This Wicked Fate (This Poison Heart #2)(21)

“This looks like the coastline on the map back at your place,” I said breathlessly. Suddenly our dead end had turned into an open road.

Down the hall a loud crack, like a dish breaking, drew my attention to the door. Tendrils of an overgrown philodendron pulled their way into the room and wrapped around the legs of the table.

“Oh my god!” Phillip must have regained consciousness and was now freaking out in the front room. “Please! The plants are going to kill me. What is happening?”

“Pipe down!” Marie shouted in his general direction before returning her attention to the phone. “Alec, what is this piece showing?”

“Aside from some scant rocky formations close to the coast, there are no islands in the Black Sea,” said Alec. “And this artwork clearly shows an island. This—this can’t be right.” He seemed at a loss. “Move the camera a little closer.”

Marie did as he asked.

“The man with the staff is probably Hermes, but it’s hard to tell with the amount of damage. The ship is the Argo. No doubt about that. And the man with the lyre is Orpheus.”

Circe suddenly gripped Marie’s arm as her gaze darted from the art on the pottery shard to someplace in the middle distance, her own thoughts probably. She chewed at her bottom lip.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

The philodendron sprouted another length and went to her, coiling around her leg. She waved it away. “Aeaea, the sorceress Circe’s island, is beyond the Sirenum scopuli.” She gently touched the mermaid figures. “The Sirens’ Rocks.”





CHAPTER 5

Even in the middle of grief and hopelessness and the impossible tasks piled up in front of me, hope bloomed anew. We had a solid lead. Circe’s excitement was palpable, and the philodendron sprouted a dozen offshoots and braided itself between us, latching onto our arms and hands.

“I’ve been combing the Aegean for years,” Circe said. “I went to Greece and stayed there for years, searching, basing all my research on the consensus that Aeaea had to be somewhere in those waters.” She looked completely defeated. “So much time wasted.”

I touched her arm. “We don’t have to waste any more.”

She straightened up. “You don’t think Phillip happens to have Orpheus’s lyre lying around here somewhere, do you, Marie?”

Marie looked around. “Probably not, but if you want to feel worse about it, it’s probably in the collection of some rich asshole who’d rather hoard it than share it with anybody else.”

“Thanks,” Circe said.

“It’s a long shot,” Alec said. He’d moved his face closer to the camera again, and we were now gazing up his left nostril. “A very long shot.”

“Bye,” Marie said, hanging up before he could say anything else.

Circe gently wrapped the pottery shard in a sweater she found draped over the back of a chair. “He’s right, but this is all we have. It might be a long shot, but it’s also our best one.”

We left the room and headed for the car, but as I walked into the front room, I once again had to keep myself from laughing. Phillip was caught up in a tangle of Rhaphidophora cryptantha, commonly known as a shingle plant. He lay by the front door, wrapped in the shingling growth of juniper-colored leaves with veins the color of bone. The only parts of him that were visible were his bare feet and his balding head. He must have been trying to escape, and the greenery had decided that wasn’t gonna happen.

“I’ll be back,” Marie said as we headed out the door. “And you better be here. We’re gonna have a little chat about your activities.”

“I’ll make it up to you! I swear!” he said as he struggled to free himself.

Circe waved her hand and the plant loosened its grip.

Marie nudged him with her foot and he slid across the floor and collided with the couch. He scowled at Marie and she just smiled. “See you later,” she said.

As we piled into the car and headed back toward Rhinebeck, there was something I couldn’t get out of my head.

“Who else would want this?” I asked as I cradled the pottery in my lap. “We have a very specific reason for needing it, but who were the people Phillip sold his forgery to? And why can’t he remember exactly what happened when he met with them?”

“He’s so busy lying all the time he probably got his stories mixed up,” Marie said. “Probably dealers who are gonna resell it for a profit.”

Circe eyed us in the rearview mirror. “Or somebody else is on the same track as us and got the shard, even if it was a fake version, before us.”

All I could think of was Karter, and the respite of the little side trip to Albany evaporated. Anger poured back in. Phillip hadn’t mentioned that any of his three mysterious visitors had been teenagers, but one of them might have been Karter. There was no way to know for sure.

Marie interlaced her fingers with mine. “What else do we need? Are we traveling?”

“I don’t think we have a choice,” Circe said. “We’ll need a charter flight because we have to transport all the pieces of the Heart. I don’t think we’ll have time to bring them back to Rhinebeck if we somehow manage to find the last piece. Probably gonna need a boat, too, something serious, because if that painting is showing what I think it is, if the legends about Aeaea are true, we’re going to need more than some dinghy.”