But they’d never found me.
My parents had hidden me well.
“But surely, if the Spartoi saw your mother killed, it would have satisfied them,” Jonas said. “Why did your father also have to die? He had a child—”
“Because he was the necromancer. His soul is what keeps them anchored here, just like it kept the spirits of his ghosts anchored in the crazy bodies he built for them. Just like the control crystal keeps a demon anchored inside a golem. Without him, my mother’s soul would transition beyond the confines of the barrier—”
“Which would then fall.”
“Yes.”
Jonas looked faintly amazed. “They thought of everything.”
“Except Tony taking the snare into another world. He’d been here for almost a century; there was no reason to think he would suddenly decide to leave. And if he did, that he would go into Faerie. It surprised even Mircea, who knew him better than anyone. No one expected him to suddenly join the other side in the war.”
“Why did he?”
“No idea. Like I still don’t know what my father was doing in that cellar in London, where Agnes nabbed him, if he wasn’t a tried-and-true member of the Guild. He won’t explain that, like he won’t tell me what he and Mother talked about, that convinced her to release him. There’s a lot I still don’t understand.”
“Such as who made the trap for your parents’ souls?”
I glanced at him, slightly surprised. “No, I know that. So do you.”
“I do not.”
“Jonas,” I said gently. “You just saw him working on it.”
“That—” Jonas’ eyes flew back to the house.
“When Dad said no, you can’t have my baby daughter, no, I won’t bring her to court, Tony freaked. Nobody told him no. Well, maybe Mircea, but no human. And certainly not one in his service. So he waited awhile, then told Roger he had a problem with an associate and wanted an unusual kind of revenge. He wanted a snare, one that was impossible to break out of, one like Dad had mentioned to him once, months before. He thought it would be amusing to have Roger create the trap for his own soul.”
“So your father made the snare—”
“No, my father made the talisman.” I pulled Billy’s necklace out of my shirt. “Like this. Only much more powerful. One that could sustain my parents’ souls while they waited for the gods to return. But a goddess’ soul takes a lot of feeding, even as a ghost, so the talisman had to be able to draw many times the usual amount of life energy from the world.”
Jonas finally looked like something had made sense. “That’s why Roger joined the Black Circle—to pillage them.”
I nodded. “He joined after Mother released him from jail. He needed a fantastic amount of power to create such a talisman, and didn’t know where else to get it. It worked pretty well—he got most of what he wanted before they discovered what he was up to.”
“And the rest he took from these . . . things?” Jonas gestured at the Dumpster.
I shrugged. “It’s what he knew. And how he persuaded Tony to work with him. Magic can be sold, if you’re willing to take the time and risk to extract it from what other people view as junk. And the more unstable it is, the more profit there is in it. It also gave him and Mom a reason to live separately from the main house, because of the risk of blowing it up. And since Tony knew shit about magic, Dad could siphon off a good deal of power from the stuff he was sent with no one being the wiser.”
“But why give the talisman to Tony?” Jonas persisted. “Wouldn’t it have been better to bury it somewhere? Put it in a safe-deposit box? Stick it in a wall? Why deliberately give it to that maniac?”
“It’s a powerful magical object, and there are plenty of peo
ple who could sense it,” I reminded him. “Bury it and it could be dug up. Put it in a safe-deposit box, and it could be stolen. Place it in a wall, and said wall might be knocked down. But Tony loves his trophies, and is well equipped to protect them. And with him, there wasn’t any risk of the holder dying and the talisman passing to someone who might want to disenchant it. Vampires are the closest things the world has to immortals anymore. Especially paranoid ones like Tony.”
We sat in silence for a moment. I don’t know what Jonas was thinking, but I wasn’t thinking much of anything. The successive shocks of the last few days had left me almost numb. Which was better than the alternative, better than going over all the might-have-beens, all the ways in which everything could have gone so differently. If the gods hadn’t fought back quite so hard, if Tony had just stayed put, if Apollo had returned, full of rage and vengeance, and been met, not by a bunch of demons, but by one very hungry, very determined, goddess . . .
But he hadn’t.
My parents had had a good plan, but it had failed. And now we were left picking up the pieces. Which would have been a lot easier if they would listen to me. But Roger had made it clear that that wasn’t happening, just like Mother had the last time I was here.
They’d seen me now; they knew that part of their plan had worked.
They just didn’t understand—it wasn’t the right part.