Garden of Bone: Book 6, page 28
Eleri worked to pay attention to the words as Darcelle continued speaking.
"She often does this," Darcelle said. "She leaves for several days at a time. Usually, she's back before the week is out, though. This time, her return is overdue."
"It didn't bother you that her room had been ransacked?"
Darcelle threw her head back released a deep and throaty laugh. The dry amusement almost made it difficult for her words to get through. "My sister's room often looks like a nuclear bomb has exploded in it. It was difficult to tell that it was more messy than normal. I was only able to do so because I had gotten tired of looking at it and had gone in and straightened it up the day before. Otherwise, I still wouldn’t know when she’d last been home—or even maybe that she was missing."
Interesting. "Do you think she left because she was angry that you went into her room?"
Again, Darcelle laughed. Only this time, it was harsher. "She expects me to clean up after her. So, no, she was not angry that I did what she expected."
"Did she say anything before she left?" Eleri knew she was going through the standard questions. Though she was trying not to sound like law enforcement, she couldn't help being what she was.
Darcelle stopped and mulled it over for a moment, as though she were actually accepting help from Eleri and Donovan on this topic. Even though no one had yet agreed to anything, they were exchanging information. "I don't believe she did,” Darcelle said. “My sister says strange things all the time. I think she may be a little bit ... "There was a slight pause, a moment, and then the words, "… mentally ill. Either that or perhaps she is just a full-grown brat. But she does not warn me where she is leaving or for how long—unless she is just trying to taunt me."
Eleri went for the next standard question, grateful to be on the asking side of things for a while. "And you've received no text messages, phone messages, no indication that she was home while you were out?"
Darcelle looked at her as though Eleri must think she was stupid and that Eleri was equally dull-witted for underestimating her. And Eleri, had she been sitting on one side of the interrogation table, would have informed her that the questions were standard. But again, until she pulled that badge out, she wouldn't do it.
"I mean," she said, trying to sound causal, "if you were worried, wouldn't you have reached out and asked her to text you back or something?"
Darcelle replied, "Of course I did. We have heard no response. We cannot find her cell phone. We have no idea where she is."
"Who is we?" Eleri asked, though she had a sneaking suspicion. Darcelle gave only the names Lafae and Gisele. Not Cabot or Carson, or either of the other two Salzanis, though Eleri suspected they were in this up to their eyeballs as well. She asked the next phrase as a question, "I’m assuming you've reached out to your friends?"
Darcelle paused, going still for just a moment. Not as though the question had caught her, but as though it had made her realize something. She looked Eleri dead in the eyes before inquiring, "Who would I ask?"
Eleri frowned, and Darcelle clarified, "I have no friends. I have only my home and the shop. I have only my sisters, when they deign to interact with me."
"But you live with them," Eleri pointed out, knowing full well that siblings didn’t always get along. Not every set of sisters was as close as Echo and Ember had been. She shuddered at the thought and pushed her focus back to the present.
"Well, live is a strong term,” Darcelle conceded. Her arms were still crossed, and she didn’t elaborate any further. Instead, she pushed. “I need my oldest sister back."
Eleri found that interesting. Darcelle seemed to feel no love for the other women in her life, and by her own words, she had no friends. Yet she claimed she needed her sister. Eleri wanted to push that envelope further, but she was afraid to give herself away. She was doing well right now, making slow advances, getting Darcelle to speak.
Just as Eleri was getting ready to open her mouth, Darcelle turned the table again, putting herself in the driver's seat and asking the next question. "Why do you believe your sister lived so long after she disappeared? Did you see her? Do you know where she went?"
Eleri shook her head. "Not at the time, no." And she wondered why she was giving this information over freely, but for whatever reason, her instincts told her that bargaining with Darcelle was the right thing to do now.
"So why do you believe she lived?" Darcelle pressed, as though she knew Eleri was going to give an answer she couldn't defend.
It rubbed Eleri the wrong way, the suggestion that her knowledge was belief and not fact. Darcelle had neatly pushed her into wanting to give up her information.
Yet given that she was standing in a shop called Mystic Vudu … and that the bone-handled knife had been here and subsequently disappeared … and given what she knew of the sisters Dauphine, Eleri decided to tell her. "Because I saw her, and I spoke to her in my dreams. I had no idea where she was, but I knew she was alive and that she was relatively safe." And then she said, "That was aside from the few times I saw her bleeding. And now, I think you know something."
Darcelle's face stayed flat, but her eyebrows rose as she asked Eleri, "Was your sister Mackenzie? Helena? Emmaline? Esther? Sarah? Rebecca? Or Misty?”
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Darcelle walked home, her thoughts tumbling. She wasn't sure what kind of tacit agreement she had just entered into—but at least knew who it was with.
She had made a deal with her own personal devil.
She had watched Eleri Eames go sheet-white as she had listed the names of the little girls that Eleri's sister might be. Even Donovan had looked shocked. She smelled the wolf on him, though he wasn't one of their own. There were so many around the city who worked with Cabot and with her sisters, and Darcelle didn't know them all, but she could smell them. This man was ... well, he was different.
One thing she knew, though—and she knew it without the use of any special powers—was that he was loyal as a dog to the Eames woman.
She'd had no doubt from the first time she met Eleri that Eleri had some power of her own. She also had no doubt that Eleri was not confident of that power. Unlike Darcelle, she'd not been raised in it, not been trained and honed it from Day One. So Eleri Eames was a bit of a wild card; however, Darcelle was done dicking around.
She left the shop sign turned to "Closed," gathered a few more supplies, and headed home. She had decided it was better to collect things bit by bit rather than raiding the shelves all at once. If her sisters were keeping an eye on her, she didn’t want to come home with a big bag from the shop. It was better to walk in the door with a few items in her purse and sneak them in, one by one. Even so, she was overstocking, but she felt the need.
When she found Alesse—or if she found Alesse, or when Alesse just came home of her own accord—Darcelle would need spells, either to bind her sister or to collect blood from her sisters. Regardless of how it might play out, if she were going to cast the final spell to break out of here, she would need an arsenal.
There was something going on between her and Eleri. She noticed the way the air crackled between them. It was almost as if they knew each other from more than just the girl’s infrequent visits into the shop and the time that Eleri had come to her home.
Given what Eleri Eames had said, Darcelle had a feeling the redhead and her partner were on the right track to find the missing sister. And she now believed Eleri had gotten much, much closer to finding her sister's remains than she was aware of.
She was still uncertain about how the whole thing had gone down, but Darcelle understood that she and Eleri had done a tug of war, back and forth, each pulling on the chains. Donovan had stood by, watching and staying out of it, for the most part. In the end, they'd compromised. Eleri would help her find Alesse, and Darcelle would help Eleri find Emmaline.
Though Eleri had not given the name, she had flinched ever so slightly as Darcelle had rattled off her list. It was Emmaline. That was the one, Darcelle was sure.
In a bone-deep way, Darcelle saw that it made sense. Eleri sparked when she got too close or when she was angry. Darcelle wondered if other people could see it, or if it was merely a product of her own upbringing that she spotted it so easily. She suspected it was a little bit of both. If the missing sister was, in fact, Emmaline, then Darcelle knew something else Eleri didn't. Emmaline's blood had been the most powerful the family had ever had.
Emmaline's death had been an accident. Were it not for Tempeste going off the rails one night, Emmaline would likely still be alive—and though Darcelle had not been fully grown, she and her sisters had been old enough to see that, once Emmaline was gone, Tempeste's best bloodline was missing from her spells. And then Tempeste had begun to age dramatically.
Darcelle had been young when her grandparents had died, and she’d never paid attention to how they had died. She never noticed that the dates on the tombstones were far—too far—into the past, much further back than an adult would have expected. Her grandparents had each lived to be well over one hundred years old.
Her mother would have probably followed suit, given that she had died late into her seventies and had looked to be merely in her thirties for most of her life. No one had even believed she had daughters approaching adulthood when Darcelle was a young woman. It was funny, because Tempeste had not given birth to her first baby until she was well into her forties.
However, it had been Emmaline's passing that changed Tempeste. Apparently, as Tempeste had aged naturally, Emmaline's blood had been more and more necessary to maintain her health. When Emmaline died, Tempeste began to go downhill. So while Darcelle had not realized the dates on her grandparents' headstones were highly significant, she did realize then that her mother was much, much older than she, or truly anyone around her, had suspected. It was only in that last decade, without Emmaline to prop her up, that Tempeste had begun to show her true chronological age.
There had been others that followed Emmaline, as Tempeste had tried to recreate the magic that she had found. None had ever worked as well, and Darcelle and her sisters had watched as their mother slowly slid into madness—or perhaps, she had finally embraced it. Tempeste Dauphine had never been stable.
It had been during those years toward the very end that she had tied Darcelle to the store. Even wild and crazy and mentally ill, she'd been a force to reckon with.
Darcelle remembered well the time, ten years ago, when they had lost Emmaline, and subsequently lost the force that made them powerful. Her sisters were still trying to recreate it.
Darcelle held a lot of information, and she was going to keep it close. Her sisters knew how powerful Emmaline had been and what the family had accomplished with her. But they thought she was dead and gone. And she was. What her sisters didn't know was that Emmaline's blood had walked into her store.
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Donovan had driven them home. Even though it was Eleri's rental, he had slipped the keys from her loose fingers when they arrived at the car and shuttled her around to the passenger side. He changed his initial diagnosis. She wasn’t just shocked by Darcelle’s announcement. She appeared to actually be in medical shock.
He hoped she was merely paying zero attention to the outside world while she thought things through. He hoped she was still reacting to the conversation that had just happened in the store, and not some spell—or worse, some curse— that Darcelle Dauphine had placed on her. But Eleri looked so pale and unresponsive, he was amazed when she fastened her own seatbelt.
Donovan no longer doubted the other woman's ability to do such things as cursing someone. He’d tried to hide his own shock. Knowing Eleri as well as he did, he was still surprised that even she did not manage to hide her reaction when Darcelle mentioned her sister's name. He’d expected a better poker face—but Eleri had not seen that coming.
There were so many problems with the whole scene, he thought as he started the car and turned, heading down the street and back toward Grandmere's. He wasn't really in a position to talk, so he let Eleri have her silence while he stole his.
It wasn't just that Darcelle knew Emmaline's name, but that the name—the whole list of names—had come to her so readily. Something in the way she said “Emmaline” made Donovan think she had a suspicion which girl was Eleri’s sister. It was entirely possible, given Eleri's unusual coloring, that Darcelle had recognized some similarity between the two Eames girls and figured out that she had known the sister of the woman standing before her.
Still, Donovan had seen pictures of Emmaline. Though she also had unique coloring, she had blonder hair and bluer eyes. It wouldn’t necessarily be obvious that the two girls were sisters. Then again, if Darcelle had been around Emmaline as long as Emmaline had supposedly been alive after she was kidnapped, it was more than possible that she recognized the connection.
He took the next turn and crossed the bridge back into the Lower Ninth Ward, grateful to be leaving the French Quarter behind him.
No. The problem wasn't just that Emmaline's name rolled so easily off of Darcelle's tongue. It was that the other names did, too. She didn't simply ask, "Is your sister Emmaline?" Instead she had listed seven names, rattling them off easily.
It was stunning. As an FBI agent, he'd wanted to slam her to the counter and pull his cuffs and arrest her there on the spot. She knew the names of at least seven missing children.
But he didn’t have his cuffs, and he wasn’t an active agent right now. They had not yet heard back from Agent Almasi about the bones Eleri had not-so-anonymously handed in, but Donovan suspected that at least one of the names that Darcelle had listed would match to at least one of the skeletons, if not more.
When Darcelle recited the list of names, it had made his heart beat faster. Blood had left his head and pooled in his feet. How many children were missing in total? he wondered. And even as he thought it, he realized this crime was worse than he’d initially imagined.
Darcelle had listed only the names of female children. Eleri asked after a sister, and so Darcelle didn’t list any male names at all. She had listed the name Mackenzie, and though common now, it hadn't been a common first name when Mackenzie Burke had disappeared. He suspected the Mackenzie that Darcelle referenced was the same one that had begun this case. He had more than suspicion. He was starting to develop Eleri’s gut sense. He believed.
Mackenzie Burke's bones had led them here and led them to their conversations with Darcelle in the first place. While all the names she had listed had been female, some of the bones they had dug up in the graveyard that Cabot frequented had been male, which meant the names she listed were only half of the missing children—or maybe less.
Donovan stopped himself from speculating. Perhaps they had stolen mostly female children and only dabbled with a few males. However, as he thought about it, the likelihood of that happening was slim. It would mean that they had dug up one of the only male victims in their random, three-grave search. That math didn’t add up. So chances were, whoever was stealing children had stolen both males and females for whatever rituals they were casting.
His breathing became shallow, and his heart beat faster to make up for the drop in his blood pressure. Physiologically, he knew what was going on in his system. He was in the early stages of shock himself. Maybe he shouldn't be driving, he thought, but he pressed the gas pedal a little harder and made another turn for Grandmere's.
He looked toward Eleri sitting next to him and realized that she wasn’t coming around as he’d hoped. He hadn’t been watching, mostly thinking and sliding under his own dark suspicions. Perhaps she had put the same pieces together as he did.
They had been very concerned with their three excavated skeletons and ten turned graves—but now that Darcelle had rattled off seven names, he suspected the problem was much larger than they had thought. It was entirely possible that he and his partner had turned over a leaf on one of the largest child trafficking rings in the nation.
He was curious what names Agent Almasi might come back with for the bones from the cemetery. Mackenzie Burke had a Dauphine family name in her past. Eleri Eames was a Remy and a Hale. Would the other names trace back to prominent families of power in the occult and underworld? He suspected they would. The kidnappings did not seem random.
Reaching across the center console of the car, he picked up Eleri's wrist. She turned it over as though he was reaching to hold her hand and comfort her, but that's not what he was going for. He placed two fingers against her pulse and felt it flutter. It was too low, too inconsistent. Luckily, they were home.
He pulled into the driveway, opened his door, and stood up. Forcing himself through breath-holding and tension exercises, he tried to push blood through his system via his muscles, almost the way an astronaut would to keep his blood pressure up. Donovan needed his to stay awake long enough to get around the car.
As he came to the other side, Eleri was slowly emerging, her eyes still not quite focusing, her pupils still a bit dilated. While she might have put together the same things he had, she had one other problem. She had just made a deal with the devil herself.
Grandmere opened the door to greet them. As she looked between the two of them, she asked only one question. "What did you just do?"
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Eleri had held up fairly well under Grandmère's stern eye and harsh questions, or so she wanted to believe. Grandmère had basically told her she'd made a deal with the devil. Eleri knew her Grandmère was right, but she was also certain that, if asked, she would do the same thing again.
Darcelle Dauphine had listed Emmaline's name. She had also said she would help Eleri find her sister. Eleri didn’t believe Darcelle would help her, but she figured Darcelle would point her in the right direction. She was more than confident that Darcelle didn’t have to find Emmaline—she already knew where Eleri’s sister was. The trick would be getting her to tell.
