Eileen Wilks - Ritual Magic

The two of them headed for the door together. Drummond hurried ahead so he could check Turner again. The black thread was definitely gone.

“Shunning is harsh,” Lily said, “but it’s got to be better than dying.”

Turner opened the door. “It will be hard on everyone, not just Santos. Including you. If you see him collapsed on the ground and sobbing, you’ll have to behave as if he isn’t there. Will you be able to . . .”

The door closed on the rest of what Turner was saying. Drummond could figure it out, though. Maybe shunning was harsh, but it wasn’t going to give that nastiness a hold on Turner. That was what counted. He’d done the job. Enough of it, anyway—the part that he could do.

The glow of satisfaction faded. He ran his thumb over the bare finger where a ring should be. How was he going to be any damn use if he couldn’t contact Lily? He frowned at his arm and gingerly flexed the muscle. Winced. It sure as hell felt as if someone had sliced through the muscle with a knife. But knife wounds heal. Maybe this would, too.

Of course it would, he told himself. But would it heal in time?

No way of knowing, and he was suddenly exhausted. That was how it went when you were injured. You ran out of oomph. That empty bed upstairs sure sounded good, but Turner and Lily would be back, and even though they’d never know it if they climbed into it with him, he would.

There was a big, oversize chair up there, too. He could sack out in it for a while. He’d figure out something about how to communicate, he thought as he drifted up. Tomorrow.

EIGHTEENhours later, they knew a lot about the man who’d been staked to the ground and killed . . . and more about their amnesia victims, too. He’d been the key, all right. Plug his life into the puzzle and a picture finally began to take shape.

Alan Debrett had been fifty-seven years old when he was killed. He’d grown up in San Diego, attending Hoover High followed by a semester at a now-defunct community college. Apparently the academic life wasn’t for him; he’d dropped out to join the Marines. After a stint there he’d gone to work at Achilles, a firm that made custom pipe fittings. He worked at Achilles for twenty-eight years, the last ten in management. He’d lived in the same house for twenty-five of those years.

Alan had been thin on family. An only child, he’d lost his father when he was forty-two. His mother was in a nursing home with advanced Alzheimer’s and his wife died five years ago. He was survived only by two cousins—one in Denver, one now living in Belize—and by his aunt and uncle.

And by his daughter, Mary.

Mary Debrett was twenty-seven years old. She had a thyroid condition, a heart condition, an IQ of 30, and many friends, both in her neighborhood and at the training center where she went once a week. She remained in ICU in a deep coma.

None of Alan’s coworkers remembered him.

One was among the amnesia victims. Upon closer questioning, several more coworkers reported gaps in their memories. A few of them had been concealing this out of fear—no one wants to think they’re losing it. Others had simply not been aware of the gaps. Yes, they knew someone used to work in that office. Couldn’t think of his name right now. Was it a he? Might have been a woman. Odd, now that you mention it, but they simply didn’t remember.

None of Alan’s neighbors remembered him.

The couple on one side had only lived there for four months and said they didn’t know any of their neighbors; the family on the other side was out of town. The SDPD was tracking them down. But several of the others remembered Mary and a few recalled Alan’s deceased wife, but not Alan. The house across the street belonged to his aunt and uncle, who were in their seventies. They’d been in bad shape when the officers knocked on their door. Both were in the hospital now, suffering from dehydration and severe disorientation. Questioning them was difficult, but it was obvious neither remembered their nephew . . . or large parts of the last fifty-seven years.

None of Lily’s family remembered Alan Debrett, either. But she did.

Not his last name, nor had she ever met him or seen a photo of him . . . at least she didn’t think so. But her mother had once talked about her high school boyfriend, Alan, when trying to impress upon a teenage Lily the need to date nice Chinese boys.

Alan hadn’t been Chinese. Julia’s father had been furious when he found out. He and her aunt had forbidden the relationship—with little success, Julia had admitted. She and Alan had gone steady for nearly two years, using any number of subterfuges she had refused to divulge to her curious daughter. His parents hadn’t approved, either. “In the end,” Julia had said, her lips tight with remembered anger or pain, “Alan came to agree with them.” And that was all she’d been willing to say on the subject.

Shortly after seven o’clock on the night after she found Mary, Lily was at her new home, which was currently a bit crowded. In another half hour they needed to leave for Isen’s house. Karonski wanted everyone to meet there for a combination briefing and brainstorming. But for now, for once, for just the next thirty minutes, Lily wasn’t doing a damn thing.

They’d turned the TV off. Someone in the insurance building on the east side of the parking lot had gotten video of almost the entire battle with the dworg. Lily had watched it all the way through online, which may have been a mistake. She didn’t want to see it again, but all the news programs kept showing snippets from it. No TV news for her for a while.

Music was better, anyway. Yo-Yo Ma was making love to his cello at the moment, and Lily was curled up in the chair-and-a-half that had been her total seating in her old apartment. Their current living area was composed of the original second-floor landing plus one of the tiny bedrooms with one wall removed. There wasn’t much room for a couch, but her old chair fit nicely.

Most of her sat in the chair, anyway. Her legs were draped across Rule’s lap. “I was so curious about my mother’s big youthful rebellion,” she said softly. “I didn’t think she’d rebelled at all, you see.”

“Mmm.” He combed her hair with his fingers. “She wouldn’t tell you more than that?”

“No, so I asked my father about Alan. I was sure he’d know. It didn’t occur to me she might not have told him about an old boyfriend . . . these days, cynic that I am, I’d probably assume every married couple had secrets, but it turned out I was right to think she’d told him about Alan. He knew who I meant, but he pretended to think I was trying to shop for a different dad. Teasing me, you know, in that dry, straight-faced way he has. When I pushed—I was pushy back then, too—he said something about letting the past stay in the past.”

“Bah,” Grandmother said.

Lily paused to see if that was addressed to her. Grandmother, Li Qin, Toby, and Julia were playing mah-jongg in the “office”—the room with the dining table. Grandmother had brought her mah-jongg set with her. Not the good one, which was over two hundred years old, but her everyday tiles. In spite of that “bah,” Grandmother was undoubtedly winning. She always did, and she didn’t believe in cutting any slack based on trivialities like age or experience.

When no further comments came, Lily went on. “So when I saw his name on the papers in his home office, I felt this little tug, as if I ought to know who he was. The memory didn’t float up to the top of my mind until we found his high school yearbook, though. There was a picture of him with my mother, and bam! I remembered that whole conversation. It had left so many questions unanswered—that’s why it stuck, I think.” She looked at Rule. “Only I shouldn’t have remembered, should I?”