The Fortune Teller(82)

Semele gripped her stomach.

“Nettie chose your parents quite carefully, knowing her granddaughter would grow up under the guidance of a brilliant scholar who would encourage her to embrace history and challenge her to learn Greek until she could read it as well as he could. Nettie wanted you to find Ionna’s manuscript and recognize yourself within the pages. But I knew that Joseph Cavnow would have only gotten in the way now. His part had been played, and strokes can happen at any age.”

Tears fell from Semele’s eyes as she listened to him.

“You were lucky, though. The two of you shared a close bond while he was alive. I was my father’s worst disappointment.”

It took all her will to speak, but she had to know. “Who are you?”

“Don’t you know?” When she didn’t say anything, he laughed again, drawing heavily on his oxygen. “That’s the shame of family secrets. You’re supposedly one of the great seers, the Keeper of the Gift. Your grandmother grasped this power but did not live to pass her insights on to you. Pity, since you’re the one who will need them most. For years you’ve been unwilling to believe. And without belief you have nothing.”

He hung up again.

“Wait!” she yelled, but he was gone. She slammed down the receiver. “Dammit!”

She took the phone and threw it across the room. It hit the wall and crashed to the floor. She sank down to her knees crying, now a heaving mess.

She tried to think—she had to calm down. This psycho had her mother and God only knew what he was going to do to her—what he had already done.

Theo hurried into the room with a strange expression on his face.

She looked up, meeting his eyes. “What?” She gritted her teeth in desperation.

“What he said … about his father. Nettie and Liliya were always afraid Evanoff would find them, even after they created new identities for themselves in Austria.”

“Now his son has found us.” Semele’s body tingled. She knew that was the answer.

The song playing on the stereo looped and the same music filled the room again. The melody pulled at Semele and surrounded her.

Then the harp solo began.

She stood up, feeling light-headed.

“This music…,” she said, approaching the stereo.

Her parents never owned music like this. And suddenly she understood. “He left this music when he took her.”

She ejected the disk. The CD wasn’t from a store. It was burned from a computer, and on the disk was a handwritten message.

Very good. Now find her.

Seeing his handwriting again gave her chills. Unlike the note at the hospital, this message included a lowercase y and g that showed a glaring personality trait: the letters had been written with a straight line down and an angry slash to the side instead of a loop. This was a rare occurrence that experts called the Felon’s Claw, and it showed a dangerous propensity for manipulation only seen in extreme criminals.

Semele stared at the note a long minute, the music filling the silence. She turned to Theo with utter certainty.

“Aishe played this music. He wants me to go to Paris.”





Page of Swords

Theo chartered a private plane out of Tweed New Haven Airport, a Challenger 300 that sat eight. They would arrive at Paris–Le Bourget Airport in less than seven hours.

Semele tried to dissuade him, but Theo insisted on taking care of their travel, explaining it was the quickest way to get there. The flight attendant gave her a glass of cabernet before takeoff, and the wine helped calm her nerves. Semele hadn’t slept in over thirty-six hours and needed to rest. But before she could she needed to know what had happened to Nettie and Liliya after they escaped.

“They went to Austria?” she asked Theo, who was settled into the seat across from her.

“To a displacement camp.” He nodded. “Camps were set up all over Europe. People flooded in from the Nazi concentration camps. Many survivors traveled from camp to camp looking for their families, but Nettie and Liliya didn’t have anyone. They stayed at one camp and pretended to be sisters under a false name, keeping mostly to themselves. They were terrified of being discovered.”

Semele couldn’t begin to imagine. “How long were they there?”

“A year. Things changed when they started helping a group of nuns who ran an orphanage in Vienna. Working at the orphanage was a kind of self-imposed penance. My grandmother told me she and Nettie suffered terrible guilt from leaving the other children behind at Makaryev. It’s something that stayed with them the rest of their lives.”

Theo grew quiet a moment, remembering. “My grandmother never spoke of her time in Russia. I never even knew about our heritage until I translated the manuscript and my grandmother told me her story. That was days before she died.”

Semele hung on to every word. Part of her was jealous that Theo had gotten to hear the story firsthand.

“When the orphanage started planning to open another location in Switzerland, Nettie urged Liliya to go and start a new life there. She moved to Lake Geneva and met my grandfather a year later.”

“And what about my grandmother?” Semele asked, her voice barely audible.

“Nettie stayed in Vienna. The orphanage was right next door to an academy for the blind, where she met your grandfather, Elias.”