Garden of Bone: Book 6, page 22
At Grandmere's urging, they repeated it twice more. And then, Grandmere pulled out the knife. She looked to Frederick and then to Eleri, and ran the knife down the back of her arm, releasing blood in its wake. She did the same to Frederick, and then turned to her great-granddaughter.
44
Donovan had been dead asleep. Whatever spell Eleri, Frederick, and Grandmere had been casting, it had gone on into the wee hours of the morning. Banished to his room, Donovan had been bored and began reading a novel. Eventually, he’d fallen asleep almost sideways on his bed with his phone face down on his chest. The soft knock on his door, around two-thirty, had awakened him.
Eleri stood there, one hand across the other arm, holding something onto it. "Hey, Donovan," she whispered. "Can you help me?"
Of course, he could. He hadn't even changed out of his clothes, so he sat up and motioned her to come inside. The light was still on, so it was easy to see now that she was holding a scrap of fabric and something that smelled odd against her arm. It tickled his nose, and he pointed to it, raising his eyebrows in question.
"Yeah, that's what it's about. So ..." she drew the word out, "apparently, this spell involved human blood."
Donovan’s eyebrows climbed higher. "Yours?"
"All three of us." She said it as though it was not a big concern, but Donovan was beginning to think it was. At least they hadn't just sliced Eleri open.
"Anyway," she said, "Grandmere offered up this poultice … and a piece of fabric … to hold it." She paused periodically through the words, as though it was difficult to describe to Donovan what she was doing.
"I can smell it," he said. "Let me guess. You want me to take a look?"
She nodded with a smirk. "You're kind of an MD. The poultice is something we made from the herbs in the garden. I think it has some dirt in it, too."
Donovan tried not to laugh. He didn’t want to offend Grandmere, and from the noises he was hearing, she was settling into the room on the other side of the wall. She didn't make much sound, so he had no idea how loud his and Eleri’s voices were. He wasn't confident that the old woman couldn’t hear their conversation.
"Let me take a look," he whispered, motioning Eleri forward.
She was holding the poultice to the back of her right forearm. Lifting the fabric and carefully peeling it back, Eleri looked down at the makeshift bandage as it took with it a soggy chunk of mashed herbs and grasses and something that looked like a red clay mud. He had no idea where one would find exactly that color here. He hadn't seen dirt like that anywhere in the city.
"What is it?" he asked.
"I don't even begin to know," Eleri sighed as she held her arm steady out toward him.
"You want me to clean it up?"
She nodded, and Donovan got to work. "This isn't going to feel good," he cautioned, "but I want to check."
He probed the wound, looking at it and into it. Seeing a flash of color, he probed again. Eleri winced. "Holy shit, El. This is deep."
She nodded. "There was some blood."
"And Grandmere did this to Frederick and herself as well?"
"Yes," Eleri said. "I watched my great-grandmother take a knife to her own arm, and she didn't even flinch. I was also very brave when it was my turn," she added, almost as though she were a child. Donovan regretted not having a lollipop to hand her.
"Honestly, part of me wants to put in stitches, but I'm shocked. It's a very clean cut, and it's not still bleeding, not really."
Eleri looked at her arm then. She didn't seem to be bothered much by blood or gore, but that kind of reaction often changed when a person was looking at their own blood and gore, Donovan knew.
She still didn't seem to flinch as she pushed and tugged at it with her other hand. "Is that bone?"
He nodded at her. "She managed to miss anything major. This is surgical precision, Eleri, really an amazing cut. And honestly, it's so clean, I think we can just bandage it."
"Clean?" Eleri said, flicking her eyes to the side and looking at tiny pieces of what appeared to be grass cuttings still clinging to her arm.
"Well, the poultice is for crap." He sniffed again, actually picking up the scent of several kinds of wild grasses that he recognized from the back yard. He didn't tell Eleri that, though. He also got lavender and a strange mineral scent, maybe the thing that looked like red clay.
"All right, we’ve got to clean it. It's probably going to hurt like a bitch."
Accepting that, she nodded and held her arm out to him while he began rummaging through the materials they'd put together that afternoon. It seemed like a million years since they'd walked into the store.
Eleri had suggested a prepackaged first aid kit, but Donovan knew better. He had specific things he wanted, and he was grateful now that he wasn't limited to the alcohol wipes that the basic kit had offered. Instead, they’d purchased a big bottle and full pads of gauze.
The way the week had been going, they might very well again. If he was a betting man, that's where he would put his money. He had not, however, thought he would be cleaning Eleri up after her grandmother cut her open.
Eleri seemed entirely undisturbed by it. In fact, she held the arm out, and he squeezed her hand to let her know this was it. The gauze was ready, soaked in alcohol, and he rubbed it down her arm. She didn't wince.
"Something's been bothering me," she said.
He raised his eyebrows. "Not the alcohol I'm using on the gaping wound on your arm?"
"No," she said.
"Did that not hurt?" he asked, surprised.
"Not really. It felt like a little sting."
"All right,” he said, “but I’ve got to warn you, I have to pour it this time. Should we go into the bathroom over the sink?"
Eleri thought for a moment, and he could tell she wanted to. It seemed like the wise decision, but she still didn't want to offend Grandmere, who had made such a lovely poultice for her, and probably cast spells on it. To be fair, so far she said it hadn't hurt, and it did seem to have stopped bleeding.
"Can we just use a towel?" Eleri asked.
"Sure," Donovan said, pulling aside the one that Grandmere had set on the end of the bed for him. He had a towel, a hand towel, and a washcloth. He would make do.
Carefully tipping the bottle and having learned long ago how to clean a wound without splashing everywhere, he poured a small stream of alcohol into the cut on her arm. As he poured, the wound seemed to pull itself together. Nothing came out of it, either. Though the strange little cut grass pieces had clung to her skin, none appeared to have gotten inside the wound.
He wouldn't have put it past Grandmere to have sterilized the knife she’d used, and for that, he was grateful. He wanted to put Eleri on antibiotics, but he didn't have any. Tomorrow, he thought, when the pharmacies opened, he'd run her by and get her some penicillin. Grandmere might have special skills, but so did he.
Eleri barely even flinched as the alcohol ran down the gutter that existed in her arm now. "That doesn't hurt?"
"Not really."
"Do you normally not react to rubbing alcohol?"
"Always. Burns like a motherfucker," she said. "But I’ve got to tell you, this cut didn't hurt that bad going in."
"Eleri, you saw bone."
"I know." She said it as though understanding just how weird it all was.
Maybe, Donovan thought, they should get out of Grandmere's house. It was one thing when the woman was making them jambalaya, or when she was serving them andouille sausage and rice and keeping her spells private. It was another thing when she was slicing her own great-granddaughter's arm to collect blood.
"It's bothering me," Eleri said.
"The alcohol?" Finally, he thought. It should burn. She should flinch, at the least.
"No." She said it as though he was being nuts. Apparently, the alcohol didn't sting.
"What, then?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said. "No, part of it ..."
"Go on …" Slowly, he patted her skin dry, pushed the wound together, and laid tiny butterfly bandages across it. He had managed to pick up some Steri-Strips—a more professional-grade version of standard sticky butterflies—and he'd also managed to get himself several little breakable capsules of first aid glue.
"It's Grandmere," Eleri said, paying almost no attention to the medical work on her arm, which really should be hurting. "She has these scars down her arm. She's always had them," Eleri said, "and tonight, I think I learned what they're from."
"They look like this one?" Donovan said.
"Yes. Very thin, white lines run the length of both of her arms. She must have been gathering her own blood for ... I don't know."
"That's weird," Donovan said.
"And I don't know what it is," Eleri continued, looking mystified, "but there's more. It’s important. I just can’t place it right now."
45
Eleri slept in late the next day and woke to find Donovan and Grandmere cooking breakfast—or perhaps brunch—by the time she had risen.
Grandmere smiled and acted as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened the night before. Frederick was long gone, too, his presence having disappeared from the house. Grandmere must have cleaned up the coffee table, as it was back to normal. A few scraps of fabric, a few out-of-date magazines on making pies, and a handful of coasters as mismatched as everything else in the house were the things that now adorned the top of it. Gone were the makings of her altar.
Eleri ate breakfast, noticing that Donovan was as quiet as she was. She didn’t mention the spell from the night before, but did ask Grandmere if it was safe for her and Donovan to take the car out again today. Grandmere shrugged. "We won't know until we try it," she said. And she went back to eating her pancakes.
Eleri and Donovan decided to drive out. They still hadn't managed to figure out where Cabot was going all the times he'd gotten the parking tickets. Eleri had tried a little harder, before leaving, to figure out what he might be looking at. Using the maps, she'd checked out local landmarks and found a small number of buildings that involved the city works in some way. There were also several homes owned by older families, where the records seemed to trail off forty to fifty years ago. And a singular graveyard.
She told Donovan about all of these things, but he didn’t seem to be paying attention. She tipped her head. She was the one who’d had her arm sliced open and had participated in a spell. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” He nodded, but it was just as absentminded as everything else. When she pressed him he said, “I smelled something yesterday.” But he wouldn’t tell her more.
Turning back to the work, he finally helped, but they were unable to narrow down which locations were most likely the important ones. They still had no idea what Cabot might be doing or why. In fact, they were working backwards now, hoping that if they got there, they would see a place and understand, from the location, what it was that was bringing Cabot there so often.
Eleri decided to check one other thing while she was at it. Again, using the hotspot Donovan had setup, she logged into the local database.
“Donovan, look," she pointed out. "None of the tickets has been paid."
Donovan blinked at her. "With that many tickets and that much money, there should be a warrant out for his arrest."
"But there’s not," Eleri replied, still staring at the information on the screen. "In fact, it appears all the automated triggers are turned off on these tickets. All the overdue notices that should automatically happen—it's all gone. The tickets are there if you look for them. But no one is actually trying to collect the money. And when they see the car, they seem to just ticket it rather than notice that it should be booted. His car should have been towed months ago," she said.
Donovan agreed. It was unusual, but they couldn’t figure out what it might mean.
As they drove, Eleri mulled it over. Hand over hand, she turned the wheel. And word over word, she spoke to Donovan, trying to figure out what was happening. "Do you think they did something, or do they have somebody on the inside making it so he doesn't have to pay his tickets? Do you think they cast a spell?"
Donovan seemed to think about it for a moment. "It seems silly," he said. "If you were going to cast a spell to not have to pay your tickets, wouldn't it be better to cast a spell so that no one noticed your car was in the parking spot? So you wouldn’t get the ticket in the first place."
Eleri had to agree, that made more sense. "But that requires the person casting the spell to think of it," she pointed out. "I would have thought—given the length of time that Cabot has been accruing the charges—that someone would have thought of that."
There was a moment of silence in the car as the two of them tried to figure out what was happening. They couldn’t. She added, "We need to assume that he has someone on the inside in the city finance department."
"That makes sense," Donovan said.
Neither of them spoke after that for a bit, because Eleri knew Donovan understood as well as she did that city employee corruption made the whole case just a little bit bigger. It put them in more danger if someone in the city could give them tickets—or maybe even issue warrants.
Worse than that, she still hadn't found Emmaline. In fact, she had nothing aside from the fact that the bones of McKenzie Burke seemed to resemble her sister so much. Perhaps she should go back and figure out exactly where they'd come from. That might lead her to Emmaline.
Something told her that if she stayed on this path, she would solve her sister’s case. She'd started to believe that, though the bones she'd seen had actually not belonged to Emmaline, that they were, in fact, the pathway to what she was looking for. She hadn't said this to Donovan. In fact, it seemed they'd just been following the trail laid before them by the mystery that was Darcelle Dauphine, and the courtyard with the bone.
"We should go back and talk to Darcelle tomorrow, I think," Eleri threw out into the space of the car.
Donovan agreed. "What specifically should we ask her?"
"I think we should ask her about McKenzie Burke."
"And also Emmaline?" Donovan asked, pushing the words slowly through the air, understanding it was a touchy subject. But Eleri didn't flinch.
"Yes."
They arrived in the area where Cabot had gotten his parking tickets—but this time, instead of going on foot and possibly encountering someone, they drove around. Both paid special attention to any car they saw multiple times and to anyone they saw on the street. While doing this, they also tried to assess if they were being followed.
Nothing they'd been trained to watch for at Quantico popped up. There was nothing that seemed suspicious in the people on the street—they walked by and disappeared around a corner and weren’t seen again. Even Eleri's “Spidey-sense,” if she could call it that, said that they hadn’t been followed this time. She could only hope Grandmere's spell worked. If it had, that further confirmed nothing physical had been tracing them in the first place. It was a disturbingly creepy thought, even to Eleri.
The first building on their list was an ancient mansion. It was marble-fronted and black with mold or dirt, Eleri couldn't tell. Though columns stood in the front from an era seemingly unrelated to New Orleans, a black, wrought-iron gate enclosed the porch, helping to make it look as though it belonged. The home sat directly against the sidewalk. The columns were close enough to reach out and touch, if a person stood there. The double front door was painted black, and so were the shutters.
The colors, at least, were very New Orleans, Eleri thought. Though planter boxes lined the railings of the second floor, any plants in them had long since withered. It was difficult to tell if anyone even currently resided there.
She and Donovan drove past and looked at the next place, which was a startling contrast. It was a small, ramshackle house on a piece of property as large as the one belonging to the mansion. It squatted quietly amongst the more elegant homes.
Donovan thumbed through the notes they'd brought. "It's not owned by the Dauphine family, but the owner does have a family history that involves a Dauphine grandparent. And the land was at one point owned by a Dauphine."
Eleri frowned. "You'd think they'd keep it in better shape." But again, there was nothing they could tell from driving by, and they weren't going to get out on foot until they had checked everything.
The last place they checked—after seeing several more homes and even a small business—was the graveyard. Like most in the city, it was bordered by a low, stone wall and a high, wrought-iron fence. But as it was the last place, Eleri and Donovan finally got out of the car.
A tremor ran up Eleri's spine, thinking about the last time they'd come through here on foot. They'd have to be more alert this time.
She turned to Donovan and asked, "Do you smell anything? Do you hear anything?"
He paused for a moment, and Eleri let him. After she waited, he shook his head. But the look on her face made her ask, "What?"
"Last time," he said, "when we were fighting those Lobomau … I thought one of them smelled like family."
46
"What do you mean?" Eleri asked.
"One of the men who attacked us smelled like family." Donovan shrugged. "I don't know. I never smelled it before. Wade said something about it—that you could smell when somebody was your family member."
Eleri glanced at him and then turned her gaze back to the headstones she was passing as they walked through the graveyard. They were still just looking, hoping they might stumble onto something that would tell them if this was where Cabot had been coming. Now she was also trying to get her mind around this interesting comment Donovan had made.
"It makes sense," he said. "Family members share a large portion of genetics. The genetics goes into things like your immune system. And you already know you can smell when someone has a complementary immune system from their sweat. That's with a standard human nose. So, it makes sense that I can smell a familial relationship. I just ..." he paused. "I’ve never smelled it before .. .and it was so strong."
