Skin Trade(156)

I looked at him. He’d put his cross back on, but there was still a tightness around the eyes. Whatever he had seen of Marmee Noir had spooked him. “I didn’t see you for the mumbo-jumbo type,” I said.

“You said it yourself, Anita; most of us don’t have your talent with the dead. We get what help we can.”

I looked at Edward. “Do you have help?”

He shook his head.

I looked at Olaf. “You?”

“Not stones and magic.”

“What then?”

“The cross is blessed by a very holy man. It burns with his faith, not mine.”

“A cross doesn’t work for you, personally?” I asked, then almost wished I hadn’t.

“The same man who blessed the cross told me I am damned, and no amount of Hail Marys or prayers will save me.”

“Everyone can be saved,” I said.

“To be forgiven, you must first repent your sins.” He gave me the full weight of those eyes again.

“And you’re unrepentant,” I said.

He nodded.

I thought about that, that his cross burned with the faith of a holy man who had told him he’d go to hell unless he repented. He didn’t repent, but he still wore the cross that the man had given him, and it still worked for him. The logic, or lack of it, made my head hurt. But in the end, faith isn’t always about logic; sometimes it’s about the leap.

“Did you kill him?” Bernardo asked.

Olaf looked at him. “Why would I kill him?”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

Olaf seemed to think about that for a moment, then said, “I didn’t want to, and no one was paying me to do it.”

There, perfectly Olaf, not that he didn’t kill a priest because it would be wrong, but because it didn’t amuse him at the moment, and no one had paid him. Even Edward at his most disturbing wouldn’t have had the same logic.

“We’re talking in front of you too casually,” Edward said. “Why?”

“Perhaps you simply feel at ease.”

He shook his head. “You’ve got a permanent spell of some kind on the room, or house.”

“All I have cast is that people may speak freely if they desire to. Apparently, your friends feel the need, and you do not.”

“I don’t believe confession is good for the soul.”

“Nor do I,” she said, “but it can free up parts of you that are blocked, or help soothe your mind.”

He shook his head, then turned to me. “If you’re going to have her do something with the medallion, do it. We need to go.”

I fished the second chain from underneath the vest and all. I’d tried carrying the cross and the medallion on the same chain, but there were too many times when I needed the cross visible, and I got tired of people asking what the second symbol meant. The image on the metal was of a many-headed big cat; if you looked just right on the soft metal, you could discern stripes and symbols around the edge of it. I’d tried to pass it off as a saint’s medallion, but it just didn’t look like anything that tame.

I held it out to Phoebe. She took it gingerly by the chain with only two fingers. “This is very old.”

I nodded. “The metal is soft enough that it bends with pressure, and some with just the heat of the body.”

She started walking toward the door that her daughter had come through with the tea. I expected us to go all the way to her altar room, but she stopped us in a small, bright kitchen. Her daughter, Kate, was nowhere to be seen.

Phoebe answered as if I’d asked out loud, “Kate had a date tonight. I told her she could go after the tea was served.”

“So she missed the metaphysical show.”

“Yes, though many gifted in the area might have felt something. You do not call down such evil and such good without alerting those who can sense such things.”

“I don’t usually pick up stray stuff,” I said.

“But you are not trained for it. Tonight’s show would have attracted either the untrained, who cannot block it out, or the trained, who are open to the alert.”

I shook my head. “Are we here for me to get lectured or to cleanse the charm?”

“So impatient.”

“Yeah, I know, I need to work on it.”

She smiled, then turned to the sink. “Then I will not waste more of your time.” She turned the water on and waited a few moments for it to run, while her eyes were closed and she looked upward at nothing that I could see or feel.

She passed the charm and chain under the running water. She turned the water off, then held the charm in her hands and closed her eyes again. “It is cleansed, and ready for use.”

I gave her a look.