Call of Water (Madame Tan's Freakshow #1) - Marina Simcoe Page 0,55
full length of his arms.
“Perfect.” I smoothed the material over his chest before stepping back.
He wasn’t looking at the sweatshirt, staring at me instead.
“What’s your name?” he asked, suddenly.
The question shocked me, as if a bucketful of ice-cold water had been dumped over my head. I did not expect this.
Zeph standing me up that day had been hard to get over. Learning that he didn’t even remember my name while I had been unable to forget a single detail about our time together hurt more than I could have imagined.
I’d had no time to prepare for this.
“You don’t remember me at all,” I mumbled, stepping farther back.
His brow furrowed into a confused expression.
“I remember this.” He took my hand, splaying my fingers for me before placing his hand against mine, palm to palm. “You communicated with me through the glass. I remember hope, understanding, and support coming from you.” He relaxed his fingers, letting them lace with mine. “Is there more I should know?”
“My name is Ivy.” Squeezing his hand, I lifted my gaze to his, searching for any spark of recognition and finding none. “We’ve met before. In Paris...” I dropped my arm, letting go of his hand. “It’s been well over a year now. You forgot me.”
“Not just you, Ivy,” he said my name slowly, as if testing the sound of it. “There are... holes and loose ends about my past that are confusing.”
Could that be some aftereffects of the smoke that was pumped into his tank?
“Do you remember Lero, your friend?”
“Yes.” Zeph nodded energetically. “Lero is more than a friend, though. He raised me. He is family.”
That matched what he had told me before, which was encouraging.
“How about Le Loup Solitaire?”
“Who?” He touched his temple, as if trying to jolt his memory.
“It’s not a person. It’s a place. The cabaret where we met. You worked there.”
“In Paris?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head, raking his fingers through his still damp hair. “No. I don’t remember it.”
“Zeph.” I stepped closer, now. “Madame...the woman you called Ghata? She had the water in the tank infused with smoke. The whole place was constantly filled with it, actually. Could the smoke have affected your memory? Do you know why else she would add it to the water?”
For a moment, he just stood there in the middle of the empty garage, his hands hanging loosely by his sides, the same lost expression on his face again.
“The water in the tank was contaminated,” he said finally. “I couldn’t move it. It was dead and unresponsive. Toxic.”
“Then how did you smash the tank today? That glass was very hard to break. I tried.”
Sending the glass across the room to embed into bracks required some real power.
“The poison had faded, allowing some of my magic to return.”
“Magic?” I lifted an eyebrow.
“The power over water,” he explained, not really making it much clearer. “I’d lost it while in that tank. Today, it came back.”
Right after I had disconnected that hose with the smoke.
“There was a pipe attached to your tank. It delivered the smoke Madame fills her menagerie with. I disconnected it minutes before your tank exploded.” Another memory popped into my brain, nagging at me with concern. “The smell was like the cigarettes that Lero smoked,” I said quietly, still unsure what to do with that fact. “I met him briefly in Paris, too.”
However, he must know more about his kind and Nerifir than I did.
“Tell me everything you know,” I asked, needing to make some sense of it all. “About Madame, or Ghata. The bracks. Nerifir. Everything.”
Zeph rubbed his chest, searching around the garage.
“Let’s sit down first. Warm you up.” From one of the shelves, he took a blue, quilted blanket, one like people wrapped around furniture when moving. “I’ll try to answer as many questions as I can. Hopefully, you’ll be able to fill in some gaps in my memory, too.”
We needed to know as much as possible in order to figure out exactly what to do next.
Zeph spread the blanket by the wall in a corner of the garage while I found a rag and stuffed it into the hole in the glass of the door window. This stopped the wind from blowing in. With the door being in the back of the garage, I hoped that the chance of someone spotting the break-in was low.
“So, you are a Water Fae, then?” I sat on the blanket, leaning