Kindling the Moon (Arcadia Bell #1)(32)

“Kicked out was more like it,” Mr. Tamlin corrected. “Over forty years in the order, and the bastards refused to stand by us after we appeared on that talk show.”

“Because you told the truth?”

“What? No. Because we”—his fingers curled to make air quotes—“embarrassed the organization and broke our vows of silence. That’s what our discharge letter said.”

I crossed my legs and tried to breathe in through my mouth instead of my nose; the room smelled musty. “On the talk show, you said that a demon killed the three victims of the Black Lodge slayings.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Tamlin agreed, her eyes fixing on mine challengingly. “Do you believe in demons, Anna?”

“I believe anything is possible.”

Together they gave me identical, slow smiles. Really creepy smiles. These people were part of the reason that occult practitioners had a bad public image.

“You never said exactly how you knew that a demon did it,” I noted. That was primarily because they spent all their on-air time yelling back and forth with the studio audience, trying to convince them that demons really existed. UFOs and demons were equal in the minds of savages—just conspiratorial BS. Anyone who cried demon or claimed to be abducted by spaceships was gullible or uneducated at best.

Mr. Tamlin leaned forward to pick through a small crystal bowl of colorful hard candy that stuck together in clumps; I wondered how old it was. “We knew it was a demon because we were there when Magus Dempsey was killed.”

Magus Dempsey was the third murder victim, the head of a small Portland organization called Societas Mysterium Anglia. I’d counted on the Tamlins to relay bits of gossip about the fourth botched murder attempt at the Luxe temple—their own order’s temple in San Diego—but I hadn’t expected them to be witnesses to the third murder. What in the world were they doing in a rival order’s temple?

“Was that known publicly?” I asked. “Because I thought you were witnesses to the Luxe attempt—the fourth incident.”

“That damned talk show,” Mr. Tamlin said. “Their producers got the information wrong. We weren’t there during the fourth attempt.”

“But the talk show aired after the Duvals were killed in the car accident,” I pointed out. “Why did it take you so long to come forward?”

Mrs. Tamlin sighed heavily. “The killer cast some sort of confusion spell on us after Magus Dempsey was murdered. We found a sigil drawn in sand on our doorstep when we got back home from the crime scene. Not soon enough, though. We both stepped through it before we noticed it. As soon as we did, wham! All the events got muddled.”

“We didn’t even remember the murder for weeks. Once memories started trickling in and we realized we’d been crossed, it took us more than a month to shake off the spell,” Mr. Tamlin explained. “We tried everything to clear the fog. All that magical talent in Luxe, and would you believe that not one of the officers could remove that damned spell? In the end, we finally got an old hoodoo priestess to do a successful uncrossing.”

“After she removed the spell, all our memories came back sharp as a tack. That’s when we told the Luxe leader everything that happened a few days before he was attacked.”

Uh-huh. I was beginning to doubt my bright idea to interview this couple. “So you told him at that time that you’d witnessed the third murder?”

“Not the murder itself,” Mr. Tamlin admitted. “But we did walk in shortly after.”

“Can you explain in detail what you saw and who was present?”

Still poking around the bowl of hard candy, Mr. Tamlin finally found the piece he wanted and struggled to pry it away from another. “Sure. I’ll tell you exactly what we told Luxe. We drove up to Magus Dempsey’s house early in the evening—”

“But Magus Dempsey was head of a rival organization, not the Luxe Order,” I argued. “Why were you at his house?”

“Yes, he was the head of the Portland order. His daughter married our second son. We were good friends.”

Interesting. If anyone from the E∴E∴ married someone from another occult order, it would be scandalous. It surprised me that Luxe wasn’t the same way. I knew our order was definitely more of an old-world organization, and that others were more liberal, but still, who knows? Maybe all that crap my parents wanted to do with their United Occult Order plan would have been more universally accepted than I’d imagined.

“Like I was saying, we had flown in to meet him for our quarterly ghost-banishing ritual. He had terrible problems with ghosts, you see—”

Oh, Mother of God. Them too? Come on, folks; it’s just imps. Say it with me: There are no such things as ghosts. Sometimes I really wished other people besides Earthbounds could see what I could.

“—and when we rang the doorbell, Magus Dempsey didn’t answer, so we walked inside. Saw him split in two on the living room floor. His body was lying in front of a demon that was being forced back into the Æthyr inside a binding triangle. Enola and Alexander Duval were standing beside it, and another fellow.”

What? My parents were there? My heart began racing. There were too many questions I wanted to ask them at once. I tried to stay calm and work through them. “I wasn’t aware that the Duval couple was present at any of the killings—only the attempted fourth murder of the Luxe head in San Diego. Are you sure it was them?”