There’d always been something guarded about Took. Years with the Biters had worn down his suspicion of the unbreathing, but unlike Lawrence, he never forgot that his friends and coworkers were predators. Even with Madoc, in those moments when Madoc could have sworn that Took had been about to give in to the tension between them, there’d always been something held back. A year spent being imprisoned and tortured hadn’t made him any easier to read. There were hints of that old, unguarded charm that lit his handsome face and Madoc treasured, but only sometimes, and it faded quickly.
So the flicker of emotion that passed over Took’s face like a shadow could have been relief or disappointment. Even if Madoc had wanted to take the chance that it was the latter, it was gone before he had a chance.
He left the water to run and gestured for Madoc to follow him through the house.
“THE MODERNfascination with the lives of witty nobodies will prove the first grains of grave dirt on my head,” Madoc grumbled as Took slouched at his desk and flicked through a dozen thumbnails of Waring’s face. “It is senseless.”
Took absently combed his wet hair back from his face with one hand. Water trickled down his neck and into his collar, and Madoc licked the imagined taste off his lips and looked away.
“Says the man with a dog-eared first copy ofThe Letters of Pliny the Youngerin his office,” Took said.
“He was hardly a nobody,” Madoc countered. “Nor did he clown for paramilitaries in a search for fame.”
Took clicked his tongue behind his teeth but didn’t argue. He pulled up two videos and nested them on the screen next to each other.
“Look,” he said as pointed to one and sketched an area just behind Waring’s shoulder. It showed a stack of cardboard boxes with bright green lettering over the front. “Those are from Appleton.”
Madoc reached over Took’s shoulder and enlarged the image with a flick of finger and thumb. Habit and a little worm of malice made him settle his weight on Took’s shoulder as he studied the screen. If he had to ache, then he saw no reason to make it too easy on Took.
“Apple and Pear Aphr….” Madoc paused and raised his eyebrow skeptically. “Aphrodisiactea?”
“Alchemy has experienced a recent revival,” Took said in the learned-by-rote cadence that meant it was a quote from some journal or website. “Particularly in areas of rural deprivation, which Appleton qualifies for by a number of markers.” He paused, and his voice dropped into a drawl as he flicked the video off the screen. “For most of these people, the only magic they ever see are fangs in the night and dead children on the news.”
Madoc grimaced at the turn of phrase, but he couldn’t argue. The Anakim had laws and morals, laid out in the Book of Enoch and evolved in the thousands of years since. Outside of war, most would never tap an unwilling throat or pitch a weighted corpse into the shallows so as not to alarm the rest of the herd. But, like any group, they had their outliers—the mad, the bad, and the lonely—and for a rogue, the easiest prey were the weakest in society.
“They claim that God is on their side,” he pointed out. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Divine intervention tends to be assumed, not witnessed,” Took pointed out. “When someone does survive within the event radius, they rarely say what people want to hear. The sort of people we’re talking about most likely have set ideas about divinity, based on the teachings of their denomination. It doesn’t satisfy to hear that the human mind, however pious, tends to get the god stuff wrong 80 percent of the time. So they turn to ‘breathing’ magic, like alchemy and astrology—disciplines that don’t need to invoke the ‘other,’ that belong to them.”
“And how is it connected to your case?”
“Apples and Appleton,” Took said. “See the connection?”
“That’s a reach.”
Took snorted and leaned back in the seat as he hit Play on the other video. “Not really. The orchards are the town’s major agricultural export. Around here, if it has apples on it or in it, then it probably has something to do with Appleton. Like the company that makes these teas, a start-up cottage industry run out of Bernice Franklin’s kitchen.”
That was a lead solid enough for Madoc to tug. “Annabelle’s mother?”
“Aunt,” Took admitted. The lead finally settled into something solid enough for Madoc to catch with his fingertips. “But the fact that alchemy and anti-Anakim feelings tend to share a slice of the Venn diagram caught my attention. Then I found her.”
He hit Play on the screen. The still image of Waring turned fluid and alive as his mouth tilted into a smile around a just-finished sentence. Bony, teenage-boy hands finished a gesture, dropped to the table, and cupped a mug of tea.
“I don’t think tea is going to help me with football,” he said as he toasted the camera. “But it tastes good. Thanks, Worm!”
Took hit Pause.
“Her?”
“Worm.”
“Nice.”
“Worm_in_the_Apple,” Took said as he scrolled down to the comments. “She only follows Waring, and she’s based in Appleton. Her aunt makes that tea she sent Waring.”
“Annabelle,” Madoc said.
“I checked her out to see if her family have Hunter connections,” Took said as he pushed back from the desk. “They don’t, but they go to a Proverbial church, so they’ve probably tithed for the cause.”
