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Chapter 20

After the detectives left, I made a phone call to the pub and asked Bran to put out feelers in the community for any word of unusual activity involving Greco-Roman revivalist worshippers recently, then got to researching. I went in the back room and pulled out all the books I had on the Olympians.

My compendium of magical creatures—the same book in which I’d found the description of the Avartagh—had an extensive entry on Janus. Unlike most of his fellow Olympians, Janus was unique to the Roman pantheon, and had not been worshipped by the Greeks or Etruscans before them. No one really knew where he came from; it was possible he’d simply been born after the Greek Golden Age and had not come to prominence until Rome was beginning its rise to power. But the compendium’s author suggested it more likely he’d existed as long as the rest of his tribe, but had for some reason remained in the Otherworld while his kin were squabbling over Greece and Anatolia, only making himself known to our world when he felt the time was right.

The Romans believed he’d been their first king and had begun their rise to mastery over the world. They worshipped him as their god of beginnings and endings, of gates and passages, of transitions and time and duality. Per the compendium, he had been one of the key masters of the veil between the two worlds until the downfall of the Olympians, when he’d lost that position of honor and power to the Sons of Lir.

The more I thought about it, the more it all fit. Janus most certainly had the knowledge of the veil and the Great Cycle necessary to devise the Tamesis. And much like the Avartagh, Janus had every reason to hate humanity and the Arcanum: the most bitterly fought of the Faerie Wars had centered around the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, and the Arcanum had been formed toward the end of that centuries-long war and helped banish the Olympians back to the other side of the veil. Undermining Lugh and the Tuatha Dé by undercutting their precious Treaty of Tara with an attack on the Arcanum’s power would be a secondary victory—Olympians were legendary for their long memories and intense grudges. It was not a significant stretch to imagine Janus would resent those who had wrested control of the veil from him.

And as Johannes had pointed out, the rise in Hellenistic Revivalist worship of the Greco-Roman pantheon could easily have given him the opportunity to try again after so long without the influence to do so. That explained both how he was directing the ritual now, and why he had not attempted it in the centuries since the Avartagh’s failure.

Means, motive, opportunity. But even were Janus directing the Tamesis rites, I thought it unlikely he was personally conducting the sacrifices. Olympians had a reputation for not getting their hands dirty, using human and Fae patsies to do their work for them—in Greco-Roman religion, priests made sacrifices to the gods, not the other way around. Meaning I was unlikely to catch him red-handed.

Were Janus in fact guilty—and he was now firmly my lead suspect—Lugh was powerful enough to hold him accountable, and it was in his interest to do so and thus uphold the Treaty of Tara. That would end the threat of him trying again even if we disrupted the current rites. But it required sufficient proof for Lugh to act. As yet, the evidence was entirely circumstantial.

Seeing nothing more I could do about Janus at the moment, I pulled my ley-line map back out, only to confirm I didn’t yet have enough information about the necessary pattern for the Tamesis to narrow down potential sacrifice locations. Unless the Philly PD were willing to cover hundreds of potential sites, there wasn’t much I could do. It was frustrating, being so close but not being able to get useful answers. I might be able to do more that evening, when I had time to remap the network and extrapolate from the movements.

I had more customers than usual that morning, which made sense given that the shop had been closed the past few days. They were a good break from the boredom and frustration. But as for the research, I hadn’t come up with much at all when the phone rang three hours after the detectives left. It was Lajoie.

“We found her.” He gave me an address.

Conshohocken, a small suburb of Philadelphia proper, was about an hour by train from my place. Fortunately, the address was only a few blocks from the station and the morning rain had let up by the time I arrived, so it wasn’t too bad of a walk.

Connors and Lajoie were waiting outside the apartment building. Connors was finishing up a cigarette. I raised an eyebrow questioningly.

“What, Quinn? I smoke. That a problem?”

I shook my head. “No problem, just unexpected. You don’t generally smell of cigarettes.”

She snorted. “Tic-tacs and deodorant, and only smoking outside. I’m not going through a pack a day here, just when I’m stressed.”

I shrugged. It was irrelevant. “She here?”

Lajoie bobbed his head toward the building. “Apartment 4C. Local uniforms reported she went in about two hours ago, hasn’t come out.”

“And,” Connors added, “as promised, no one has approached her prior to your arrival. You ready?” I nodded. “Then let’s go.” She flicked the butt of her cigarette to the concrete and headed in the door.

I let the detectives take the lead up the stairs. When we reached the fourth-floor landing, Lajoie knocked on the door that said 4C.

“Police,” he announced. “Ms. Carr, we’d like to ask you a few questions.”

There was a long silence, then the sound of high heels on hardwood as someone approached the door from inside.

“May I see some identification, please?” It was Sam’s silky contralto.

Lajoie pulled out his badge and held it up to the peephole.

“I’m Detective Lajoie, Ms. Carr. My partner and I would like to talk to you about Evan Townes and Jane Crandall.”

There was another silence, presumably as she inspected the badge for signs of counterfeiting. We then heard the sound of several locks and door chains being released, and Connors holstered her weapon just as the door swung open to reveal the tall, curvy blonde form of Samantha Carr, Sorcerer of the Third Rank of the Arcanum.

She locked eyes with me for a second, apparently unsurprised to see me with the detectives, before turning her head to address Lajoie.

“Detective.”

He nodded in acknowledgement. “This is my partner, Detective Connors. I believe you know Mr. Quinn. He’s consulting with us on the case.” He gestured to each of us in turn. She nodded politely to Connors, then gave me a longer, more measuring look before returning her attention to Lajoie.

“Please, come in. Would you care for a drink?” she asked as she turned and walked back down the short entrance hall.

Lajoie led the three of us after her to her small living room.

“No drinks, thank you. We just have a few questions for you,” he said. Connors seemed content to let him take the lead in the interview.

“Of course. Whatever I can do to help Philadelphia’s finest. Please, have a seat,” she replied, gesturing to the couch that took up most of the room.

We sat; she took the armchair facing us at an angle, crossing her legs at the knee.

“Ms. Carr,” Lajoie began, “you were seen in the company of both Evan Townes and Jane Crandall, at the Paris Bistro, shortly before both were murdered. Care to explain that coincidence?”

She sighed and looked down. “I didn’t know Jane was dead. The news hasn’t named the second victim yet. Damn.”

We all silently waited for more. She eventually looked up at me instead of the detectives.

“Since you brought them to the Market, can I assume you’ve briefed them on our world?”

“The basics, yes,” I replied evenly. “They know about the Arcanum and the Fae. They know we’re tracking someone trying to recreate the Avartagh’s Tamesis rites.”

She nodded in acknowledgement. “Okay. You know how the ley-lines in the city were moving around more than usual lately, almost randomly?”

I nodded silently. Connors’s eyebrows raised in question, but I ignored her. We could get into that later.

“Well,” she continued, “I have a journal in my possession, given as a gift from my old master Benoit de Calais upon my completion of the Trials. It belonged to his great-grandfather, a sorcerer named Jean Guiscard, one of the Arcanum hunters who stopped the Avartagh centuries ago in Brittany. And it mentioned the same thing happening there before the rites started. All of the victims were killed at new nodes that had just formed from the shifting lines in the days before.”

That matched what I already knew, at least. I nodded again.

“So when I noticed the weird movements here, shortly after I got back into town, I looked into it. I got in contact with every sorcerer who lived at or near one of the new nodes. I was trying to figure out if they were in danger, if they had anything else in common, that kind of thing. And if they were in danger, I hoped to figure out what order they were likely to be attacked in, and to warn them.”

“Okay,” Lajoie replied, “assuming that’s true, how did you hope to figure out what order they were going to be attacked in?”

“By tracking the ley-line shifts and trying to figure out the pattern—to figure out where the new nodes were going to be by the time the attackers needed a new blood sacrifice. Logically, they’d target the nearest unranked sorcerer to the next node. That’s the simplest and easiest way to pick their next sacrifice.”

Connors and Lajoie looked over at me. I nodded in confirmation.

“I looked into the same thing this morning, but I still don’t know enough about the rites to figure out which nodes are being targeted.”

“You don’t have Guiscard’s journal,” Sam said. “That’s what put me on the trail initially, and his notes are detailed enough that I was able to identify the first two ritual locations, but not in time to stop either of them.”

“Why,” I asked slowly, choosing my words and my tone diplomatically, trying to avoid sounding accusatory or suspicious, “did you not report this to anyone?”

“Would you?” she shot back. “I’m a ranked sorcerer. I’m supposed to be able to take care of my home city.”

I scowled, but it was true.

“You must have known that anything involving the Avartagh was beyond your own skill.”

“Maybe,” she replied, “but I’ve never exactly been on good terms with the Rectors.”

“Oh?” I asked.

“I never told you this before—it’s not exactly first date conversation material—but I was only taken to be trained after I accidentally set my parents’ house on fire and they both died. I was six. A team led by a Rector showed up to take me. He wanted to put me down as a danger to others.” I winced at that. “Fortunately, two of his team members managed to convince him to take me to the Court for judgement. The Court fostered me with a First Rank until I was old enough for apprenticeship. But you’ll forgive me if I don’t exactly trust Rectors after that.”

It was a fair concern. Some Rectors were quick to judgement and would rather end threats than put in the effort to solve the problem humanely. Especially in the late fifties or early sixties when this must have occurred, with the Shadow War fresh in the Arcanum’s collective memory. A lot of the men and women serving the Arcane Court after the war were happier to kill first and ask questions later.

I could see how such a traumatic experience might shape a young Sorcerer’s opinions of those charged with maintaining the peace and upholding the treaties and customs. I looked over at the detectives. Connors was stone-faced as always, but Lajoie looked horrified. From what the Avartagh had revealed about his own history, I could understand why.

“Then why not come to me, as the senior Sorcerer in the city?” I asked.

She quirked an eyebrow. “I did. Twice. Yesterday and the day before—I told you at the Market I had something I wanted to talk to you about. This was that something. But you haven’t been home. The shop was locked up both times I tried to drop by.”

I nodded. “I was out of town looking into some things. Sorry about that.”

She waved it off. “Yeah, I didn’t think you were avoiding me. But still, you asked.”

“Who were the other four you talked to?” Lajoie asked.

She frowned. “If Jane is gone, that leaves one other woman and three men as possible targets. All unranked sorcerers. Anna Begay, Charles English, Jeremy Wilson, and Joe Gonzalez. All live within a half mile or so of one of the spots where it looks like the nodes are heading. What I haven’t yet figured out are exact locations of the eventual nodes, the order of the killings, or what it is the killers are trying to do with the energy they’re harvesting.”

“Do you have contact information for them? Addresses and phone numbers?”

“Yes,” she replied. “It’s in my address book in the bedroom.”

“Could you get it for us, please?”

“Of course.” She stood and walked to the bedroom, closing the door behind her.

As soon as the door closed, Connors immediately leaned in.

“Do we trust her?” she asked in a low voice so Sam wouldn’t hear.

I thought about it for a moment. “Everything she’s said holds up. She did tell me at the Market that she wanted to talk to me about something, and I can confirm on my security cameras whether she actually came by as she claimed. If that’s true, everything in her story is consistent.”

“You said she’d just recently returned to Philly?” Lajoie asked.

“Yes,” I nodded, “but she lived here previously, too. The timing of her return is fairly weak evidence for considering her a suspect, especially considering the matter of her oaths.”

The detectives considered this, but before they could respond Samantha opened her bedroom door, address book in hand.

“This should have everything you need to track down the four I’ve identified. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Why yes, Ms. Carr,” Connors answered, “there is. We’re going to pick up these individuals and bring them in for interviews. In the meantime, would you mind accompanying Mr. Quinn here to his office and show him what you’ve got so far, maybe try to get a head start on figuring out who the next victim will be?”

I started. Invite Sam into my shop, my office, my private research area? Work with her? I hadn’t really worked side by side with another sorcerer in decades, and definitely not one with whom I had an awkward history. I wasn’t keen to change that particular habit right now.

I glared at Connors, annoyed at the presumption. But she met my gaze unflinchingly. I could practically hear her thinking at me. She was right, of course. If Samantha really did have anything useful, this could help us, and I was the only one in a position to use her information. And I was also best equipped to determine whether the timing of her return was suspicious or a mere coincidence.

Samantha, for her part, was grinning in amusement. “Sure thing. Just let me get my things and show me the way.”

“We’ll give you a ride. Gather whatever you need.”


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