Garden of Bone: Book 6, page 12
This time, she made a point to memorize the address. But now that she knew where it was, how could she get back in? She needed to see the courtyard. Could she see where she’d dug? Were there more bones?
A block and a half away, she found a spot and parked the car. This time, she approached the house cautiously on foot, coming around the corner, walking up casually. She stepped slowly near the patio that bordered the sidewalk, trying to figure out what she could do. Can I just peer into the courtyard? Do I look like a tourist? She wasn't sure if she even looked like one now.
Something about her spoke of purpose and need. She knew that much. So surely, she wouldn’t pass as a random tourist. If someone was in the house, they’d get an odd vibe from her.
But as she approached the courtyard fence, she saw a young woman standing just on the other side. Her hands interlaced the wrought iron spikes and she looked out. "Hello," she offered in greeting, almost as though she'd been expecting a visitor. She’d not been standing there when Eleri had last driven past.
Unable to do anything else, Eleri replied, "Hello,” and quickly added, “I love your house!" It seemed like a nice thing to say—touristy, maybe not too creepy. "It's just beautiful. The courtyard is stunning. And the garden is amazing."
"Yes," said the girl. Something in the way she dragged out the letter S, something in her tone, told Eleri that she didn't quite buy what Eleri was selling. Whether that was because she was not keen on tourists in general or Eleri in particular, Eleri couldn't have said. Still, she was unprepared for the young woman's next words.
"My name is Lafae. Welcome to my home."
Eleri smiled and held out her hand. They clasped hands through the gate. No shock or tremor hit her, although Eleri had been braced for something when she touched this young woman's hand. Something about her face looked familiar. Still, despite all the thoughts racing through her head, she forced her standard etiquette. "My name is Eleri."
"I know," said the young woman. "You were here before. You came into our courtyard."
Well, shit, Eleri thought. So much for thinking the young girl just didn't like tourists.
She wasn't that young, actually. Something about the way she had stood with her hands on the fence, almost hanging on it, one hip shot out to the side, had made her seem almost like a petulant teenager. But Lafae must be at least partly into her twenties.
She threw the bolt on the gate, and Eleri realized it was an easy thing to do—simply a flip bolt. Had she reached through the bars the other day, she could have flipped it herself, easily letting herself into the courtyard. In fact, anyone could walk in.
Lafae turned as Eleri followed her into the open but shaded space and looked over her shoulder. "No, ma'am," she replied. "Not just anyone can come in."
She didn't illuminate the idea any further, but left it to stand had she said her thoughts out loud, or did Lafae have some kind of special skills? Maybe she just read people well. Maybe she just realized she'd opened the bolt and wanted to be sure she wasn't advertising to the street how unsecure her home was. Somehow, Eleri doubted a reasonable explanation was at work here.
As she stepped onto the grounds, it felt like something seeped up through the soles of her feet. Despite the grass, and despite the shoes she wore, she felt something leaching up and into her—something separate from this strange woman. Eleri walked carefully. The feelings coursing with her blood told her this ground was hallowed.
Even as Eleri was registering the sensation, a door from the home opened onto the courtyard. Practically hidden by vines, the door swung forward and suddenly became visible. Another young woman, who looked much like Lafae—and again, seemed very familiar to Eleri—emerged into the space.
Lafae beckoned to the newcomer with brightly colored fingernails that tipped graceful hands, but something underneath the show lurked a feeling Eleri couldn't quite place—or maybe didn't want to.
"This is my sister, Gisele," she said. Her accent lilted. It rode the words instead of forming them.
Eleri put out her hand again in yet another attempt at etiquette, but once again, the new woman beat her to it.
"You are Eleri," she said, and Eleri only smiled. The day was getting stranger and stranger. And then Gisele added, without mirth, “You tried to steal something from us the other day.”
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"Would you like to come in?"
Gisele swept a graceful hand to her side, motioning Eleri into the home. She had no long nails and wore no bright colors, unlike her sister. Something flowed from her that was more natural, something that told of magic in her touch.
Eleri smiled as best she could and offered up her nicest, "No, thank you."
She was not stepping foot into this house. There was something under the ground, and she could feel it. These two sisters were toying with her. She wasn't about to let them.
"So," Gisele said in little more than a whisper, "we shall speak here, but you can't raise your voice."
Eleri shrugged. Why would she? Unless she needed to attract attention? Did they know she was a federal agent? They knew many other things about her. How had they figured out her name? Unless—well, factoring in her lapse in memory, anything was possible.
Perhaps she'd even been inside the house before, but nothing swam to the surface in her in recollection. What she remembered and what was real were certainly at odds.
It was Lafae who spoke next. "You found our house and you entered. That speaks of something."
That was a vague sentence, Eleri thought, and she merely raised an eyebrow at the other woman. This was an old trick from interrogation training: Keep the other person speaking and let them give themselves away.
Lafae either fell for it or played along; ultimately, Eleri couldn’t tell.
"Those gates are protected. What are you, that they let you in here?"
Eleri shrugged again. It wouldn't be fair to answer when she really didn't know what she was—but she wasn’t going to reveal that to these two.
They stood in front of her, the two sisters as close to each other as they were to her, the three of them forming a triangle. Eleri had her back to the street. She didn't feel completely safe, but anything else would be a far more vulnerable position. In any other configuration, they would block her exit. Right now, the two women had their own home at their back—and she had no idea what else might be in that house.
"You tried to steal from us?" Gisele nudged the topic again, the Ss lingering just a little bit. The Rs were swallowed ever-so-slightly, almost as though she were British, though nothing else in her accent spoke of a UK origin. Though the tones were distinctly New Orleans and definitely local, they lacked any of the drawl of the south.
"I found something," Eleri conceded. “Stealing” was a harsh word for confiscating evidence—though Eleri couldn’t yet prove that was the case.
Gisele tsked twice with her tongue and played the return game on Eleri. Waiting in silence and hoping Eleri would speak. Eleri obliged. "It was a human bone."
She wondered if she could shock them enough to return what she'd found, or at least acknowledge the enormity of the problem. Instead, neither reacted at all.
She tried again, playing another card. "So, you are aware that you have human bones buried in your courtyard?"
Lafae laughed. "This is New Orleans, honey."
Eleri found it humorous to be called “honey” by a woman who appeared to be her junior, but she didn't let it stop the forward momentum of the conversation and she didn't let it change her expression.
"Human bones can be found all over New Orleans,” Lafae protested. “Finding one in our courtyard doesn't mean much of anything."
"Doesn't it?" Eleri pressed, again tossing the ball back to them. This time though, they both stayed silent. Eleri waited a beat and, when they didn't speak, she said, "I found the human bone, and you're correct. They exist in abundance all through a city as old as this one. Old Graves and bodies float to the surface all the time. Any yard might contain who-knows-what …"
She acted as though their excuse was perfectly normal, but then turned her expression on a dime. "However, when I found this one, you stole my memories and sent me home. You took the bone back. You cleaned the evidence."
She waited again. The two women shrugged their acquiescence to what they had done. That was shocking in itself. Eleri only barely believed that magic like that was possible. A quick admission that it had been perpetrated against her was not what she’d expected.
Who were these two and what in God's name were they up to? She was considering drawing her badge from her back pocket when Lafae and Gisele suddenly went on alert. Both women, though it was subtle, quickly tensed, their eyes darting toward the left. Their noses lifted slightly into the air.
"Cabot," one whispered to the other. Eleri wondered if it was an incantation, or another spell on her, or a name. She had no idea. Then they resumed the interrogation on her.
"How did you get through the gate?" Gisele asked a second time. "No one can get through that gate without an invitation. Yet you walked in when no one was home. What did you do?" She almost hissed as she repeated the last question. "What did you do?"
The second time she said it, her tone demanded an answer—and for the first time, Eleri felt threatened. These were two women who had successfully erased a portion of her memory. She had gone home with no idea where she'd been. It had taken hours to find this place again, and now they were hissing at her like snakes, asking what she had done. She decided to turn the tables.
"I opened the gate. It pushed open quite easily." That much she remembered, and she would use it against them—even though she was unsure if her memory was accurate. Their eyes widened, but she didn't give them a chance. "What did you do?" she demanded in return. "You stole my memory. So I stumbled onto something you very much want to keep secret. Tell me. What did you do?"
Both women slightly shook their heads, refusing to answer. Eleri aimed another direction. Whereas she wanted to tell them she'd found the anterior end of a broken piece of adult tibia, she felt that pulling out her professional vocabulary—though it accurately described what she'd seen—would out her as the scientist she was. She wasn't ready to do that. She wasn't ready to tell them she was a federal agent, either. She wanted more information before they possibly clammed up and turned away.
This time, it was Lafae who smiled at her, and the smile was neither welcoming nor warm. One edge of her lip curled up, revealing white, even teeth. Eleri thought they must be orthodontic—but then again, with these two, who knew how they accomplished anything? Lafae's grin opened a little wider and she spoke. "Doll, if you can open our gate, then you should know very well what we did. Tell me—" She leaned in closer. "What are you?"
"A visitor," Eleri replied. She saw Gisele’s eyes narrowing as she scanned Eleri from head to toe. Her nostrils flared as though she was sniffing at her, and Eleri wondered, What in God's name is she looking for? Lafae's twisted grin did not leave her face.
Gisele motioned to her sister and Lafae glanced at Eleri questioningly before running through the same motions. Eleri stood still, taking it. Let them look. Let them sniff. Let them examine her. What would they possibly come up with?
Lafae's focus turned away for a moment as a man approached from the street. He pushed the gate open easily, and Eleri couldn't remember if Lafae had locked it behind them. Regardless, he was in with them now and somewhat behind her, where she couldn’t get a good look.
Eleri didn’t like it. Her agent training had only been short on how to get out of these situations, and most of it had emphasized how to not get stuck like this in the first place. Too late. If the three were in league and if they wished, they could box her in. So she turned to look at the newcomer. She wanted a good look it his face.
This must be Cabot. He wasn’t a spell, but a person—and as she took in the long face, the lean nose, the thick but narrow jaw, she realized what he was. He was like Donovan. And here were these two women with human bones in their yard and a wolf amongst them.
Cabot also looked Eleri up and down, and he came to a conclusion the two women had not. He looked at them and said, "Remy."
24
Eleri stood still, trying not to let her expression show that she already knew what Cabot was. The average person on the street wouldn’t have been able to understand his skills and ability just by looking at him, but GJ Janson's research and the skeletons in her grandfather's lab had made a number of skeletal anomalies in Donovan's kind quite clear. Still, Eleri never would have guessed it the first time she met Donovan—and she knew the human skeleton like the back of her hand. So there was no reason at all for Cabot to be alerted to her knowledge.
She was happily surprised to find that she could simply look at Cabot and know right away. The shape of his face, the hair along his forearms, the way he carried his shoulders—because his scapulae were longer and thinner than normal, his rib cage slightly rounder and less flat front to back—gave him away.
She almost smiled, but fought the urge. She didn't want any of these three to know that she knew. She also had to figure out how Cabot had immediately known she was a Remy. Though it was her family name, she hadn’t shared it with them. The way he’d said it, “Remy” didn’t mean anything good. He hadn't introduced himself, either, and hadn't spoken directly to her. He'd simply looked her over, smelled more than whatever the two sisters had, and declared her a Remy.
She looked back and forth now between the three of them, taking a short step backward so that Cabot was no longer behind her. She was calculating a clear path out. She noted from the corner of her eye—without glancing over or turning her head—that the fence remained slightly open. Unfortunately, only one of the two halves was open. The other appeared to still be locked in place. The open one was on her side, meaning it swung toward her, and she couldn't simply push through it as she fled. She'd have to duck around it.
Still paying attention to the conversation as well as her escape route, Eleri neither confirmed nor denied what Cabot had said. However, it didn't appear that anyone doubted him. Lafae and Gisele glanced to each other for a moment, side-eye, never taking their attention off of Eleri. Apparently, being a Remy meant they trusted her less now, and they hadn’t trusted her when she showed up.
She almost said "Eleri Eames," but clearly, the name Remy meant something to them. Maybe that was because it was New Orleans. Maybe it was because they were involved in something. The problem was, if they were involved in something, the name Eames might mean just as much. She didn't know, so she decided silence was the best strategy.
Slowly rocking her weight to one side, then the other—as though she might just be nervous—she managed to get another half step backward. This time, though, Cabot turned and stared at her, narrowing his eyes once more. "What are you doing here, Remy?"
She raised her eyebrows, trying to look innocent, and said, "My Grandmere lives in town." The French term for grandmother didn't faze any of the three, though with names like Gisele and Lafae, Eleri was not surprised by that.
"It's more than that," Cabot declared, an obvious demand for more information from Eleri. When she didn’t volunteer it, he volleyed more specific questions at her. "Why are you here? Why are you at this house? How did you find it?"
Eleri shrugged and answered only his last question. "Stumbled upon it two days ago, and—well, let's just say, these lovely sisters took something from me." She wanted to say she was going to head out, but that didn't feel right. If she announced she was leaving, they might try to stop her. She did not want to have to make a break for it. She wasn’t certain they wouldn’t try to physically detain her. There were three of them. Two had some kind of powerful voodoo and one was a wolf. Though he likely wouldn't change fully, right here in view of the street, he still could bare fangs and grow claws in a heartbeat.
She'd seen it before. What she didn't know about him was whether he was Lobomau—but given the numbers Donovan had spouted to her recently and his warning, the safer bet was that Cabot was.
Eleri decided taking the offensive was a better option. She looked between the two sisters. "Any chance you still have that bone that I dug up the other day?"
Again, without moving her eyes, she tried to change her focus to the ground near her feet. It wasn't difficult to spot the wound in the earth where she'd removed the piece in question. The sisters had not tried to cover it up, and the damage further cemented the facts, though her memory was still a little spotty.
"You need to leave right now, witch," Gisele hissed.
While the two sisters had been toying with her cat-and-mouse style before, now the atmosphere had turned an ionic cold. Cabot's pronouncement had changed everything, although Eleri had to admit she was grateful for the invitation to go.
She shrugged at them and said, "Thank you so much for your time and hospitality. I do love the courtyard. It's just lovely."
Then she turned and forced herself to walk sedately through the gate. She turned left, winding her way back to the car and wondering if she was being followed, either on foot or by some mysterious power that she still didn't understand. Only when she was in the car did she let herself suck in a deep breath and feel the weight drop from her shoulders with relief. Still, she couldn't let any of those feelings show. Were the sisters watching her, even now? She knew they would be if they could. Eleri just didn’t know if they could.
Carefully, she turned on the engine and shimmied her car out of the parallel spot before turning around and taking her first left. She did not drive past the house again, not wanting them to see her or catalog her car if they hadn't already. Though she had no doubt that Lafae had been watching her go by earlier, she wasn’t going to give them a chance to catch anything they might have missed.
She headed quickly back across the bridge and home to Grandmere's. Her Grandmere threw open the door when Eleri came up the back walk.
