our attention. Her eyes flickered from Mother Karen to Rick; clearly she knew something was amiss, but I could tell from her expression that she wasn’t about to let it sidetrack the meeting.
“Well, now, it looks like everyone has had a chance to finish the fine lunch our hosts have provided for us,” Riviera said. “And so it’s time to get down to bare boards, as it were.”
She paused. “As head of the Governing Circle, my primary duty is to ensure the welfare of the Talented families under my jurisdiction. A large part of that involves enforcing the laws set down for us by the Virtus Regnum; that part’s usually pretty easy. But sometimes the law and our community’s welfare are at odds with each other … and that’s when things get difficult.
“I was head of the Circle for over fifty years, but after half a century of being responsible for thousands of often-ungrateful lives, I was ready to spend some quality time in my garden. My nephew Benedict seemed to want the job, seemed to be entirely qualified to do it, so we all put it to a vote, and twelve years ago, he took the reins. Everything seemed to be going fine under his watch, until last week when some well-intentioned but frankly very poor decisions blew up in all our faces.”
Riviera looked at me. “When I came into the house Friday night and saw what you’d done to Benny, I was ready to kill you on sight, my dear. When I saw what you’d done to Angus and Eugene in the alleyway, I was ready to clap you in irons and drop you to the bottom of the sea. But then the butler told me what he’d overheard and I learned about the babies … and I realized I needed to put my judgments back on the shelf until I had my facts straight. And you’re most fortunate, young lady, that you didn’t destroy my nephew’s mind completely, or else we’d have never been able to recover memories of his that cast your actions in a rather better light than we’d have ever guessed.”
“I never meant—” I began, but she held up a hand to silence me.
“Please let me finish; you’ll have your time to speak. This is a little difficult for me, and I want to get it all out here on the table.”
She took a deep breath. “I told you I stepped down because I was tired. That’s not the whole truth. My son Reggie … you know that he killed himself, Jessie. And you know why, probably better than I do. I never laid eyes on the hell my brother Lake made for himself and his family, and that’s my failure, as a sister, a mother, and a governor. That’s my mortal sin, one I’ll carry to my grave.
“The day Reggie died … well, I hope none of you ever feel the way I felt. I told myself I wasn’t fit to protect the city if I couldn’t protect my own son. And I crumbled, I simply crumbled. Benny told me that he would take care of everything, and I took him at his word. But instead of dealing with Lake’s hell, he simply kept covering it up.”
“Didn’t you know that my brothers were trapped in the hell?” Cooper asked, sounding deeply suspicious.
She shook her head. “Until you brought them back, I didn’t even know they’d been born. When Reggie took Benedict to the farmhouse and he discovered Lake and Siobhan dead in the basement and the blood in the ritual circle … Reggie misjudged what had happened. He never saw the other children; the devil had probably already pulled them into its realm. Or maybe he saw the babies but couldn’t bring himself to tell me about them. By then, the mundane authorities had found Cooper and his baby brother. Until last night, I thought the Warlock and Siobhan were the only sacrificial victims. Benny, it turns out, knew the truth from the beginning, but never told me.
“I should have dropped everything to investigate my brother’s atrocities myself, but the Circle was in the middle of a crisis; several of the founding families were demanding we secede from the Regnum and withdraw entirely from the mundane world, and things were getting violent here,” Riviera said, then looked at Mother Karen: “You lived here then, didn’t you?”
“That was a bad time for the city,” Mother Karen agreed. “A lot of children were orphaned. And