Chapter 20
“Sojourn to Vancouver?”
Natasha jumped. She hadn’t heard Jakob enter the kitchen, much less come close enough to snitch a sweet roll from a batch she’d baked alongside six dozen cookies, four loaves of bread, and a pan of cinnamon rolls that now covering the table. She hadn’t slept, couldn’t sleep, not after the graveyard and all it had shown her. Dawn hadn’t cracked the sky when she started the oven, needing the concentration on measuring and pouring to keep her Shadows murky, subdued. Now—“Vancouver?” she echoed dully and a rogue Shadow tried to flare: Owen Brophy, ragged hair, ragged clothes, and an arm slung around an equally ragged redhead—whose hand was saucily tucked into his back pocket. Don’t show! she said irritably, and Shoes, weaving ’round her ankles, leapt in alarm. Natasha stooped, gathered her up.
The kitten purred, and Jakob affixed a glare to her radio, also on since pre-dawn, a barrier to prevent him from reading anything she might have brought home from the graveyard; Vincent Haslom and her mother.
Her mother.
That does not mean Vincent Haslom is my father. She petted Shoes rhythmically. Frantically. Vincent Haslom couldn’t be her father. For hadn’t Baba always said there had been many boys? Too many boys? Her father could be any of them. Not the ogre. Not the fairytale Huntsman who would happily chop up his own children. Cuddling Shoes closer, she said, in a stronger voice, “Why Vancouver?”
“Because Jessalyn and your Sea-Eyed Knight will be there.”
As if Brophy was hers. “And Blue Eyes?”
“Going also, with plans to surprise them with a pricey dinner he can’t afford out in Kitsilano.” He took a handful of cookies. “Our prey will follow them.”
‘Prey’. The word cast a pall down her back. Jakob cocked his head quizzically. “You saw none of this?”
“No.” Her Shadows had given her only the past, Vincent and Silva—and a dead body they’d been intent on concealing.
Jakob watched her, clearly aware there was more.
She chewed her lip, said “What happens when we track them all to Vancouver?”
A fleeting smile caught his lips, there and then gone, yet it chilled her enough to flash a hand out, trying to connect to him, trying to read.
He pulled away. “I believe this person will begin to experience the consequences of their actions.”
As he said it, a Shadow swelled beyond his left shoulder, a body, swinging from a tree, its insides dangling from its stomach, red gore. Her breath collapsed in her throat. She had to force her voice past it. “D-do you want this person caught, Jakob? Or dead?”
“Does it matter?”
Sometimes his eyes were so deep and so fathomless they made her feel as though she stared into a well. She swallowed, hard, and “Yes, it matters,” she said clearly. “Because I will not be party to murder.”
The body hanging behind him opened its eyes and Really?’ she heard clearly.
Jakob brushed cookie crumbs from his fingers. “There is a difference between killing someone and knowing they will be killed.”
No there wasn’t. Not really. Tearing her gaze from the body, she pinned a stare to her cousin. “Why,” she said, “do you hate this person? What they’re doing…it’s not about you, Jakob. It’s not personal.”
“Showing you your own tombstone isn’t personal?”
But it was her tombstone. Not his.
He lifted his chin. “You judge me for hating this person, Natasha? For despising their sadistic version of morals? Their cruelty?” Here he pointed to Shoes’ ruined paw.
She winced. “No, but—”
“But you think I am cruel too for wanting them dead? Well, my dear sestranek, let me bestow a harsh truth: cruelty understands cruelty. It’s the only vernacular some people speak.”
Vince Haslom’s Shadow appeared and seemed to nod in her periphery. Still— “An eye for an eye leaves everyone—”
“We’re already blind, Natasha. This person turns our whole world into psychic ink while they plot murder, and you feel like doling out mercy?”
Yes. No. “I…this person. They’ve been hurt, Jakob. That’s why—”
“That’s why they’re owed a killing? Of you? Are you listening to yourself?
“But…” But hadn’t she once been hurt too? And wasn’t her tormentor now dead? She peeked at the body still dangling behind Jakob. Mercy. She’d considered the concept a million times, would dwell on it a million more. Did she believe in mercy? Could victims afford to believe in mercy? “No,” she whispered, the word scurrying out like a reflex. Rob and Jessalyn’s terrorist, whoever it was did mean to kill her too. “And why?” she asked, accidentally aloud.
Jakob looked at her, sharp.
“Because it is personal,” she added, circling the track, and now her gaze shifted over to Vincent Haslom’s Shadow. Who did you kill? she asked. Show.
A sheet of ink descended and hid him. Silva’s doing, the covenant Natasha had seen her make in the graveyard. She called out to her mother’s absent Shadow. Mama, how? How could you do this?
The body hanging behind Jakob re-opened its eyes, indignation afire. How? How could you cover for him?
She flinched and looked back at her cousin, but as their gazes clashed she could not help but wonder—did her eyes sometimes look like a pit too? Their eye shape, their strange color, their ability to see all the things others could not…all were traits that they shared. So too, she knew, was their talent for stepping between truth and lie. Inhaling, she selected words carefully. “You would have to really love someone,” she said slowly, “to cover for them if they caused another to die.”
He held her gaze. “Or be deathly afraid of them.”
She did not blink. “How do you know you’re not being manipulated? This person knows how to play with our Shadows. Blue Eyes might not be going to Vancouver at all.”
A flicker of doubt creased his forehead and, along with the cookie in his hand, it made him look like the little boy who had once been her buddy, her cousin with the cowlick and pocket full of rocks. “I will throw them at people who are mean to you, sestranek.” She sighed and, on impulse, reached out, brushed hair off his forehead like their Baba would have done. “I am staying here,” she said. “In case Rob does too.”
Jakob nodded, but reluctantly, and the radio continued to play so he could not see that while she was alone she would go back to the graveyard, call her Shadows to show Silva again. Perhaps she could learn how her Matka had created the psychical darkness that had hid Vincent Haslom’s crime.
And perhaps she could also learn how to undo it.
***
Owen slipped away from Cory and Jessalyn as soon as good manners allowed, then brought out his cell. Rob answered on the first ring. “Hey, Old Man!” He sounded stoked. “Jessie texted me about her big sale.”
Yeah. To ThirdEye20/20. Owen gnawed his lip. Golden rule of investigating: only tell the victim what they need to know—and right now Rob needed to know very little. Jessalyn was, after all, right: he did worry. Stress lurked in the brackets around his eyes. Was in the pinched tightness that grabbed his mouth whenever he thought he was alone with his thoughts.
But something else altogether was present in the dead cold that crept beneath his expression whenever he got pissed off. His old man. Old Man. Funny how it had always been the endearment between them. Maybe Rob had always longed for someone else, anyone else, to impart that title upon. He drew a ragged breath and “I need some background,” he said, then forged forward. “What can you tell me about your Dad’s history?”
Silence. It climbed between them, stretching out so long that at last he said “Rob? You still there—”
“What does he have to do with it?”
Jesus. That flat chill in Rob’s tone…it was like hearing Vince Haslom call out from the grave and Owen twitched as ice gripped the base of his neck. “Maybe something, maybe nothing,” he said. “I’ve done some digging—”
“And now you know he killed a man. How’d you like to share that bloodline, Owen?”
Shame crouched beneath all the hostility, made him feel like a shit, but still—“What if the storybooks aren’t about Jessalyn at all?” he asked. “What if this whole thing is about you?”
Rob fell quiet. Owen pressed on. “The internet isn’t telling me who his alleged victim was—”
“Doesn’t matter. I can tell you. So you think this whole thing has to do with revenge?
Very likely. Still, he hated wounding him, so—“I’m just throwing paper airplanes, Old Man. Just trying to see if any take flight.”
Another spate of chilled silence slipped by then Rob spoke, still so flat that Owen could picture, in apt detail, old Vince Haslom, polished and grave and always so goddamn disapproving. “That would mean it’s not just me who’s in trouble,” Rob said.
Owen shoved Vince Haslom’s image away and, tracking alongside Rob’s logic asked “Has Sabrina had anything off happen lately?”
“Sab? No. She’d have told me. We don’t keep secrets. Never have.”
Never could if they wanted to keep each other safe. “Old Man—”
“Galinko,” said Rob. “The environmentalist the old prick got rid of out in Alberta. His name was Galinko.”
Owen’s throat went to dust. Galinko. The same name of the person whose suicide-was-no-suicide, and who all his armchair detective cohorts on Alberta Unsolved said the Nikoslavs murdered.
