Which meant Tallulah Finch had failed in hers, if her own daughter was part of a coven.
I looked back and forth between them. “There’s something you’re not saying. Why haven’t you mentioned this stuff to me before?”
“Well, first because we haven’t had a coven issue in Colorado in decades. I may complain about the system, but it’s healthy enough to keep witches away from that,” Lily answered. “And coven magic only works among trades witches, or witches with the same specialty.”
I turned my gaze to Simon. Of the two of them, he was more likely to tell me a hard truth. “Remember that story I told you when we first met, about how boundary witches raised the dead and sent them after humans during the Inquisition?”
Of course. It always came back to fucking boundary magic. “They were a coven,” I finished for him.
“Yes. That’s the most famous case of coven magic in history.”
I sighed. We’d have to unpack that later. Odessa’s meeting was still several hours off, but I felt a crushing urgency to go faster, get there sooner. Odessa was too clever for her own good. That YouTube video had been a good diversion, but I didn’t trust her not to have another one planned. “Okay, so Odessa and her friends have been doing coven magic, using the mandragora to turn the Unsettled into spirit bottles.” A new thought occurred to me. “That’s why she can’t just leave town, isn’t it? Odessa needs to do one more spell.”
“Like an addiction,” Lily said, nodding.
“Or an infection,” Simon added. “You’re right; they’re compelled to keep going.”
Which meant if we didn’t stop them tonight, Odessa wouldn’t just sell the spirit bottles she’d made already and then disappear. She’d tell herself she would, but the compulsion to keep the coven going would be there. They might leave Atlanta, but there were any number of cities in the South where they could bottle more of the Unsettled.
“I wondered why her friends agreed to meet with her tonight, now that she’s been caught,” I said, thinking out loud. “I mean, there was always a chance that I would die without alerting Beau, or we would assume Odessa had somehow done all this on her own. But you’re saying they have to continue.”
I stood up, trying to will away the woozy feeling that enveloped me. “We need to move. I want to be at that cemetery before she arrives.” Now I just needed to talk Beau into staying away.
Lily and Simon exchanged another brother-sister look, and this time Lily was elected to speak. “Lex . . . are you sure you’re up for this?” she said. “I love you, but you look like shit.”
“I can still kick Odessa’s ass,” I said pleasantly. Then I reconsidered. “But maybe we should take a few precautions.”
Chapter 38
We made a list and sent Tobias to the store. After he left, I went and knocked on Beau’s office door.
It was opened by a frazzled-looking Beau, who waved us in with the phone still glued to his ear. “No, Mr. Mayor, that won’t be necessary. I understand, sir, but I have a family emergency this evening.” He turned away, still listening.
Milburn hung up the call he was on and approached us. “Got a minute?” I said quietly. “I could use some information.”
“Sure.” He pocketed the phone and grabbed an iPad that was sitting on Beau’s desk. “Let’s go in the dining room.”
A few minutes later, Milburn was giving us a rundown on Odessa’s target, using the iPad’s map.
“The Marietta cemetery is one of the few soldier burial grounds that was operational during the war itself,” he explained as he opened the program. “Men who fell at Chickamauga and Kennesaw Mountain were buried here shortly after the battles. When the war ended, the state arranged for soldiers to be dug up from mass graves at battlefields all over the area and reinterred here.”
On the map, the area looked sort of like a pyramid with the very tip cut off. “This top part is a tiny memorial park to the state governor during the war,” Milburn said, tapping an area with what looked like a bunch of flags and a gazebo. Just below that was the Confederate Cemetery, which looked like a bunch of dotted lines. The dots, I realized, were individual gravestones. The lines weren’t straight, but curved and arced around trees and a handful of statues, plus another gazebo and what looked like a cannon.