental glances from my brothers’ tutors for them causing shit in class. I shouldn’t be stressed to the point of breaking because we don’t have enough money for bread, let alone for Darvin’s art class and new paints and brushes and canvases and—” He thumped his forehead on his folded-up legs. Joy wanted to touch his arm, to comfort him in even the simplest way, but instinct told her not to. Instinct told her Peregrine speaking of his fears and worries and stresses at all was a huge deal and to not push him.

  “That should be dad,” he went on, his voice getting weaker. “Not me.”

  “There’s no one else?” she asked, quiet. “No one to help?”

  “No.” He lifted his head from his knees, his eyes open and grim. “Our family’s always been pretty small—dad’s anyway. Their mum has a sister down south but we never see her. My mum—Gabi’s mum—is gone, so she can’t help either. My brothers have a sister from the same mum but her dad hates us so… It’s just me.”

  He sounded so tired. Joy dug around in her coat—slung over her bag of shopping in the middle of the row of shelves—until she came up with a smoky quartz oval that fit neatly in her palm. It grounded her, eliminated negative energy and encouraged positive feelings. She’d soaked it in sea water for a week to make it more powerful and she kept it for little stresses and the worries she carried around, but Peregrine needed it more. Smoky quartz was known for enhancing inner strength; it would help Peregrine more than any sympathetic words.

  She held it out to Peregrine, who’d been watching her silently. “It’ll help,” Joy told him. “Even just a bit.”

  He held the smooth crystal, his expression neither angry or distressed now. More ... surprised. “Thanks,” he said quietly, and put it in his jeans pocket.

  “You’ve been looking after your brothers for ten years?” Joy asked gently. She remembered how he’d said Kordell, my youngest, and wanted to hug him very badly. />
  Peregrine nodded, scanning the shelves opposite. “I was the eldest. Irven was only thirteen, but I was seventeen, old enough that they didn’t send us away to the nearest adult, old enough that they let me take over everything—dad’s job, looking after the kids, everything except his seat on the council. It’s fine really. I’d rather this than them sending us away, or separating us. It’s just … sometimes it feels impossible. They’re all assholes, everyone but Dell, and I can say that because I’m an asshole too, I know I am. Most of the time we don’t get on. They don’t like authority but if I let them run wild, they’d end up in a ditch somewhere, or in a cell or—” He took a tight breath. “We argue all the time, and there’s no way around it, so obviously they all want to leave and get as far from me as possible. I understand that. I don’t like yelling at them or setting rules or enforcing them, or any of the other shit I have to do to keep us alive. But there’s no one else.”

  “Does Gabi know?”

  He laughed, a bitter sound. “Maybe if she’d bothered to read my letters. But no. She doesn’t even know my dad’s gone. It was the year she found out I was her brother.” He laughed again; the sound cut Joy apart.

  Joy pushed her hands into the carpet to keep from drawing him into a tight embrace. “You need to tell her.” At his glare she said, “I mean it. Do you know how many people keep giving her food and shopping and everything else under the sun? I think you need a break—a serious one—but something tells me you won’t take it. The least you can do is accept one of Gabi’s army of casseroles and take the night off.”

  “Joy—”

  “No. You need help, even just a tiny bit, and there are people who will want to help you if you tell them.” He set his jaw, back to brooding. Joy sighed. “Sorry. I’m … I don’t know when to stop and leave it alone. I think sometimes I want to help so badly that I end up making things worse. I’m … a motherer.” And not in a good way sometimes. “I know you’re all serious and manly and self-sufficient and all, but … I might know a few ways to help you. If you’re not above help.”