“Is he always with you?” I ask.
“Not all the time. There are times when I can’t seem to reach him, but I always know when he’s here. I can feel him.”
“This is so messed up.” Placing my hands over my face, I rest my elbows on the table. “It’s your fault he’s here, your fault I only get to see him like this. Because you killed him.”
“He asked me to,” Valdemar stresses.
“Why? Why would he want that? He had his whole life ahead of him. Nothing is as bad as taking a bullet to the head,” I argue.
Valdemar’s eyes widen as he leans over the table, closing the gap between us. “Believe me when I tell you, angel, that the bullet to the head was the better option.”
There’s a coldness running through me which I ignore, too rattled by this conversation to pick up on the chill.
“How can that be?” I feel like I’m on a roller-coaster—the ups and downs, the speed at which this tale is racing, and the wind harsh against my face. I just want it to stop, to get off and catch my breath.
“Because we’d been set up.” Valdemar sits back, his body slackening as if he has no energy to retell this part of the story.
“Set up?”
Licking his lips, he straightens as if bracing himself to relive something he has no desire to. “We thought that once Jacinta had faked her reaction to the drug, the staff would carry her off into the private function room and Fortunato would be called to deal with the situation, seeing as she happened to be the girlfriend of a Raven Hand. He wouldn’t want any bad blood between us or suspicion raised about why Jacinta had reacted the way she did to a harmless glass of whisky.”
“Then why use yourselves? Why not use some lesser-known Raven Hands?” I ask.
“Because I would never send another Raven Hand to do my dirty work.” There’s anger behind his words, as if I’ve insulted him by even insinuating this.
“You did with Ed,” I point out.
“Ed and I were equals. He was my Blood Brother. And he was integral to the plan, as was Jupiter.” Glancing around the room, he tenses his jaw. “What I’m about to tell you has to stay here. I wouldn’t tell you at all if I thought I could withhold it, but again, I owe you this—the truth, all of it. I just have to hope you honour these secrets, not out of consideration for me but for what you’ll do to these people if you tell the world what they can do.”
Swallowing hard, I nod. I would never want the world to know I see the dead, that my brother could see the future. We would be ridiculed, disbelieved, taunted at the very least—or at worst, hunted down, rounded up, deemed a menace to society, or experimented on until there was nothing left of us.
“We had much bigger things in mind than trying to catch Fortunato out at drugging his customers. We figured if we could track him at all times, we could assassinate him.”
“How were you going to get a tracker on him?” I ask.
A smile creeps into the corners of Valdemar’s mouth. “Jupiter can track people—anywhere, anytime. That is his gift.”
“How?” But then it hits me when I recall my first meeting with Jupiter and Valdemar’s subsequent reaction.
“Once he’s touched a person, he knows exactly where they are at any given time. One touch,” Valdemar confirms.
Shit. I see now why Valdemar doesn’t want me to publish this. I can’t imagine the outcry if the general public knew that someone was walking the city who could track anyone just by touching them. No wonder Valdemar had been so insistent that I didn’t let Jupiter touch me. But why would he care about my privacy? Surely it would be to his advantage to have his second-in-command know my whereabouts?
“So, you guys faked the reaction to the drug to lure Fortunato into the room so Jupiter could touch him. But it didn’t work out?”
“No. Fortunato was already there along with Dr Tem-Pest, but they weren’t interested in Jacinta. They had their sights set on Ed.”
A freezing fog fills my lungs.
“They knew he was a Raven Hand,” I guess. The tattoo on his left hand would have been a giveaway. “They knew you were there to foil their little experiment.” I’m surprised there isn’t a mist curling from my lips as I speak, the coldness having wrapped itself around my chest cavity.
“And to this day, I don’t know how. Maybe they’d been watching Ed. Maybe they’d known all along what we were planning. Who knows, but either way, they were waiting for us in a good old-fashioned ambush.”
Stalling, Valdemar blinks and pushes back in his chair as if he’s trying to get away from what happened next.
“Do you know what Adolphe Fortunato does to people who cross him?” he asks.
“Not specifically. But I’ve never looked into him. Like you pointed out, he’s not a man to tangle with.”
