. . . something else?” I let the unspoken question hang between us, but she didn’t answer it any more than Eammon had. I wondered if she’d been spelled not to tell me. It was frustrating that no one could. If I knew what I was, then maybe I could figure out what I was capable of. That would’ve been good, wouldn’t it?
Yeah, I thought so too.
“Your gran, Celia, she was looking for pieces of a spell,” Penny said. “She had part of it she was trying to decipher. A few stanzas on a sheet of paper. A list of ingredients, if you will.” She sipped her tea, which was mostly whiskey, her dark eyes thoughtful. “I don’t know what exactly the spell was for, she never told me, but she was determined to find the components and keep them out of the wrong hands. Course, you and I both know she never came back from NOLA, at least, not alive.”
I clutched the teacup so hard, I worried for a moment it would break. I forced my fingers to ease off the bone china. “A spell? What spell could be worth dying for?”
Penny kept tapping the rim of her cup. “That is the question. Something powerful, for sure. Something that could change the world if it was used. Knowing Celia, it wasn’t because she wanted to complete the spell, but rather because she didn’t want anyone else to. Being a Coven of Silver, we are guardians of both worlds: human and shadow filled. But how do your parents figure into this? That is the place to start, I think. With their deaths.”
My hand dropped to the bag at my hip. Gran’s spell book was in there, a piece of her I still possessed. A niggling, half-drunk memory tried to surface, but it settled back under the murk before I could take hold of it.
“Hattie was raising a demon,” I said. “She wanted the blood of a bigfoot to do it. You said there were only a few spells that would call for an ingredient like that.”
Penny’s eyelids lowered and she pursed her lips. “That will help narrow down which spell she was hunting for. There are maybe fifty or so that use the blood of a bigfoot. Assuming there is more than one copy of the spell to find. Goes along with what Celia was hunting for, I think, something very rare, something very hard to find.”
A chill of apprehension twisted up with a curl of excitement. “You know for sure what Gran was looking for in New Orleans? Won’t that help narrow the search down further?”
Penny gave a sad smile and took another swig of whiskey before she answered me. “It would. She was looking for the wings of a fallen angel.”
9
I tried desperately to quirk one eyebrow at Penny, because sitting there on her tiny porch drinking whiskey out of fine china teacups, I was sure she’d just said that Gran had been looking for the wings of a fallen angel in NOLA.
Then again, New Orleans was known for being a sinful city. Maybe it wasn’t so surprising it had hosted a fallen angel or two at some point.
“What?” My mouth moved before I could think better of it.
“Rude,” she muttered. “You young ones forget your manners too quick. What? Eh? How about a proper response?”
It had been some time since I’d been called a “young one,” let alone called out on my manners, but I suppose next to Penny, who was likely in her nineties, I was young. “Pardon me,” I tried again, “but could you repeat what you said about angel wings? I thought maybe I misheard you.”
Penny nodded. “That’s better. Now, Celia told me that she was sure that if anywhere in the world she’d find the wings of a fallen angel, it would be in New Orleans. Popular place for the otherworldly as you can imagine, and more temptations than even an angel could resist. Apparently.” She leaned back in her cushioned chair with a sigh, holding her cup to her chest. “Whoever took your gran’s ghost likely knows the knowledge of the location of those wings is locked somewhere in her soul. Of course, I’m assuming a new player hasn’t stepped into the arena in the six months since your gran’s murder.”
Something about the matter-of-fact way she stated it got to me. Murder. I mean, I’d known that Gran hadn’t died naturally, but hearing it like that made my throat tighten. Which called