Cover Spell (19 page)

“Yesterday, at the hotel, I saw you with Miss Grace. I knew it couldn’t be a coincidence. The obvious magical aura you two produce together gave me hope. I knew I had a chance. I had to do something. If you didn’t find the jasper, I hadn’t lost anything, and if you did, well now look where we are.”

Finn persisted with his line of questioning. “Why not approach us instead of playing a game of hide and seek?”

“You’ll excuse me, Detective, if I suggest you aren’t the most willing ally. I needed to make sure you were still interested in the jasper and I needed a place to meet with you that wasn’t so public. The media attention has been nonstop around the hotel. There are consequences to everything I do. Right now, I’m trying to assure that no one else gets hurt.” He exhaled. “I’ve told you about the jasper. You know now. Will you please help me?”

“Wait.” Finn held up his hand. “Why would you hand it over so easily if you traveled all over the world for it? You said yourself. There are only a few in the world, and I know you paid a small fortune for this one.” I looked at the pocket where the rock was and wondered how much a stone that could speak to the dead was worth.

“Because I won’t need it any more if you help me. It’s yours. Will you help or not?”

There was something in Meyers’s pleas that touched me. I remembered how he and Jane talked about Josette. He had helped her and Luke be together; he rooted for Josette to escape the clutches of Consul Henri. A man like that could not be entirely bad. If he knew where Emmy Harper was being held, I didn’t think there was much of a decision to make.

“Yes, we’ll help.” I smiled at the aged butler. Finn shot me a disapproving look, but I shrugged my shoulders. Meyers had answered all of his jasper questions. “Tell us what we can do to help you so we can get Emmy back.”

With sad and tired eyes, he looked at me. “Release me.” He choked on his words. “I need you to help me die.”

Neither of us was expecting the desperate request.

“Die? What do you mean? Are you sick?” I tried to comprehend what was happening. “We can’t help you die. I’m sorry.” I sputtered the words out.

“Sure, we’ll help you die,” Finn offered.

I punched him in the arm. “Finn!”

“What? It was his request, not mine.” He shrugged his shoulders and leaned back on the antique sofa.

“Mr. Meyers, I don’t understand. Release you from what?” Maybe we could do something else to help that didn’t involve death.

The butler hadn’t broken his gaze. “I’m sure you have lots more questions, and I have some of the answers, but I need to know if you can do this for me before I divulge any more information.”

I picked at the edge of the sofa. This was by far the most difficult thing anyone had asked of me, and I wasn’t even sure what he needed from us to do it. He knew about the jasper and he knew about Emmy. Our choices seemed limited.

Finn snapped, “We said we’d do it. We’ll release you, kill you, whatever you need. Tell us where the girl is. That’s the deal.”

Meyers’s sigh filled the room. “I’ve waited so long for this. I knew when I saw you that you were the one we waited for.” His blank eyes shifted their focus to me.

I didn’t know what he meant.

“Me? Why were you waiting for me?”

The shocking revelations kept coming, no matter how slowly I was sorting through the facts being thrown at us.

“It’s Consul Henri; he’s the one who has Emmy. Cut his power and all of this will be over. I know now you are the one who can do it.”

I almost choked. I felt like I was living one of my dark nightmares. The consul had Emmy? I felt sick.

“Wait, is this the guy you told me about from your book, Ivy? The controlling father?” So, Finn had been paying attention to my Luke and Josette story. He seemed distracted by other things last night.

“He’s the one. The overprotective, lunatic of a father that Josette ran away from. I guess that explains all of the look-alike kidnappings you had in the file.” I paused. “Mr. Meyers, how did he go on living in the city for so long without anyone being suspicious? And you too? You’re both well over a hundred years old.”

Normally, I would feel bad about calling out someone’s age, but this supernatural nightmare had to be addressed.

The old man answered rather promptly. “Monsieur Henri has incredible financial resources. His business dealings overseas and here in Louisiana have allowed him to buy the silence of those around him. And me. Well, I don’t make many acquaintances. It’s easy to go unnoticed if you stay as invisible as possible all of these years.”

It sounded isolated and lonely.

Finn wasn’t buying the story. “You’ve lived all of these years without anyone putting the story together? No one has recognized the consul?”

“That is correct, sir.”

“Hmm…how did he leave his post with the French government and remain in the United States?”

“As I said, he had vast resources even then. Once Josette disappeared, he resigned as consul general, and both countries willingly agreed to let him stay in New Orleans to search for her. After a few years, he was no longer a concern to either country and he began creating his New Orleans empire. We’ve been here ever since.”

“But what does destroying him have to do with you?” I blurted out the question.

Finn shrugged his shoulders at me. It was the next obvious issue we needed to address.

Meyers inhaled a long, heavy breath. “It is something for which I am both terribly ashamed of and incredibly grateful for. I was already an old man when the consul came to me with the proposition. He offered me an eternal life. At first, I wanted the prospect of an immortal existence. I thought it would help me recapture my youth, maybe give me another chance to relive my life—make different choices, prosper in a new life.” He wiped a tear from his tired eyes. “For that, I am ashamed.” He paused. “But then, the kidnappings started, and his power started twisting into something darker than I ever thought possible. The more it consumed him, the more I knew there was a reason I had accepted the curse. I had to stay with the consul to save the girls, to free them. It was like watching everything that happened with Josette replay again. He was obsessed, fixated, and just pure mad. Setting them free was my only way to atone for the selfish and deplorable decision I made to accept the immortal curse.”

I had tears in my eyes. I couldn’t imagine what he had been through. In perfect gentlemanly fashion, Meyers reached into his coat and pulled out a pressed handkerchief for me to use. I accepted the gesture sheepishly and blotted both of my eyes lightly. Finn rolled his eyes.

“Mr. Meyers, I hate to ask this, but what is it? What is the evil that follows you? I can feel it.”

Sitting in such close proximity to the butler, the darkness in the air was thick. I had gotten used to it, but like a bad smell it never went away. However, I knew it wasn’t him. He was too good—too kind to emit that type of evil.

He stretched his hand in the air and turned his wrist so that the face of his watch was exposed. It glowed faintly, and I felt the hum of evil surrounding it.

“The consul and I are bound together by the watches.”

It was obvious Finn was officially over the sad story. “Then just take the damn watch off. You don’t need us to free you.”

“I wish it was that simple, sir. The curse is on my soul—not in the watch. I can’t escape it, only if the curse is broken. The watch binds us together. If I leave it or try to destroy it, the energy within will pass to someone else. I can’t let that happen. I have accepted my choice and I have to make sure this watch is always with me. I pity the burglar who thinks they have found gold and steals it on a whim. It’s a curse worse than death to be bound to the consul.”

“So what this comes down to is you need Ivy and me to break the curse?”

“You make it sound easy, Detective. If you can eliminate his power, the curse, the bond, the kidnappings will all be over. I’m entrusting that you two can do this. I know you don’t owe this to me, but I’m desperate. I’ve never met a witch with your abilities before. Can you?”

Why did he keep saying that? My only gift was
Time Spelling
and nothing about it could help Emmy.

“We can,” I piped up before Finn rescinded his offer. “What do we do next?”

F
INN AND
I didn’t talk during the first few minutes of our car ride back to the French Quarter. I kept rehashing the conversation with Meyers, and tried to memorize all of the information he had given us. I scribbled down the address he had offered me on a piece of paper, and pulled it out to read the street name and number again. Finn was driving like a crazy person, away from the lazy sprawling plantation and back into the city.

“I can’t believe you just agreed to help him, Ivy, without even talking to me about it.” He was angry with me, and was the first to break the silence.

I turned the radio down. “You act like you don’t make plans without consulting me. How did we even end up at the plantation?” I crossed my arms and glared out the window at the sugar cane fields racing past my view.

“A voodoo queen? You realize we are going on a hunt for a crazy damn voodoo queen?”

I seldom saw Finn get angry. He was too cool and calm for anger. If things were ever too intense, he usually left, but now he was trapped in this mission with me and I had forced him into helping Meyers. Unwillingly, he had accepted the jasper, and it wasn’t something he could return like a library book. I understood why he was a little peeved.

“Come on, Finn. We can find Emmy. It’s not even a hunt; we have an address. Don’t you want to find her?”

If everything Meyers had told us was true, Emmy Harper was alive and well. However, her captor, Consul Henri, was a demented man who had evaded time with the help of an infamous New Orleans voodoo queen, Madame Chantilly. What a name for a queen.

He huffed. “I do. Of course I want to find her. It’s my job. I just don’t like being committed to do extra things. Breaking curses,” he muttered. “How did you know Meyers was telling the truth anyway? What if this is some kind of trap? What if there is another Proxy and is way to steal our magic?”

Would he believe me if I said it was a gut instinct? I did have the added bonus of seeing Meyers in 1945. I hated he was so skeptical. I probably should be after Vegas.

“I wish we could have talked before I agreed to help him, but it happened so fast. The night Josette ran away with Luke, I saw how Meyers worried about her and how much he wanted her to escape. He helped her. He was more like a father should be instead of how the consul treated her. Now, he wants Emmy to escape. We can do this for him. We can help.”

“Yeah, but I’m not interested in bag-of-bones Meyers. That guy sealed his fate when he signed up with Madame Chantilly. I want to find Emmy so I can get back to…” His words trailed off. I thought he stopped himself before he uttered “Shadow Quest.” “You, babe, I want to get back to you and me and last night. Not some ancient evil who has problems.”

“I don’t know if that’s exactly fair. Meyers isn’t evil. You heard what he said. The only way he could protect Josette was to make sure he was around to keep her father from getting to her first. Really, Finn, he’s not a bad guy.”

“Whatever you say, gorgeous. Whatever you say.”

He zipped the rental car through the winding back roads of Louisiana that carried us into the heart of New Orleans’s black magic district.