Sapphire Nights (Crystal Magic Book 1)(95)

Sam couldn’t leave after that mention of her mother. Walker would just have to wait. She added more of the statues to the outer circle but encouraged her aunt to keep talking. “Do you know how to reach Susannah? Should I let her know I’m here?”

“Mariah, bring me more of those redwood branches,” Daisy demanded.

Mariah grimaced and accepted her place of servitude in Daisy’s palace. She sent Sam a look that said she wanted to hear all about it later, then climbed out to fetch branches.

“Sue washed her hands of us,” Valdis responded in her usual gloomy voice. “She left with no forwarding address and doesn’t keep in touch. I have no good idea where she is. This place nearly broke her, broke all of us. You should have stayed away.”

“Sam, gather up some of those foundation stones over there.” Nibbling at the sandwich Mariah had brought for her, Daisy pointed at the far end of the house. “We need this wall done if you won’t leave.”

Sam began gathering stones, but at least she was still within listening distance. She looked for a way past her aunt’s gloomy prognostications. “She must have been crushed with grief, losing so much in such a short time.”

“It had been coming long before that, disaster upon disaster. They should have all left when I did. But Sue stupidly thought she could save your father. They were happy for a while, I suppose.” Val snipped wire and wrapped it around the stones, handing the rough form to Daisy to finish. “Of course, as I learned, life in the city wasn’t any safer.”

Dang, what did she have to do to get past the gloom? Sam looked for a way to carry more stones at once but she only had her pockets. “How did my mother know Jade and Wolf?”

“Sue went to the university for a while. She wanted to write and illustrate children’s books. She imagined herself as a modern Dr. Seuss. Jade and Wolf were teachers who encouraged her. She must have kept in touch when she came back here. The house had burned, and we’d lost the land by then, of course, so she and Zach stayed with Cass.”

“Do you think she’s still writing children’s books?” Sam asked cautiously, emptying her pockets in front of Val. Her aunt had never been so loquacious. Maybe she needed familiar territory to feel safe? Or to vent grief.

“Hope so. She was good, and she shouldn’t have to sacrifice everything. She sent you away because she loved you, wanted you to be safe, and she was homeless, broke, and just a teenager. Our parents were dead, and I was barely surviving as a waitress. She didn’t want to live off your trust fund or Cass. Jade and Wolf were older, already established, desperately wanted children—and promised to live a long way from here and danger. It must have made sense at the time.”

“And she didn’t want the Kennedys to have this land,” Daisy added, sounding completely coherent for a change. “Your mother gave you away in hopes the Evil One would wither and die, but evil doesn’t die,” she finished sadly. “He is up there now.”

Oh well, almost coherent. “So you had the land back by the time I was born.” She’d never quite understood the timeline of the disastrous year of her birth.

Val pushed back her veil to sip from her water bottle. In the dying light of the sun, shadows danced on her angular face. “I remember my parents when they were good people, talented, generous, gregarious. My childhood was happy, if a little strange, with so many people wandering in and out of it. I think the intentions of the commune were initially sound. But drugs and jealousy consumed them and blackness descended. The land returned after their souls departed.”

That sounded vaguely ominous. Sam wasn’t certain she wished to explore this path any longer. “So you and my mother inherited the result of your parents’ lawsuit?”

“The vultures lingered,” Daisy said. “They had to be dispersed.”

Val gestured toward Daisy with her water bottle. “We scattered the ashes and fled to all the corners of the earth. And the land was happy again.”

“So twenty-five years ago, your parents died, and my father died, and you and Susannah left, so there was no one left to fight?” Sam suggested as she gathered stones.

“We buried Evil’s eggs, but they’re still hatching,” Daisy said in a voice almost as mournful as Val’s.

Yup, the Lucys had their own language. Sam could understand Walker’s frustration. “Evil can’t be a person if he’s hatching eggs. Where did you bury them and how do you know they hatched?”

“Daisy mixes up time periods,” Val offered. “The evil in this ground has been here since prehistoric times, if it’s in the rock crystals as we suspect. The only thing we buried was my parents’ artwork, and maybe some others. They were corroding and probably should have been set on fire, but others had been saved, so we’d hoped someday these might be too.”

“So that’s what we’re protecting with the sculptures, artwork?” That almost made sense in its own weird way. Sam carried more of the small army to the outer foundation.

“And ourselves, for now,” Val added. “If Evil is back, we have no shield.”

Sam hid a sigh of exasperation. “Fighting evil requires identifying the source—and rocks can’t be evil. Polluted maybe. The Kennedys are not evil just because they’re trying to save their property and offer jobs to people who live up here. They may be going about it the wrong way, but being wrong is human, not evil.”