Banishing the Dark (Arcadia Bell #4)(32)

That I could believe.

“Even your father was her dupe. I apologize for being frank, but he worshipped the ground she walked on and would’ve done anything she asked, no matter how immoral or dangerous. Enola was a tornado ripping through the order, and Alexander was her one-man cleanup crew, sweeping all the evidence beneath the rug.”

“Even bodies?”

“Takes a special kind of evil to murder your own child.”

“My brother,” I murmured, studying Rooke’s face. “You’re the one who told Wildeye.”

He nodded. “I hadn’t thought about little Victor Duval in years. When I was grandmaster of the Pasadena lodge, I traveled to Florida twice a year, so I saw Victor a handful of times. Your parents proclaimed him the first Moonchild, but he was a sickly child, physically and mentally. I think they knew fairly early on that their conception ritual was a failure.”

“So they killed him?”

The garden path split in front of us. A wrought-iron signpost held two hand-lettered signs, one pointing to a succulent garden, and the other to “Sacred Trees.” Rooke headed toward the trees. “I don’t know for certain, but a rumor circulated among some of the officers. One of the caliph’s magi, Magus Frances—did you ever hear about her?”

“Vaguely. I think she died when I was a toddler.”

He nodded. “Back before you were born, she had a vision during a psychotropic ritual and claimed to have seen your father drowning Victor in a bathtub.”

“Dear God . . .”

“The caliph dismissed it, was furious at Frances for making accusations. Frances wasn’t exactly the most stable of magicians, so the rest of us dismissed it, too. And your parents appeared to be grieving. I didn’t know your mother very well at the time, so I just chalked it up to Frances partaking of one-too-many magic mushrooms.”

“When did you discover her vision was real?”

He pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose. “No one did, to my knowledge. It was only the word of one crazy old magician against your parents’. But as I came to know your mother, I began to wonder.”

“Why? What else did she do?”

“Nothing concrete, really. Just the way she treated people. She was beautiful, and she had this way about her that made you feel as though she were royalty—aloof and bored one moment, ripping you to shreds the next. You never knew what to expect. People secretly called her Queen, comparing her split personality to one of two Lewis Carroll characters. Was she the calculating Red Queen today or the furious Queen of Hearts? We never knew.”

This astounded me. Growing up, I never saw her angry. Not really.

Rooke stooped to pick up a slender broken bough and, after snapping off a few dead branches, wielded it like a walking stick, tapping its tip against the path. “People were frightened of her anger, but it was the coolness that bothered me.”

As I kept an eye on Lon and Evie, Rooke went on to relate a story about my mother unemotionally slapping a teenage boy in the middle of a ritual for flubbing his Latin and another about a time she calmly stabbed a waitress’s arm with a fork after the girl accidentally knocked a glass off the table. When Rooke started a third story, I cut him off.

“You don’t have to convince me that she was damaged,” I said. “I know it firsthand. I’m more interested in the circumstances of my origins, my conception. What can you tell me about the Moonchild spell?”

He lightly tapped the end of his walking stick against an open-mouthed gargoyle molded into the arm of a cement bench. “Ah, yes. Call down a great spirit into the womb, and give birth to a goddess. A classic ritual. I’m assuming you’ve researched my grandfather’s version.”

“We both know she didn’t use Crowley’s version or the older standard ritual.”

“She claimed to have perfected it. Altered it somehow. The order toasted her success when she gave birth to Victor, but after years of watching him catch every virus known to mankind and be shuffled in and out of the hospital, people began to wonder. And when he showed no magical aptitude whatsoever? Well . . .”

“What changed between my brother’s ritual and mine?”

“It was modified—no doubt about that. Enola told the caliph she came across the solution during one of her trips home to France. One of her secret magical partners oversaw your conception. Someone from another order—”

“Frater Blue. He showed up with my parents to oversee me being sacrificed last year. I sent him to the Æthyr with my parents.”

Rooke raised a brow. “My, someone’s been busy. I suppose there’s no point in suggesting you track him down and ask him for a copy of the ritual.”

“Dead end,” I quipped with a tight smile.

We passed an unusual tree from India known as the sleeping almond. A small metal sign identified the bark as having properties “similar to milk of the poppy” during certain years of its growth. I blinked at it for a moment; the geeky magician in me was awed. Powdered and charged with Heka, the bark of this tree was a valuable ingredient in a couple of the medicinals I made. On a few occasions, I’d ordered it from shady overseas vendors, shelling out several hundred dollars a pop for a sliver of bark the size of a fingernail. Crazy that Rooke had it here. And at the tree’s base grew a thick shrub of a rare variety of silver jasmine. No wonder this man was rich.