Insanity (18 page)

His fingers brushed across the cover of his book. It looked like leather, but I knew what it really was.

Skin.

His second wife, Adelaide—Addie to me from the day I met her—slipped out of the kitchen and came to stand behind his chair as he read the old spell book he had taken from somebody in Never. Somebody with Madoc blood. Somebody evil—or that he had decided was evil.

Another body, burning in the night.

“I haven’t seen Trina much this visit, Xavier.” Addie’s voice sounded matter-of-fact. “Let us have some girl time.”

My muscles tensed, but I worked to keep still. No expression on my face. No hint of anything. The air in the room seemed too hot and too still. Even with the nose plugs firmly in place, the scent of Addie’s pot roast seeped into my awareness. She was cooking that on purpose, because we needed the smell of the meat.

“What are you buying?” my father asked her.

Addie placed a glass of iced tea on the table next to my father. “Salt and bay leaves,” she said. The elbow he couldn’t see, the one behind the chair, bent as she reached into the pocket of her blue apron and pulled out a dead man’s hand.

It was all withered and pickled. Each finger had been dipped in tallow rendered from the dead man’s fat. He was a truck driver, shot to death by police in another state, then shipped home for burial. At Johnson and Sons Mortuary, where Addie worked, she had been able to take the hand—the one that held
the knife that the truck driver had used to hack a prostitute to pieces—with nobody the wiser. She stole enough fat from the murderer’s gut to finish the job, and we had what we needed to get us a little breathing room when we needed it.

Addie moved quietly behind my father, lit the thumb of the Hand of Glory on fire, and slid it under his chair.

I imagined I could see the sick-sweet scent of the burning tallow as it eased into the room and wrapped itself around the smell of pot roast.

My father shifted. Addie flinched, and I jerked on the couch in spite of trying harder than hard to stay motionless. My heart beat faster, and faster again when he yawned.

“All right, then,” he said. “You have half an hour.”

Addie headed back into the kitchen without daring to look at me.

My father reached for his tea, yawned again, then put the glass back on the table. His head turned in my direction, and my pulse hammered until my eyes watered.

His lids fluttered, then lowered.

He leaned his tall frame back in his chair and rested his hand on top of the confiscated book of spells he had been studying. A few seconds later, my father started to snore.

The kitchen door swung open again, and Addie motioned for me. I moved in a hurry, heading straight for the door to the basement.

Spelled like he was, my father just grunted instead of spouting rules or reducing the time he had allowed us. He wouldn’t sleep much longer than an hour, I was sure of it. No spell worked
against my father for very long, but at least this one would keep him from casting his own spells to track us or listen in on what we were saying. If we were really, really lucky, he wouldn’t catch on to what we had done.

If we weren’t lucky ... no. I didn’t want to think about bad things and tempt them to happen.

Addie and I slipped out through the basement door, hurried down the steps, and out to the driveway. Then we ran all the way to the car.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I pulled the plugs out of my nose and pocketed them as Addie drove away from the house.

Somebody honked at us and I jumped. Was that Dad’s truck, already fired up and ready to chase after us? Had my father woken from his sleep despite the Hand of Glory sputtering and smoking under his chair?

My fists clenched, but I made myself relax my fingers. What was I thinking? It’s not like I would try to hit my own father, no matter how much he freaked me out.

“Trina.” My stepmother eyed me in that funny way, part friend and part parent like she had been since the day my father brought home his new young wife. I had been five, she, eighteen; I’m not sure my father had understood that he was giving me an ally, not a babysitter. As for my real mother, she was long gone, probably as far away from my father as she could get. I had never gotten so much as a letter from her.

“I’m not going back to Lexington,” I told Addie, fixing my
gaze straight ahead at the road. “I applied for an externship this semester, and I start Monday. After that, I may finish at South College, if my transfer gets approved.”

In the reflection on the car’s front window, I watched as Addie grimaced. “He’ll have a fit. He doesn’t want you to stay in Never.”

I tried to shrug and act like I didn’t care. Addie said, “I’ll do what I can, but I know you didn’t have me knock your father out to keep him from hearing about your school decisions.”

That made me twitch. Addie didn’t use spells to pry into my thoughts or the future. She didn’t have to. It was as though she could read everything in my heart just by glancing at my face.

“I won’t be living at home,” I told her.

This made her sigh and nod. “You’re moving in with Darius.” The
he’ll have a fit
went without saying. A little while ago, Darius had gotten himself accused of murder and arrested. It was all cleared up now, but still. That kind of thing didn’t impress fathers, especially fathers as overprotective as mine.

As for the rest of the story, I couldn’t bring myself to say it yet, so I went for, “I’ll have my own room,” like that would make a difference.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Addie asked, slowing as we pulled into the grocery-store parking lot.

The energy in the car seemed to crackle, and my insides clutched. I wondered if my father had some spell at work, creeping around the edges of our conversation, looking for a crack to seep through and soak up all my secrets.

“A few weeks ago, I got into some things over at Lincoln
Psychiatric,” I said. My pulse jumped, and I glanced in the rear-view mirror.

There was no truck behind us. I was just expecting it to be there.

“Lincoln? Are you out of your mind?” Addie sounded more exasperated than mad, but I understood.

My father had always made it clear that Lincoln Psychiatric was off-limits to me. It was the one place in Never, Kentucky—other than cemeteries—I was never allowed to go, no matter what. Lincoln was a dangerous place. It was bad because a lot of
them
ended up there—the strange folks with Madoc blood. The evil things my father eradicated.

Addie was still talking, muttering instead of yelling like I knew she wanted to. “You know he’ll go on and on about Lincoln Psychiatric. It’s a hotbed. It’s a—”

“Cess-a-pool,” I finished in a bad imitation of his deep voice, with the way-South but slightly French accent he got from his Creole mother. “I know there are bad things at Lincoln, Addie. I helped kill one of them.”

Addie’s frown turned her soft face hard, and the light in her eyes seemed to flicker, then go dull. She had never wanted me to be part of the killing. She parked the car, shut off the engine, and bowed her head, showing me her perfectly cropped hair, the tiny curls so tight I couldn’t have stuck a pin in them. She had protected me, even using spells that might bring my father’s wrath straight down on her head—and I had gone and gotten myself involved in the war my father never stopped fighting anyway.

“They know about us—some of the people who can ... you
know. Do special things.” My frown matched hers. “They know for sure somebody’s killing them off.”

“Then we have to get ready, and I have to warn Xavier.” Addie moved to start the car again, but I grabbed her arm.

“You don’t have to tell him anything.” An image of Darius shoved its way into my mind, with his dopey grin and stubbly cheeks—and that white, burned-out eye that saw things it shouldn’t. “They aren’t coming to fight us.”

“They will,” Addie said, shaking off my grip, but not starting the car. “They always do. Look at your history.”

My history.
She meant my father’s ledgers. How many Madocs he had killed, and how many so-called normal people in Never had died mysterious deaths. Murders and disappearances and mysterious goings-on, he recorded it all, and always assumed the Madocs did it.

It was Satan who set evil like the Madocs free on earth
, my father liked to say,
and God who tasked men like me with destroying it.

I opened the car door and got out, hoping Addie would do the same. After a few seconds, she did, and we stood facing each other over the white hood of her Oldsmobile.

“He’s wrong, Addie. Not everybody with power is evil.
We
aren’t bad people, right?”

She folded her arms, frowning deeply. “We don’t have power. We just know how to tap the power in other things. It’s different when you have it inside you, in your blood. Then it tears up your mind and soul and makes you just like those demons Xavier hunts.”

An image of the burning body flickered behind my eyes, and I had to squeeze them shut and count to three. I’d always known
what my father did, or said he did, to keep us safe, but I’d never seen him at it, and I’d never seen what was left over when he finished.

The body in the woods had just looked like a dead man. Nothing huge or wicked or scary. It had been pathetic.

Was my father the one who tried to kill Levi?

I pushed that right out of my mind.

“I met some people who can do special things,” I told Addie. “And I don’t think they’re bad.”

Addie’s shoulders twitched, and her frown melted into an expression of horror. “Honey, creatures like that lie to you. They can fool you into thinking whatever they want you to. That’s what the devil’s minions do.”

“They aren’t the devil’s minions.” I shook my head, feeling a hot splash of desperation in my guts. “They’re just people, like me and you.”

Addie stared at me with both her eyebrows raised so high she looked like a cartoon. “Who are these folks?”

I shrugged. No way was I giving her names, and she knew it. After a few seconds, she gave up and gestured to the store. “Come on. Salt and bay leaves. He might not notice we’ve been gone longer than we should have been, but he’ll notice if we don’t bring what we went out for.”

The rest of our shopping trip and the ride home had been quiet, because I had no guts.

When Addie and I got out of the car at the house, both of
us studied the basement door, then the living room window. We were eighteen minutes past the limit my father had given us. The Hand of Glory had probably gone out, but it wouldn’t leave behind any wax or ashes. He’d never know we used it, unless he found it burning. We had about an even chance of getting away with our extra time and privacy. If he was awake, he’d be pissed, and he’d keep us both at home for weeks—unless I abandoned Darius and went back to school.

Addie started for the house, but I caught up with her. “Wait. Just one more minute.” If I couldn’t make Addie understand this, I had no hope of ever making my father hear me. “Some of the folks who have power could help us, and we could help them. They really aren’t evil, not all of them.”

Addie’s mouth opened, then closed. She gripped the plastic shopping bag and shook her head as if she were trying to line up jagged thoughts that wouldn’t smooth together.

“One of them, this girl Forest,” I kept going in a rush, “you can feel the specialness dripping off of her. Darius can see how good she is with his bad eye, but we don’t know who she is, not really. The bunch of us took out a serial killer under the asylum, and a tree that was, I don’t know, too alive or something. It had a mouth and teeth.”

Addie said nothing at all. She just stared at me. I thought she was listening. I thought she was hearing me.

“My father has been right all along about some things,” I admitted. “There
is
a war going on, only not the one he thinks. That’s why I have to work at Lincoln for a while, to keep another pair of eyes on what’s happening, and to help.”

Addie caught hold of my elbow and slowly walked me toward the basement. I didn’t fight her as she pulled me inside, closing and locking the door behind us. Once we were there in the quiet within the walls, she gazed deep into my eyes, and the tightness that had been building in my chest eased a little. I got everything said. And Addie was listening. She was always with me and for me. She would understand, and she would help me convince my father that we had to help good people—whether they had power or not—fight the real evils when they showed up.

“Darius,” Addie said. “When did you find out?”

I blinked, not understanding her question.

She let out a long, slow breath, the way she did when she was sad. “When did you find out Darius Hyatt had Madoc blood?”

“What?” Frost hardened across my thoughts, then dropped lower to dust my heart. I hadn’t said anything about Darius having power. That was the one secret I wouldn’t share, because my father—oh. His eye. I had mentioned Darius’s eye.

“It must not be strong in him, or your father would have sensed it long ago.” Addie dropped the bag with the bay leaves and salt and put her arms around me. When she pulled me close to her, she held me tight. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m so sorry.”