“I told you before that he is no trouble to me.”
“Er . . .” I looked back at the cat. He flattened his ears and hissed silently at me, but at least he stopped digging his claws into the flesh of my arm. “Then why did you bring him out here?”
She smoothed the cloth over the table and poured a little water into the scrying bowl. “He is your mother’s familiar. He will provide a bridge to her.”
“That’s just an old wives’ tale. Or more accurately, I guess, an old witches’ tale, because my mother never used a familiar, and if she did, she would have hardly chosen a fat, grumpy cat to be one.” Davide’s lips thinned, his whiskers held flush with his face, his eyes shooting lasers at me. Or they would have if he could have managed it.
“You are mistaken,” was all she said.
I looked back at Davide. He squinted back at me, and farted on my leg. “For the love of—”
“Silence.”
At Tallulah’s softly spoken command, I stopped glaring at Davide, shooting a quick glance at Ben out of the corner of my eye. He had adopted a mildly interested expression as Tallulah invoked a trance, but as I watched, one corner of his mouth tipped up.
You are entirely too sexy for your own good. How am I going to spend the rest of my life with you if all you have to do is quirk one side of your mouth to have me imagining the most lewd things?
You will enjoy yourself greatly, both in chastising me for my appearance, about which I can do little, and in being pleasured as only a Beloved can be pleasured. Yes, including more tongue swirls in that particular spot, although I object to you including in your fantasies that object, and I would like to know, since you’ve had no other men, how you learned about devices intended to prolong erections?
The Internet, baby, the Internet.
“Sir Edward is with us,” Tallulah said, interrupting my mental review of all the toys I thought might be fun to use on Ben. She sounded brisk and businesslike as usual, not at all adopting the dreamy tone my mother did whenever she communed with the goddess. “I have told him of your request, Fran, and he has agreed to help you, although he warns that he is limited in what he can see.”
I was expecting the session with Tallulah to take a long time, what with all the looking around Sir Edward had to do from the Akashic Plain, referred to by people in the Otherworld as Akasha, and by normal people as limbo. But to my surprise, it took Tallulah and Sir Edward only three minutes to tell us what we wanted to know.
“There is a man, swarthy and bull-chested,” Tallulah said, gazing intently into her scrying bowl. “I see him clearly. Sir Edward says he has much dark power, although he disguises it well. He was a servant, but has been freed. It is he who holds your mother, bound by love.”
“A swarthy man?” I glanced at Ben.
“De Marco,” he said.
“That’s what I was thinking. But why? Because he knew Mom in the past?”
“Perhaps the issues of their relationship were not resolved in the past.”
“Possibly. But that doesn’t sound like her.”
Ben admitted it didn’t.
“And is she really in love with de Marco, or did he magic her somehow?”
Ben asked Tallulah, “Is he nearby? Is Miranda with him?”
“Yes. And yes,” she said, her gaze still locked on the smooth surface of the water in the bowl. She was silent for a moment, then added, shaking her head, “He has too much power for Sir Edward to see more details. He says that this man is gathering forces to him, dark forces.”
The therions? His experiments, do you think?
It’s possible, but therions are not beings of dark power.
Tallulah suddenly took a big gasp of air, then sat back, her eyes once again on us. “That is all we could see. The man sensed Sir Edward’s interest, and would have attacked him had Sir Edward not retreated back to the Akasha.”
“De Marco can attack ghosts?” I asked, incredulous at the idea. I knew ghosts in corporeal form, such as the Vikings and those that had been grounded, could be interacted with physically, but Sir Edward had never, in the time I had known Tallulah, had a solid form.
“Yes. He is an Ilargi, a reaper of souls.” Her eyes held sympathy as she reached across the table and tapped Ben on his wrist. “You must guard well, Benedikt. He desires to add you to his forces.”
“Well, he can just desire all he wants, Ben is mine,” I snorted, immediately regretting the show of possession.
Why? I enjoyed it, Ben said with a smile.
Yes, and you’re going to be absolutely unbearable after a few years of that, and I have to spend . . . what, a thousand years with you?