they cracked then hand them off to the Grande Dame in the hopes pursuing justice against her nemesis, and quelling the new threat Leisha posed, would encourage her to return to work.
Underhanded? Yes.
Slightly desperate? Also yes.
Effective? Goddess, I hoped so.
When I got back to Woolworth House, I didn’t have to look hard to find my husband. I followed the whir of the blender to the kitchen and found him elbows-deep in perfecting baby food recipes he planned on testing on Kaleigh.
Sneaking up on him, I pounced and wrapped my arms around his waist. “Where’s LJ?”
“Corbin is babysitting while Oscar explains the fine points of foam dart war theory to him.”
“How is the bracelet working?” I kissed the back of his neck. “Or is that the wrong question?”
“It stayed on this time.” He made a pleased noise. “We’re making progress.”
Another fun discovery we had made was that LJ was a bit of a nudist. He would slip out of his onesies, his booties, and his diapers given half a chance. The bracelet resembled an ID bracelet, but its sigils kept him in a corporeal state. In theory. It was a work in progress, okay?
There was also a sigil to keep it glued to his wrist so he wouldn’t gum it off and choke on it.
Babies were a lot of work.
Everyone warns you, but you can’t fully comprehend it until you experience it for yourself.
Factor in LJ’s ability to communicate with Cletus, which blew our collective minds, and we had trouble with a capital T on our hands in the near future.
“Did you learn anything new?”
Forcing my hormones back into my stretch pants, I leaned against the counter and prepared to adult for a while. “I got more details out of them, but it’s mostly confirmation of what we already knew.”
Head cocked toward me while he spooned mush into sterilized jars, he listened to the rundown.
“As Abayomi tells it, a mysterious stranger helped her escape prison out of the goodness of his heart. He refused to go with her, and he asked for nothing in return, except that she deliver the box to Woolworth House. According to her, she had no idea of its contents.”
“He chose an easy mark, one with nothing to lose. Abayomi would have accepted his bargain, no questions asked, if it meant a chance to see the moon rise again.” He glanced over at me. “He was no usual inmate to have a box with a porcelain doll in his possession, ready to hand off with a golden ticket past the guards.”
“Or no inmate at all.”
“Or that.”
“The Davenport Prison is necromancers only.” I rubbed my forehead. “That doesn’t leave us with any good options as to how the box slipped through sorting in the mailroom. Anyone searching the packages would have identified the doll as contraband and tossed it or returned it to sender. We’ll have to make calls, see what we can find out from the guards and the admin staff.”
Atramentous had been taken off the table for her, not because she didn’t deserve it, but because there were a handful of human inmates in residence. That gave her a slim chance to rebuild her fledgling army with inmates desperate to claw their way out of the darkness.
Davenport, a maximum-security prison built to contain high-risk necromancers, was the compromise.
Linus cleaned the jar mouths with a soft towel. “How did Leisha explain their association?”
“Abayomi appeared to her in the guise of Hecate and hinted strongly that she was Eloise. Once ‘Eloise’ offered her a peek at the Marchand collection in payment, Leisha stopped asking questions. She convinced herself what ‘Eloise’ told her was the truth. That or she just didn’t care as long as she got what she wanted out of the exchange.”
With a little digging, Eloise’s pregnancy had been debunked. It was merely a story Abayomi had spun for Leisha’s benefit.
“Leisha is a master at glamour, but that doesn’t mean another master couldn’t have tricked her.”
Abayomi had been a Grande Dame. Which meant she was a power. Her specialty might not be glamour, as was the case with Leisha, but she had mastered it over her very long life. No one could be in doubt of that. You didn’t get appointed to the position of head of the Society for Post-Life Management without both talent and cunning.
Wiping his hands, Linus faced me. “Then it was Leisha who dispatched the vampires at the manor.”
“Yep.”
“Any idea why Boaz didn’t simply hide behind the wards with Mother and call for