a mistake, but then it was too late.... She was still young then. She’s powerful, but she’s not well trained. She’d already been to juvie and she might not have known at the time that her records were sealed. She probably freaked, thinking they’d send her up as an adult with one strike. Plus her other crimes, she might have believed they’d put her away for life, so she came up with the rape story to buy some time and then she ran for the woods. She seems to have an extraordinary connection to nature here—right down to animals and the plants. Maybe that was why she went to the greenhouse.”
“Yeah, I don’t get that. Why did she rob the greenhouse of a plant that was growing on the ground outside it?”
“I think she needed to rip the plant apart, but since she’s connected to the power there, she didn’t want to hurt one that was growing in the living soil around the lake. I’ve only seen her take things that weren’t alive. She knows things she won’t tell me, and, as far as I can tell, she takes a positive delight in messing with Ridenour.”
“Sounds like mutual hate. It doesn’t seem like much of a reason to kill someone’s father, though.”
“I’m still not sure about Ridenour.”
“You kind of like him.”
“I do, but that’s not a factor in guilt. I’m sure the ley weaver didn’t kill Leung or Strother. It’s not interested in human problems and it doesn’t seem to move away from its . . . sculpture or whatever you’d call it. It wouldn’t have to wreck a car since it could just draw the energy out of someone like Leung, and there’d have been no ghost left to tell me a crime had been committed. I’m reasonably convinced Willow isn’t responsible, either. That leaves Jewel, Costigan, and Ridenour.”
“Unless there’s someone else.”
I heaved a sigh. “The mysterious Number Five. I just don’t know. But I can’t get that anchor stone back without solving the murders, and I must shut down the loose power around the lakes. It’s not safe as it is and I’m not sure it’ll be better back the way it was. Jewel’s not the weak and gracious grande dame she wants people to believe her to be. She’s greedy, and until she got sick, she was powerful and dangerous, and people are still scared of her. But I think she usurped the power when she built the house. I don’t think it’s really hers, which may be why she’s sick now.”
“So where are we going now?”
“To find out who knew we were at Leung’s place.”
Geoff Newman scowled at us when he opened the door, but he spoke in a low voice. “What do you want? And who’s this?”
I ignored the latter question. “I want to know who sent a shambling army of walking corpses to visit me last night at your father-in-law’s place.”
Newman’s mouth dropped open and his aura pulsed with alarm. “Who what?”
I pushed past him into the house. Tendrils of yellow and sickly green energy stroked at my legs, but nothing stopped me. Quinton came silently in my wake.
Newman shut the door behind us and stared at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Where’s Jewel? Maybe she does.”
“Jewel’s resting. She had a rough night. The rain—” He cut himself off.
A piece of the puzzle about Jewel’s illness clicked into place in my mind. “Rain makes her weaker, doesn’t it?” I demanded. Newman hung his head but didn’t reply. “At least I can assume she wasn’t out directing zombies to my door. But who was?”
He looked back up, imploring. “Please . . . please keep your voice down. Come on in here and we can talk.”
He motioned us to follow him toward the unused wing of the house. Well, not entirely unused, since the room we walked into was a kitchen that was plainly an active work area. It was a big space that led into a dining room facing the lake. An ill-advised little dining nook had been built at the end of the kitchen and facing the front of the house where it would never get the sun or a view of anything but the steep road up to the highway. The area had been converted into a makeshift office, and I wondered why Geoff Newman hadn’t taken over one of the doubtlessly empty rooms upstairs. I noticed that the writhing tendrils of energy didn’t penetrate very far into the kitchen, so maybe that was the reason he’d chosen it—a refuge from the demands of his wife.
He shifted papers aside and closed up an open laptop computer to make room for us all at the small table. He sat in a white kitchen chair and faced us once Quinton and I were seated on the padded bench below the window.
He played with an empty coffee cup, but he didn’t offer us any coffee.
“Tell me about Jewel,” I prompted.
“Sometimes the rain makes her sick. Not all the time, just storms like last night. I don’t understand it. Jewel always says the water is being taken away from her. I don’t see how that can be, since the water is falling down on all of us, but that’s what she says. Lately she’s been pretty sickly, like she just doesn’t have any energy at all most of the time.”
“When did it start?”
“It’s gotten worse over time, so it’s hard to say when it started. She’s been having troubles since we met and that’s why we’re here—she said building the house right here would be better for her, so we did that.”
“Did it help?”
“A bit, at first. After her stepmother passed was when she first started having bad days. When Jonah died, they happened more often. She talked about demons a lot. At first I thought maybe she was a little . . . touched in the head, but I know that’s not true now. I know there’s something about the lake that . . . I don’t know how to say it.”
“It’s the source of her power,” I supplied. “Right now the power is uncontrolled, so anyone who knows how can take some of it. When they do, they drain power your wife’s been relying on and she gets sicker. When it rains hard enough, I suspect the power in the lake gets drawn to the surface, like osmosis, and it’s easy for other mages to suck it off and use it. They might not actually be trying to hurt her, but the effect is the same. The system is supposed to be held down by a single nexus point under this house. That’s why she wanted to build here, so she could control the nexus rather than drawing power from it at a distance. But right now the nexus isn’t anchored properly and others are using the power that Jewel’s never truly been able to control. That’s what she wants me to fix.”
“I understand that. Sort of. What I don’t understand is why they have to kill anybody. Is someone going to try to kill Jewel?”
In a bland voice I asked, “Would you care if she died?”
Newman looked appalled, the energy around his head sinking into a clinging, muck green shroud. “Of course I would!”
“Why? Don’t say you love her. I know you care about her, but that’s not the same thing.” There had never been any sign of the dancing sparks between them that I associated with love.
“I do care! She’s a hard woman to like, it’s true, but she—she makes things better. Do you have any idea what it’s like to do good work? To know what you’re doing is difficult, but necessary, and that you’ll keep on doing it, even if no one notices and no one cares?”
I’d done plenty of “right” things that went without acknowledgment or reward, but they weren’t the same. He wasn’t talking about Jewel’s trying to restore the lake; he was talking about his own part—the silent support. “I’ve seen it,” I replied, knowing it was sitting beside me, and for a moment I felt the same confusion and despair that had kept me awake in the night, studying the ceiling.
“Then you know how I’d care. So . . . is someone going to kill my wife?”
“I don’t think so. I’d guess they can’t touch her directly and they don’t really want her to go away, because then Willow would become the keeper of the nexus and they certainly don’t want a rogue sorcerer like her in charge of the power around the lake. She may seem like just a crazy young woman, but, if I’m right, Willow’s potentially very dangerous to anyone who is trying to grab power from the lake.”
“I don’t understand. Why Willow?”
“Willow is Sula’s daughter, and, until you built this house for Jewel, the nexus had been husbanded by Sula’s family for generations. All the other mages are Johnny-come-latelies, not people who were born here. They aren’t
