"And she never told you?" Molly demanded. "What a bitch."
I gave the apprentice a lopsided smile. "The last time she'd seen me, I had been busy murdering the only thing like a real parent she'd ever had, and had apparently tried to kill her, too. It isn't a simple situation, Molly."
"But I still don't get why you lied about her."
"Because I had a bad time of it, coming out from under DuMorne's corpse the way I did. If the Wardens knew that she'd been there too, and fled the Council rather than coming out to them..." I shrugged. "Looks like she's managed to convince Ramirez that she doesn't have enough power to be considered for the Council."
"But she does?" Molly asked.
"She's nearly as strong as I am," I said quietly. "Makes up for it in grace. I'm not sure what would happen if the Wardens learned DuMorne had a second apprentice, but there would be trouble. I'm not going to make that choice for her."
"In case I haven't told you this before," Molly said, "the Wardens are a fine bunch of assholes. Present company excluded."
"There isn't any easy way to do their job," I said, before amending, "our job. Like I said, kid. Nothing's simple." I pushed myself slowly to my feet and found my keys and Mouse's lead. "Come on," I told her. "I'll drop you off at your place."
"Where are you going?"
"To talk to the Ordo," I said. "Anna's got them all holed up with Elaine."
"Why don't you just call them?"
"This is a sneak attack," I said. "I don't want to warn Helen Beckitt that I'm on the way. She's got an angle in this; I'm sure of it. It's easier to get people to talk if you get them off balance."
Molly frowned at me. "You sure you don't need my help?"
I paused to glance at her. Then at the bead bracelet on her wrist.
She clenched her jaw, took off the bracelet, and held it up with defiant determination, staring at the beads. Three minutes and two beads later, she gave it up, gasping and sweating at the effort. She looked bitterly frustrated and disappointed.
"Nothing's simple," I told her quietly, and put the bracelet back on her wrist for her. "And nothing much is easy, either. Be patient. Give it time."
"Easy for you to say," she said, and stomped out to the car, leading Mouse.
She was wrong, of course. It wasn't easy.
What I really wanted to do was get down a little food and go to bed until my head felt better. That wasn't an option for me.
Whoever the Skavis was, and whatever he was up to, there wasn't a lot of time to figure it out and stop him before he added another victim to his tally.
Chapter Eighteen
The Amber Inn is a rarity in downtown Chicago: a reasonably priced hotel. It isn't large or particularly fancy, and it wasn't designed by an architect with three names. No one infamous has owned it, lived in it, or been machine-gunned to death there. Thus, stripped of anything like a good excuse to stick it to the customer, one needn't schedule a visit to a loan officer in tandem with making a reservation, even though the Amber Inn is fairly central to Chicago.
It was the kind of place I always tried to pick on the occasions my work had taken me to another town for a client's business. My job, in cases like that, is investigating, not checking out four-star hotels. The most important thing was to be close to where I would be working and that I not run up an unmanageable bill. I've heard that some private investigators make it a point to stay somewhere nice at the client's expense, but it always seemed unprofessional to me, and a bad way to conduct business in the long term. It stood to reason that Elaine would have chosen it for similar reasons.
I didn't ask after her at the desk. I didn't need to. I just told Mouse, "Find 'em."
Mouse sniffed the air and we started walking down halls like we owned the place. That's always important, the confidence. It keeps people from getting suspicious about why you're stalking around the building, and even when it doesn't deter them, it makes them respond more cautiously.
Mouse finally stopped at a door, and I extended my hand, half closing my eyes, feeling for magic. There was a ward over the door. It wasn't terribly fancy or solid - it couldn't be, without a threshold to use as a foundation - but it was exceedingly well crafted and I was sure it was Elaine's work. The spell looked like it would release only a tiny bit of energy, probably a pulse of light or some kind of audible sound that would alert her to company.
I debated, for a moment, making a Big Bad Wolf entrance, and decided against it. It wouldn't be terribly polite to Elaine, and the only person I wanted to scare was Helen Beckitt, assuming she was there. Besides which, tipped off by her alarm and wary about a murderer, Elaine might well send a lightning bolt through the doorway before she had a chance to see who was there. I knocked.
Nothing changed, but my instincts warned me that someone was on the other side of the door - not magic, just the sudden absence of the simple, solitary feel one gets when standing alone in an empty house.
I sensed a little stirring of the magic in the ward. Then the door rattled and swung open, revealing Elaine standing on the other side, one corner of her mouth tilted up in amusement.
"Oh, I get it," I said. "Not a ward. A peephole."
"Sometimes a girl's got to improvise," she said. "You look awful."
"Long night."
"It must have been. I thought you were going to call."
"I was in the neighborhood."
She pursed her lips in speculation. "Were you?" I saw the wheels turning in her head for a moment, and then she nodded once and lowered her voice. "Which one?"
"Beckitt," I murmured back.
"She's here."
I nodded, and she opened the door the rest of the way at the same time I stepped through it. She slipped to one side as I walked briskly into the room. It was clean, plain, a kind of minisuite with a queen bed, a couch, and a coffee table.
Priscilla sat on the couch in a pea green turtleneck and a scratchy-looking wool skirt, and scowled at me in disapproval of Dickensian proportion. Abby and Toto occupied the floor, where Toto was engaged in mortal combat with a white athletic sock he had pulled partway from the foot of his plump little owner, who sat looking distracted and distant. Anna sat on the edge of the bed, dark eyes tired, bloodshot, and serious, while Helen stood by the window again, holding the curtain aside just enough to gaze out.
Toto promptly abandoned the field of battle upon spying Mouse, and walked in a little nervous circle within a couple of inches of Abby's lap. Mouse went over to trade sniffs with the little dog, and promptly settled down to begin grooming Toto with long licks.