1.
“I knew there was going to be a sequel.”
Lionel recognized the face of the dark-eyed woman at the hors d’oeuvres table. The name, he had to reach for. She tossed him a lifeline.
“Jerrica Winter,” she said. “We met at the press expo in DC last year.”
“Right.”
He took her hand. She had a soft grip, and her fingertips slid along his palm as they parted. She lifted her hand to her face, flicking at her raven bangs while she looked him up and down. He’d thrown a sports coat over his ivory button-down and faded pale jeans, but he still felt underdressed for this party. Black tie was the rule of the evening, and the faux-sandstone floor of the Griffith Museum’s gallery hall hosted a whirl of Savile Row suits and shimmering couture gowns. At least he wasn’t alone, lingering at the unfashionable edge of the room; Jerrica had shown up in an off-the-rack pantsuit and sensible flats.
“I finished reading your book on the flight,” she said. “Good stuff. When you went on ‘indefinite leave’ from Channel Seven, I figured you had to be working on a follow-up. Publisher must have handed you one hell of an advance to make you give up a steady TV gig.”
“Something like that,” he said, craning his neck and scoping out the room. Still hoping he’d see one particular face in the crowd.
He had left New York a month ago. Now he was living on his dwindling savings, driving a rust-spotted Corolla hatchback he’d bought with cash on the Jersey border. His mission was fueled by intuition and gas-station coffee.
Jerrica studied him with a fresh eye, like something had just occurred to her. “You’re not going after Spears, are you? I know you like hunting big game, but you’re wasting your time. He’s so clean he squeaks when he walks.”
Cordell Spears. Invisible fingertips riffled through the who’s who in the back of Lionel’s mind. Billionaire, philanthropist, made his cash in medical technology and slapped his name on a dozen children’s hospitals from coast to coast. No. Lionel had made his journalistic bones taking down quacks, charlatans, and peddlers of mystic woo. As far as he knew, Spears was on the level.
Then again.
“Everybody’s got skeletons,” he said, keeping his tone neutral and his eyes on the snack spread. Small plates, deviled eggs, blocks of white cake like imported Athenian marble. The gnawing in his belly reminded him that he hadn’t eaten since that morning, when he drove into Indiana with a cardboard cup of black coffee and a stale glazed doughnut in the center console.
“Not him. None worth writing about.” Jerrica pursed her lips, like she disapproved of the lack of scandal. “Two ex-wives, but hell, me too. He pays his alimony on time. No disgruntled employees with receipts, no whistleblowers. Spears Biomedical employees get a full year of paid maternity leave and an honest-to-God pension fund. Guy dedicated his life to eradicating childhood diseases, and when he’s not working medical miracles he’s funding charity shindigs like this one out of his own pocket. He’s one of the good guys. A real-life superhero.”
Lionel’s eyebrows went up. “A superhero, even?”
“The Post called him ‘Tony Stark with a stethoscope.’”
“I’m not sure there’s any such thing as a ‘good guy’ billionaire. Not when you scratch deep enough.”
“Cynic,” she said.
“It’s a bad habit. I’m trying to quit.”
He reached for a Mediterranean pinwheel, a tortilla spiral stuffed with sundried tomatoes, spinach, and cream cheese. It was cold on his tongue, fresh, with a hint of Parmesan.
“If you figure out the trick,” she said, “teach me how. So if you’re not doing background on Spears, why are you here?”
Good question.
He was here because his lover kept a promise she had made to him. She’d made it with bloody tears on her cheeks, clutching the horn-handled knife she used on her arm sometimes when she needed to let the pressure out. You know what happens next? You wake up one morning, and I’m gone. I’m just…I’m just gone. Because I always leave.
He was here because he woke up alone in their bed, on the houseboat they’d rented up in Montauk, with nothing to see but an empty toffee wrapper on the counter and an empty patch of closet where she kept her rolling suitcase. Her patroness—their patroness now—had given Lionel a simple choice. His odyssey to New York had plunged the professional skeptic into a world of ghosts and horrors. He could leave it all behind. Go back to Chicago, back to the cameras and the spotlight, and his illusions of a rational world. In time, the memories might even fade.
Or he could choose Maddie. Choose her, chase her, following her trail across a haunted America. His teacher, masquerading as an elderly heiress named Regina Dunkle, couldn’t promise him victory. All she promised him was struggle and pain. And magic.
He chose Maddie. He never looked back.
But now his teacher was gone. “Regina” disconnected her phone number and had been methodically erasing any trace of her existence. She was done wearing that particular mask. Lionel didn’t feel abandoned. Sometimes, lying half asleep in the tail of a forgotten dream, he thought he could feel her. Watching, curious, eager to see what he’d do with the tools he’d been given.
The goddess Hekate—titan, witch-queen, keeper of divine mysteries—was a strong believer in the sink-or-swim method of education. And Hekate had chosen him for her own, just as she had done with Maddie centuries before.
So he trusted his intuition and drove. He followed billowing clouds of starlings and charted a course based on train-car graffiti. Lionel was new to this whole “being a witch” business—he still didn’t like speaking the word out loud and never claimed it for himself—and he wasn’t sure if he was hearing the whispers of the universe or just flipping a metaphorical coin and imagining a signal in all that noise, but until he found a concrete lead, that was all he had to go on. His intuition landed him in a cheap hotel on the edge of Bloomington, where the cleaning staff had missed a tourist brochure for the Griffith Museum left behind by the previous occupant. He’d looked it up. Tonight marked the North American debut of a new traveling exhibit, Treasures of the Mycenaean World.
Dangling banners lined the great hall, encircling the edges of a glass ceiling that rose up like a circus tent, open to the murky night sky. A bone-white sliver of moon peered down, veiled behind wispy, ragged clouds. This was exactly the sort of show that might draw Maddie’s attention: she was a treasure of the Mycenaean world herself. So far, though, no sign of her.
Lionel was still trying to answer Jerrica’s question when a deep, confident voice jarred his thoughts.
“Jerrica Winter and Lionel Page? How much trouble am I in here?”
Jerrica greeted the new arrival with a quick, tight hug. “You know you’re safe from me.”
He was statuesque, chiseled, built like a Greco-Roman wrestler in a thousand-dollar suit, and he had an easy, generous laugh. He turned to Lionel and offered his manicured hand.
“Said the scorpion to the frog. Lionel! You don’t know me, but I know you. Big, big fan. Cordell Spears, pleasure to finally meet face-to-face.”
The man of the hour. Lionel couldn’t miss the private security, hovering at a respectful distance but close enough to jump in at a moment’s notice. They wore Secret Service earpieces, and judging from the cut of their jackets, they were packing more than muscle underneath.
“Same,” Lionel said. “I understand you’re the person to thank for this exhibition?”
“Well, our archaeologists in the field did the real work. I just foot the bills. It’s a good cause. History is important to me. Should be important to all of us. We can’t chart a clear course to the future if we don’t know where we’ve been.”
“Agreed,” Lionel said.
Cordell flashed a gleaming smile. “That’s why what you do is so important. Chasing down frauds, exposing snake-oil salesmen. Take it from me, my game is medical science, and it feels like every week there’s some new con man slinging a miracle cure—”
He paused. An elderly woman, bifocals dangling from a chain around her neck, was waving a brochure at him from across the room.
“Looks like I’ve got to get up there and battle my stage fright. A thousand public appearances and it always feels like my very first time. Jerrica, Lionel, catch you two after the show.”
Lionel watched him go, the silent security guards drifting like phantoms in his wake. He felt Jerrica’s eyes on him while he loaded up a tiny plate of vegetarian appetizers.
“You’re looking for a reason not to trust him,” she said.
“I don’t dislike him—”
“But you don’t trust anybody,” she said. “Like I said. Cynic.”
“It’s a bad habit.”
“I think it’s sexy.” She tilted her head. “You doing anything after this? Want to grab a drink, do some catching up?”
It sounded like she had more than catching up in mind. “I’d have to ask my girlfriend.”
“Oh? She here?”
No. She wasn’t. Lionel took one last look across the sea of faces, hunting for the curve of her chin, her bright-eyed glow. Maddie wasn’t here. He’d followed his intuition and come up empty. Maybe he was fooling himself.
“We’re kind of doing a long-distance-relationship thing at the moment,” he said.
Jerrica shook her head. “Get out now, save yourself a world of heartache. Those things never work out in the end.”
The wall sconces dimmed. Through the glass circus-tent canopy, skeleton moonlight shimmered down. A microphone let out a heartbeat of feedback squeal as Cordell Spears took the podium. He stood there for a moment, a wall of stony silence, all eyes on him.
“Are we…great?” he asked the gathering.
He was answered with faint murmurs, uncertain noises.
“America was built,” he said, “on the foundations of the past. Our forefathers looked to the Mediterranean, to the traditions of Greece and Rome, when they laid the first stones of this nation. Why? Because they drew upon history, and they had studied a grand civilization that endured for centuries. What did they see there? Greatness. A model to be emulated, a promise of enduring glory.”
Cordell’s patter was well rehearsed and he had the room in the palm of his hand, but Lionel was more interested in a new arrival. Lionel didn’t fit in with this crowd, but she was a piece from an entirely different puzzle. Frizzy orange hair, bags under her shell-shocked eyes, long and sallow cheeks. She wore a housecoat and combat boots.
And as she made her way through the heart of the open gallery, no one—no one but Lionel—seemed to notice her at all. The pale moonlight wreathed around her, stealing the color from her skin, turning her to glass.
New York had given Lionel scars to last a lifetime, inside and out. It had also given him a witch’s eyes. The newcomer felt him looking. She turned as she passed, and her mouth moved in silence. Maybe he felt the words echoing inside his skull, or maybe he just read her lips: Don’t try to stop me.
Maddie would have known what to do. But Maddie wasn’t here. Just him. Lionel set his plate down on the edge of the snack table. He braced himself, shoulders tight, knees limber. Whatever was about to go down, he was going to have to pick a side and move. Fast.
