you able to make contact?”
She gulped down half the glass of water in one go, feeling like she’d just spent a week crawling through the Sahara. She nodded weakly as she swallowed.
“We have to dig up that grave before Leda does. And then we have to take the relics to a temple, the directions to which are in Aislin’s workshop…which was inside the school that got torn down, but she insists it’s still there. Also. Question. That witch who went renegade back in the eighties and killed most of the Sisterhood?”
“Yes?” Patty replied.
“Was his name Jimmy Sloane?”
She folded her arms. “It was.”
“He’s having a bad time down there.”
“I think,” Patty said, “you should start from the beginning. I’ll go put on a pot of coffee.”
52.
Seelie chewed on crackers, downed a second glass of water, and told her story as the color slowly returned to her pallid cheeks. There was coffee all around. Nell held her mug cupped in both hands, the porcelain warm against her palms. She took it black; it was after midnight, and the bitterness kept her awake.
“Aislin’s mention of another apprentice,” Patty mused. “And that entire vision, I find curious. It sounds like Aislin was trying to communicate through memories, to convey something important. She sent her student on a mission, one so critical it was omitted from every record. And she wanted Cecilia to know about it. Why?”
Seelie shrugged, munching on a saltine. “It was some kind of arranged marriage. Deep-cover James Bond stuff, they set up a whole fake past and a family and everything. They needed the guy’s help to build the Asclepion. I guess I wasn’t seeing what I was supposed to be seeing, because that’s when Aislin cut in and talked to me one-on-one. As long as she could manage, anyway.”
“Can we circle back to the statue thing?” Tyler said. “We have to warn them.”
“The Culpers?” Nell asked.
“They’re being hunted down and slaughtered one by one because they’re protecting a hollow ‘magic statue’ that’s worthless and empty. We have to tell them.”
“Do you?” Max said. “I mean, the whole point of that plan was to give Leda multiple targets to chase, slow her down, and keep her distracted. And it’s working fine, just like it has for the last two hundred years. What if you tell these dudes they’ve been conned and they all decide to walk off the job? Or hand the statue over to Leda? Now she only has one target left. The gravesite, which, y’know, is the same one you’re after.”
Tyler thought about it. He shook his head.
“The Culpers have a duty, and they believe in that duty. I don’t think they’ll abandon ship.”
“Good, so no need to rock the boat.”
“But,” he said, “they deserve the truth. Whatever they decide—stay and fight Leda or walk away and live—they deserve to make that decision with their eyes open. It’s the right thing to do.”
Max rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Make your life harder if you want, guy. You do you.”
He took out his phone, walking into the kitchen as he dialed.
Nell was in her element, sifting facts, interrogating them like a detective. “So, we need three pieces to solve this puzzle. One, we need to find a ‘temple of dreams,’ and the only map is in an orphanage that no longer exists. Two, we have to find the gravesite, and that’s top priority since Leda’s already ahead of us. If she digs that statue up before we can, it’s game over. Three, take the relics to the temple and figure out how it all works.”
“And we’ve got nothing to go on,” Seelie said.
“Not true. We know Aislin was setting up everything right around the time she sent her apprentice on that undercover mission, right? That was in 1870. Now, we know the graveyard is in, or near, the city. It had to be somewhere Aislin could easily reach.”
“I’d have to think she’d want a site close to the orphanage,” Patty said. “The entire point of weaving the Labor was to stow the needle and thread safely, until the Asclepion could be finished. She fully expected to do it in her own lifetime.”
“It’d be close enough that the Sisterhood could keep an eye on it,” Seelie added.
Max slouched against the wall. “There’s a buttload of graveyards in this town. And three million stiffs buried at Calvary alone.”
Nell sipped her coffee. Jolts of caffeine pinged off the facts in her brain, nudging them together until they clicked.
“But we know the cemetery has to