lip worriedly. “How long has it been waking you up to have its way?”
His smile turned bitter at that, but stubbornly didn’t fall. “A very long time, ma’am.”
“Call me Iris.” She turned to me, once again all business. “Is Gideon joining us for lunch?”
“He can go with you if he wants to, but Sage has a job to do,” my father started, but my grandmother cut him off with nothing more than a finger pointed in his direction. I wished I could be so firm.
She turned to truly look at him for the first time, steel in her gaze. “If you don’t leave my grandson alone, I will have you banished. Don’t think you’re the only bitter bastard who managed to cling on after his death. Banishing you won’t even keep me awake for one night. If banishing Sage’s grandfather didn’t, don’t think you’re any more important to me than he was.”
My mouth fell open, and my father went pale. He turned around and marched right through the bookshelf, which he usually went around.
“Can you really banish him?” I asked in a whisper. I thought again of Dr. Almasi, and her offer. Her card, burning a hole in my wallet.
She turned and grabbed one of my hands, squeezing it with impressive strength. “Do you need me to? I’ll call right now—”
I shook my head, and everyone turned to look at me in surprise, even Fluke. I glared at him. “I met someone who already offered. If things get bad enough, I can contact her.”
I could only imagine the lecture I was in for after this. There I was, casually talking about banishing my father from his own domain forever. It was a struggle to be sorry, and I didn’t struggle very hard.
“Let me grab a note to put on the door, and we can go.”
“A note?” she asked, confused.
I grabbed some paper from the register, scrawled a note on it, and taped it to the door. “I don’t have any employees,” I admitted. “I was Dad’s only employee, and I haven’t really had a chance to look at the shop’s finances yet. Not that I would understand them even if I tried. But there’s got to be a reason he only ever paid me minimum wage. I probably can’t afford to hire anyone.”
She blinked at me for a long, silent moment, as though having trouble understanding my word vomit, but then she turned on her heel and headed for the door. “Well then. Shall we get Italian?”
“Italian what, ma’am?” Gideon asked, following her out the door.
Chapter Sixteen
The McKinleys, as it turned out, were not the terribly impressive earth mages of their reputation. Well, some of them were. But also in our family line ran a more unusual strain: an ability to crack open and use the ley lines themselves.
“I suppose I probably would have been able to,” Iris told me over her linguine. “But I really am very good with earth, so I was trained in it. And your grandfather’s line—he took the McKinley name, you understand—they really were earth mages. I think my father was trying to ‘breed the evil out of us,’ as he’d have put it.”
She had arranged for a private room in the restaurant, which was the only reason I wasn’t cringing and looking around for eavesdroppers. As it was, I just got to be openly horrified. “They’re some kind of zealots?”
She shook her head. “My father was just old fashioned. He didn’t understand. My husband never knew, and Roger doesn’t either. Your mother, though—” She dropped her head to stare at her plate, melancholy overtaking her. A mere moment later, however, she drew back up, spine straightening like a woman who had a lot of practice at pretending to be fine. “A friend of mine worked in the school system. We faked her test so that no one would know, and then simply had Meredith train her in what we pretended was forest magic.”
Gideon, meanwhile, had fallen in love with my grandmother. He was sitting at the table, elbows braced just above the white cloth as though he were actually touching the thing, chin on one fist, staring at her. “That must have taken a lot of work.”
She waved him away. “She was my baby girl. After school, though, she distanced herself from the family. She never explained, but I had the feeling she thought she was in danger. Then Meredith was murdered, and I knew. I offered to send her away, but she insisted