Burroughs returned to Emma’s bedside like a vulture drawn back to a fresh carcass. “I think you’ll agree, DeVries, that time is of the essence if we’re to win broader support from the Wizard Council before any more wizards are murdered. As you know, I have considerable experience in interrogation. I have no doubt that, given a little time, I can obtain the answers we want.”
“I am less interested in obtaining the answers we want than I am in getting at the truth,” DeVries said. “I told you—both of you—that I intended to handle this interrogation myself. What was it that you didn’t understand?”
“I’d hoped you’d reconsider,” Burroughs said. “We can’t afford to squander our only chance to make our case against the cabal in Trinity. We need to get more wizards off the fence and onto our side.”
“And I don’t think we want to wear our witness out talking politics,” DeVries said. “We’ll discuss this after I’ve had the chance to talk to her. Now go.”
They went.
DeVries pulled up a chair and straddled it, facing Emma. He might have been a college student, in his jeans, sneakers, and a collared shirt. “I’m Rowan DeVries,” he said.
“Emma Greenwood.”
“You’re the daughter of Tyler Greenwood and Gwyneth Hart?”
Gwyneth? Gwen. Right. “Yes.”
For a long moment, he stared down at his hands, saying nothing. Then he said, “Is it true what they said? Now that they’re gone, do you want to change your story?”
“Is it true that I’m a prisoner?”
His head came up quickly, his expression startled.
“Mr. DeVries. I may not know much, but I’m not stupid,” Emma said.
“Call me Rowan,” he said. Then added, as an afterthought, “Please.”
“Rowan,” Emma repeated, putting an edge on it. “If I’ve been so sick, then why am I not in a hospital? If I’m accused of something, then why am I not talking to the police?”
“You’re not accused of anything,” Rowan said.
“Then suppose you tell me what this is all about?” On the streets of Memphis, she’d learned to take the offensive when she got into a tight spot. A good bluff could sometimes save a person a world of trouble.
“We need to know what happened,” Rowan went on. “How you were hurt. And we need to know now. Just tell me what you remember, whether you think it’s important or not.”
“I’m not talking to anyone without a lawyer,” Emma said.
“A lawyer would not be helpful,” Rowan said stiffly.
“Not to you, maybe.”
“Look, I’ll walk you through it,” he said. “And you fill in what you know. We found you on the floor of the conservatory. Was that where you first saw the intruders?”
Emma folded her arms and said nothing.
Rowan’s tawny eyes hardened into amber, set into a face gone pale as marble. “Don’t try my patience, Emma,” he said softly. “My sister Rachel is dead. She’s all the family I had. I practically raised her after my father was murdered. I’d prefer not to hurt you, but I will get some answers.”
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know,” Emma said. “Do you want me to make something up?”
“All I want is the truth,” he said. “No games. Don’t try to tell me that you don’t remember anything.” He released a long breath and raked both hands through his hair.
“The last I remember was being in my workshop in the basement.”
“Workshop?”
“I’m a luthier. I build guitars.” She paused and, when he didn’t ask questions about this, continued: “After that, nothing. Or almost nothing. It’s just a few scenes. Like pictures, in my head. Somebody in a mask. And—and gunshots. And blood.” Tears leaked from her eyes and ran down her face.
He handed her a tissue. “This masked person. Can you tell me anything else? What was he wearing? How big was he? Did he look familiar? Was he gifted?”
Emma shook her head. “It seemed like he was all bundled up, so all I could see was his eyes. He had sad eyes.”
“Sad eyes?” Rowan sounded a little exasperated.
“You asked what I remembered, right? I remember that.”
“Did he try to charm you?”
“Charm me?” Emma was lost. “You mean, seduce me? Or…”
He flushed. “Charms. You know. Spells. Conjury.” He raised his hand and mimicked casting a spell.
“Oh. No.”
“How old was he?”
“All I saw were his eyes.”
“If you had to guess.”
“From his voice, I’d say he was younger rather than older. Teens or twenties.”
“Are any of these people familiar?” Rowan had his own array of photographs stored in his phone, the same people the other wizards had shown her.
“I don’t recognize any of them.” She handed the phone back.
“How about this one?”
It was a photograph of a girl with chestnut hair in a tennis outfit. The resemblance between her and Rowan was striking. It pinged something in Emma’s memory.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Is that your sister?”
“Yes,” he said, putting the phone away. “What can you tell me about Tyler?”
“I don’t really know him that well.”
“He’s your father, right?” Rowan said, raising an eyebrow.
“I just came to live with him a few months ago.”
“Where were you before that?”
“I lived with my grandfather in Memphis. After he died, I came here.”
And then Emma could have sworn that Rowan did the flicker-eye thing. The lying thing. He looked down at his hands. Then back up at Emma. “So. Since you’ve been living with Tyler, have you seen people coming and going? Meetings at the house? Did he seem to be involved in any kind of…conspiracy?”
“No. Nobody ever came over. He didn’t seem to have any friends. He was pretty much a homebody, except when he went out for gigs.”
“Gigs?”
“He plays—played—bass guitar in a band.”
“Did you ever see him work with chemicals, plants, poisons, magical devices?”
“No, never.”
“He was a sorcerer.” It was a half question.
“That’s what I’m told. But I never saw any sign of it.”
“How about you? Are you a sorcerer as well?”
Emma shook her head. “I don’t know what I am. Maybe nothing. Tyler said I was gifted, but that was the first I heard about it.”
Rowan seemed to have run out of questions temporarily. Closing his eyes, he rubbed his forehead, looking about as weary and heartsick as Emma felt.
“What happens now?” she asked, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer.
“We’ll keep trying, Emma, until you remember more.”
“And if I don’t?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. But I want the truth, Emma. Nothing more and nothing less.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “Will you tell me the truth, then?”
His eyes narrowed. “It depends on the question.”
“If you can’t tell me the truth, tell me nothing at all,” she said. “I can’t stand a liar. How did they die? My father and the others?”
He shifted his gaze away. “Do you really want the details? I mean—we don’t have to—”
“I’m not like other people,” Emma said. “I’ve been told that all my life. And I want to know how my father died.”
“Very well, if you insist,” Rowan said. “Greenwood—your father—had a deep cutting wound to the thigh. He had some…he was burned, and he’d been cut by broken glass, but what killed him must have been blood loss.”
“And the others?”
“Two of the dead, including my sister, were badly cut up, too. Stabbed and slashed. One was shot. The others didn’t have a mark on them. We’ve seen that before. So we’ve been thinking there were several attackers, using different weapons
.”
“Did you call the police?” By now, Emma was fairly certain he hadn’t. “Did you even do an autopsy?”
Rowan rolled his eyes, as if Emma were a hopeless case. “That would be a colossal waste of time.”
“Really? Maybe you could use the help. You don’t seem to be doing such a great job on your own.” Emma’s anger was bubbling to the surface again, despite her efforts to contain it. “Tell me this,” she said. “What were your sister and those others doing at my house? I assume they weren’t looking to book a gig.”
Rowan chewed on his lower lip a moment, as if debating how much to say. “We’ve been looking for people with a connection to Thorn Hill. We think there’s a connection between what happened there and a series of murders going on now. Including the killing of my sister and your father.”
“Thorn Hill?” Emma asked, playing dumb.
“It was a Weir terrorist camp in Brazil. All of the underguilds were involved, to a degree, but it was mostly sorcerers. They flocked there to work in secret on weapons they could use against the Wizard Guild.”
“That’s not what I heard,” Emma blurted, recalling what Tyler had said. “And not what I remember.”
Rowan’s eyes widened in surprise. “You were there?”
Brasilia. Memory poured over her. The scent of jasmine and four o’clocks in the gathering dusk. Emma and her mother, riding in a Jeep on a rutted country road, hitting bumps at full speed and flying through the air. Emma shrieking with laughter. Go faster, Mommy.
Of course, as a five-year-old, she had no way of telling what else went on there.
With that, Emma’s beaten-down memory struggled back to life, surfacing a scrap of conversation she’d had with Tyler. About her mother.
She was working for Mr. DeVries at the time.
Mr. DeVries? Who’s that?
Somebody you never want to meet. A wizard.
That was why the name DeVries was familiar. Rowan’s father was the wizard her mother had worked for. The one she was frightened of. The one she fled to Brazil to get away from.
“Emma?”
Emma looked up to find Rowan DeVries staring at her. “What is it?” he said, leaning toward her, his hands on his knees. “What do you remember?”
“I was there. When I was little.”
“And?”
Two impulses warred within her. Her first impulse was to withhold as much information as possible. But she realized that this might be an opportunity to learn more about her mother.
“Tyler told me that my mother used to work for your father,” Emma said finally.
“Did she?” He didn’t seem surprised.
“And she ran away to Thorn Hill to get away from him.”
“That’s certainly possible,” Rowan said, nodding. “So?”
“Is it true that she used to make poisons?” Emma knew that she was taking a risk, poking and prodding, digging up the truth about her mother. If your mother is dead, and if nobody will tell you a thing about her, you can make up whatever kind of mother you want. But she wasn’t interested in made-up mothers. Emma was a person who liked to take the truth by the throat and shake it. If there was one thing she couldn’t stand, it was a liar.
Rowan rubbed the back of his neck. “Does it matter now? Some things you’re better off not knowing. Maybe you should just leave that be.”
“You mean, like you let Tyler be?”
Rowan sighed. “I don’t know specifics about your mother, but it seems likely that she made poisons. The sorcerers who worked for my father were primarily involved in making them.” His voice was flat, matter-of-fact. “If so, she must have been good at it. He only hired the best.”
“What—what would he want with poison?” Emma forced the words over a dry tongue.
“My father, Andrew DeVries, founded a syndicate known as the Black Rose. Its members solved all kinds of sticky problems for their clients, but they specialized in contract killing of the gifted. Wizards, mostly. To be blunt, I come from a family of assassins.”
Emma’s heart squeezed painfully as the realization hit home. My mother was a murderer. An accessory to murder, at least.
“The syndicate was successful from the very start. After all, why butt heads with an opponent when you can take him out of play entirely? Why negotiate with rebellious underguilds when you can eliminate their ringleaders and frighten the rest into submission? A little judicious killing can reduce the need for bloodshed later on.
“My father didn’t take sides…he was apolitical. He sold his services to anyone willing to pay the price. Of course, some in the wizard houses were disdainful of him…at first, anyway.” A trace of a smile quirked Rowan’s lips. “They considered poison a weapon of the underguilds, an inappropriate tactic for wizards. They preferred to settle disputes via the anachronistic elegance of the Game.”
“The Game?”
“You’ve not heard of it? They used warrior gladiators as proxies to settle disputes. They would fight one-on-one, winner take all, under a set of rules that go back to the sixteenth century.” He rolled his eyes. “Rather silly, really. It leaves way too much up to chance. My father was nothing if not efficient. People soon learned to get out of his way.”
Horrified words crowded together in Emma’s mind, competing to escape. “B-but…what would he…I don’t understand why she would—”
“There’s a lot I don’t know, all right?” Rowan snapped. “I was twelve when my father was murdered. Rachel was eight. We were not involved in Father’s business; we were attending private schools under aliases for our own protection. I was fourteen before I found out my real name.”
“Who killed your father?” Emma asked.
Rowan straightened his sleeves. “Who indeed? So many suspects to choose from.”
“Why are you interested in Thorn Hill?” Emma asked.
“The sorcerers who went to Thorn Hill had expertise in a number of areas that are of interest to us now. Much of that knowledge was lost in the accident. We’re hoping to salvage something.”
“The accident?” My father called it a massacre, she wanted to say. “What happened?”
Rowan shrugged. “Apparently some of the poisons they were working on contaminated the water supply. Nearly everyone died. A few children survived—and many of them were horribly disfigured.” He frowned, appraising Emma. “You must have left before then,” he said.
“I guess I must have,” Emma said. “How many people died?”
“Several thousand, from what I understand.” He grimaced. “So much expertise was lost. What a shame.”
“Yeah. A shame about the expertise,” Emma murmured. “Why does that matter now? Have you decided to go into the family business?”
“Recent events have forced my hand,” Rowan said.
“What do you mean?”
“Somebody is murdering wizards. We believe we know who’s doing it, but right now we’re helpless to stop it. Thorn Hill was also a center for research into Weirstones. Specifically, research on ways to modify them.”
“Why would anyone want to do that?”
Rowan shrugged. “I don’t know…maybe they wanted to create a mutant army to kill wizards?”
“That’s ridiculous,” Emma said. “My parents would never be involved in something like that.”
“You mean your mother, the assassin’s accomplice, or your father that you just met?” Rowan laughed. “We’re alike, you and I…we both spring from tainted stock.”
“Why do you want to modify Weirstones?”
“All of our Weirstones are dependent on the Dragonheart, the source of magical energy. A small group has seized power over the Weirguilds by taking control of the Dragonheart. We’re looking for a way to free ourselves from dependence on the Dragonheart while retaining our gifts. Until we’re able to do this, we’re helpless to fight back.
“We’d been looking for your father for a long time. Some records seemed to connect him to the Black Rose—perhaps through y
our mother, I don’t know. He was connected to Thorn Hill as well…he spent some time there. So we thought perhaps he might be the link we were looking for.
“Rachel believed that she’d finally located him. She and the others went to question your father and verify who he was.” Pain flickered across his face. “I should never have allowed her to go, but she was excited, hoping this would be her first big breakthrough. And I thought, of course, he’s a sorcerer—what chance would he have against eight wizards?” He grimaced. “But somebody else showed up, maybe somebody who knew they were coming. My sister called for help, but I got there too late.”
He lost more than I did that night, Emma thought. For me, Tyler was a link to the past and a hope for the future. But anyone could tell that Rowan really loved his sister.
“She didn’t describe the killer to you?”
Rowan shook his head. “It seems she didn’t plan on being dead when I got there.”
“You sent eight people to question one man?”
“Most of them were young. New recruits. Like me, Rachel assumed the job was routine, and brought them along so they could gain some experience. But it’s also possible that they were anticipating trouble. Anyone who can murder that many wizards is exceedingly dangerous.”
“But you weren’t there?”
“If I had been there, Rachel would have survived. Or I would be dead,” Rowan said bluntly.
“And so…your sister and the others drew assassins to my house, and my father ended up dead?” Emma made no effort to keep the bitterness out of her voice.
“Either that or your father lured my sister and the others into a trap,” Rowan snapped back.
“And ended up dead himself. That’s a real good plan, to host a murder with his own daughter as witness.”
“If he was involved, I’m sure he didn’t mean for it to turn out the way it did,” Rowan said. “This is the first time the murderers have left any witnesses. I don’t think they meant to.”
So, Emma realized, she herself was supposed to be dead, along with the others. If any of what Rowan was saying was even true.
“How did I get here?”
“At first, we thought you were dead, too,” Rowan said. “You didn’t seem to be breathing. And yet, you were still warm, and you had a faint pulse. We brought you back here, hoping you’d recover. When you didn’t show any signs of improvement, we called in that labrat healer.”