“So maybe they haven’t come after us because they can’t come after us.” Joyce glanced again at her phone, as though it had betrayed her. “Not here, anyway.”
“That’s why we were trying to get here last night,” Patrick went on. “But then when we were cut off by that bus that the Ridden had stopped in the street . . .”
“The lighthouse was the only other option,” Izzie finished for him.
“But Ivory Point is only safe at high tide, I’m guessing,” Patrick said. “That’s when Fuller committed all of his murders, so far as we were able to work out. Presumably so that the other possessed individuals couldn’t come and interfere.”
Daphne was thoughtful for a moment, a worried look on her face.
“So are we going to be okay going back to the Resident Agency? Or even back home, for that matter?” She finally said, looking around the room at the others. “My apartment is on the other side of Hyde Park, and there’s no magic markings on my building, so far as I know. If they know who we are, couldn’t they be waiting for us?”
“Maybe there’s a way to make something portable that would serve the same purpose.” Izzie frowned, rubbing her chin. “My grandmother never left the house without her mojo hand, a gris-gris bag that she made to protect herself against evil. Could be we need something like that to keep us safe, only using the stuff that we know is effective against the Ridden instead of the camphor and roots and bits of bones that Mawmaw Jean used.”
“I’ve got tons of sea salt, and we can probably do something with my mom’s wedding silverware, or maybe some of her old jewelry.” Patrick glanced over at the pantry and the cabinets. “It’s worth a shot, anyway.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” Izzie nodded.
Daphne was thoughtful. “I wish there was a way to know who was Ridden and who wasn’t, short of them going all blotchy and mindless. Would help to defend against them if we could see them coming.”
“Well,” Izzie rubbed her jaw, “there is the ‘ilbal.’ It was a drug that Nicholas Fuller took that supposedly helped him to see the Ridden for what they really were.”
“What, you mean those vials of powder that were found at Fuller’s apartment?” Patrick gave her a skeptical look. “You really think one of us should try that stuff?”
Izzie shrugged. “It might be worth a shot, is all I’m saying.”
“So what’s the plan?” Joyce asked. “Where do we go from here?”
“We still need to figure out what the hell they found down in that mineshaft,” Izzie answered. “Was it just the stuff we’re calling Ink, or was there more to it than that? What happened the other times this kind of thing cropped up, like with the Guildhall fire in the forties and the Eschaton Center murders in the seventies, and is there anything from those cases that might be useful for us to know now? Strategies, tactics, defenses, whatever. And finally, how does Martin Zotovic and Parasol fit into all of this, and just what is it they’re trying to achieve?”
“And then?” Daphne looked a little dubious.
“Then we figure out how to stop them.”
CHAPTER FOUR
It was past noon before Joyce’s clothes were finished in the dryer, by which point Daphne and Izzie had already left together, each carrying one of the “gris-gris bags” that Izzie had assembled: Ziploc sandwich bags filled with sea salt, random bits of quartz that Patrick had found in a drawer, and a piece of silver cutlery from the silverware drawer or silver jewelry that had belonged to his mother. The idea was that, if cornered by one of the Ridden with no way out, they could use the salt to form a ring around themselves, and hope that either the quartz or the silver might be enough to keep the Ridden at bay. If nothing else, they could throw the sea salt in an attacker’s face and hope for the best, or try stabbing them with a fork. Daphne and Izzie were driving back to the FBI offices to retrieve some of the things they needed, and would pick up clothes and supplies at Izzie’s hotel and Daphne’s apartment before returning to Patrick’s house for the night. They’d all agreed that it was safest to spend the hours between sunset and sunrise in a place that they knew to be secure, at least until they could work out other forms of defense.
Patrick had finished cleaning up the kitchen, clearing away the dirty dishes and washing up the pots and pans, and then changed into something a little more appropriate for the cold weather outside, ultimately opting for flannel shirt, jeans, and hiking boots. His quilted jacket was in the dryer with Joyce’s things, a little scuffed up after the evening’s excitement, but still serviceable.
While he was getting dressed he heard the timer on the dryer buzzing down in the basement, and by the time he finished lacing up his hiking boots and returned to the living room, he found Joyce was already dressed in her own clothes again. She was looking at the framed photos on the table beneath the spot where he had hung the tapa cloth that his maternal grandparents had brought with them from Kensington Island back in the seventies.
“Is this you?” Joyce picked up the frame that was sitting front and center, showing a little boy standing beside an old man in overalls.
“Yeah, that’s me and my great-uncle, Alf Tevake. That was taken when I was about three years old, I think? Right around the time that he moved
