He groans. “I know, I know. I was scrambling to cover, to try and explain. I didn’t know what to say! It seemed better than the truth. Close enough to it that he would believe me, but far enough from it that he wouldn’t know everything.”
I sigh and rub at my brow. “How many times has this happened before?”
“Never!” Brennan insists.
When I look skeptical, he swears, “I promise, Jude. I’m always careful. Aaron’s different.”
The dreamy look in his eyes tells me he’s got it for Aaron,bad.
“Look, whatever you tell Arla, just leave Aaron out of it, okay?” His voice is urgent, laced with concern.
“Why?” I ask him. “Aaron is innocent in this. It’s not like she’d do anything to him.”
Brennan laughs, and it’s short and sharp like gunfire. “You understand even less than I thought if you believe that.” He sets his glass on a nearby table. “You know, when I first met her a couple of years ago, all she could do was make it rain or turn the faucet on with a look, push cups off the table with a thought, bend a spoon. We were so alike then,” Brennan says, remembering. “Still figuring our magic out. But I didn’t know it then. I thought she wasbetter than me because she could do more than I could. I thought she was a goddess. I didn’t just admire her.” He leans toward me. “I worshipped her. She made me believe she had something I didn’t, something she could share. She promised me this whole way of life.”
“And?” I ask him.
He sits back, spine stiff. “You’re not hearing me. Do you remember the night in the park? That first invitation we left for you… how it caught fire?”
I rub my palms together. “Of course. How could I forget? I was still holding it when it burst into flame.”
He grins knowingly. “That was the first time I ever saw Arla magic fire.”
My neurons sizzle inside my skull, trying desperately to get his message across.
“Do you understand me now?” Brennan says, clasping his hands together. “It wasn’t her fire… It wasyours.”
I shake my head, confounded. “What?”
“The only power Arla ever had before coming to Seattle was with water.”
“A water diviner,” I whisper, recalling the title she used for it in her penthouse.
Brennan nods. “Exactly. She told me that she used to go dowsing with her mother as a girl. Then her father figured out she could locate oil too. He started using her to find crude deposits and collected mineral rights. She made him a wealthy man. That’s where the money came from to buy the club.”
I sit back, letting this sink in. Growing up with the opposite—a parent who wanted to repress the power in me rather than exploit it—I can’t really imagine what that must have felt like. But I know the hot stare of a man who looks right through you and sees only what he wants. I know the pain of paternal betrayal.
Brennan goes on. “Crude oil, as it turns out, has very little water in it, sometimes less than one percent. So, her affinity for water is beyond exceptional, of that I’m certain. But the rest…”He stares past me. “I looked him up, you know—her father. Not at first, of course. I believed everything she told me in the beginning. But over the last several months, as things stopped adding up, I became suspicious of some of those early stories. And then you came. She’s different about you, was even before you showed up. I thought maybe she was just enamored with her new toy, but she’s keeping too many secrets. Do you know why she had you meet us under that bridge?”
I shake my head.
“Bat guano,” he tells me. “I saw her collecting it before you arrived. We were supposed to be watching for you. She didn’t know I was watching her instead.” He grinds his jaw. “The night we were at the Space Needle, she took Twig outside the city on a private errand. I only found out because Cadence told me. She left Rock to babysit the psychic, keep her doped up and occupied in the hopes that Cadence wouldn’t detect anything. But Cadence being Cadence kept ‘smelling purple,’ and later, I found bittersweet in Arla’s room. It’s a climbing nightshade with purple flowers, every part toxic to ingest. Why would she need that?”
I see the candle I found in my grandmother’s fireplace, half-burnt and wrapped in goldenrod, scrawled with a word I couldn’t fully make out and rubbed with blood, the dead snake tucked inside.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. But I can picture Rock holding that shovel in the cemetery, the bag of his aunt’s cremains. I think about telling Brennan, but I don’t want to fuel his paranoia.
Brennan tugs his phone out of a pocket and types something into it, before turning the screen toward me. “There,” he says, definitive. “See for yourself.”
Printed across the screen in bold letters is the headline—Colorado Oil Baron Alcott Wells Dead by Accidental Drowning.
My eyes meet Brennan’s over the phone. “Is that…”
“Her dad. She said they were estranged. But he was found in a fountain on his own property,” he tells me. “It was only three feet deep.”
I swallow, a sick knot of alarm spreading through my stomach.
“Survived by one daughter—Arla T. Wells,” Brennan reads. “Poor bastard.”
