Something Wicked (8 page)

“It’s been almost twenty years.” Ben looked from her to me and back, and his dark eyes seemed almost too sharp for comfort. “I’m just wondering why it’s anybody’s business what happened.”

That was a good point. So why did I get the feeling he was hiding something?

Maggi said, “Let me tell you a bedtime story.”

By the time we’d had our dessert—baklava—Ben knew as much about the Grail Keepers as I did. But he was still resisting the idea of secret societies of evil men. Especially the idea that he and Victor had any connection to one of them.

Interestingly, when he argued, Ben Fisher completely forgot to be reticent. He was dogged. “So Ms. Sanger—”

“Stuart,” I corrected.

“Call me Maggi,” she insisted.

“These Grail Keepers may or may not be real. But even if the mythology were valid—” He tapped the table with three fingers, in case his intense gaze and shifting weight wasn’t emphasis enough. “It doesn’t mean there’s also some group of powerful people—”

“Men,” Maggi corrected firmly. “Powerful
men.
”

“Men, then, who are running the world without any of us ever catching on. People aren’t that easy to control, and secrets have a way of leaking out. Yours is a contained mythology. You understand?”

I really, really didn’t. Maggi seemed to, and nodded, but Ben’s the one who explained it.

“Mothers passing on knowledge to their daughters, that kind of secret can be kept because you aren’t trying to control anybody else. You aren’t trying to direct other fates or lives. So it’s really nobody else’s business. Even if the secret got out, immediate interest to unaffected parties may not be high.”

Now
I thought I got it. “So if someone else found out, they’d go, ‘Huh, nice story,’” I said. “They wouldn’t go, ‘What the hell do you mean?’ because they aren’t involved.”

“Exactly. And—”

I interrupted because, really, waiting for him to take a breath didn’t seem to work. “But what about increasing feminine power a hundredfold?”

Ben considered that. He had a really animated face when he debated things, his lips pressing or relaxing, his eyebrows rising or his eyes narrowing as different thoughts shot through his mind. He had a brain I was only beginning to get the enormity of. “I assumed we were talking personal power, not dominating power. Am I wrong?”

And like that. Lost me again.

“You’re not wrong,” said Maggi. “And bless you for knowing the difference.”

“But
I
don’t know the difference.” I sounded sulky. But I couldn’t do more damage to my image than I had with the question about his parents’ murder, so why not be clear about it?

“Personal power means power over oneself,” explained Maggi. Okay, like magic, changing the world by changing one’s perceptions. That I got.

“But some believe that one person’s gain must by definition be another’s loss,” added Ben. “You see this all the time when a successful person becomes an object of ridicule or envy despite the fact that his or her success doesn’t come from us, in no way hurts us, or may even help us. That’s a dominator belief, that there’s a limited amount of power out there and one person’s advancement is by default another person’s deficit. Understand?”

I nodded. Slowly.

“Dominator power is power over other people. But personal power accepts that one person’s gain isn’t necessarily anybody else’s loss. If that’s what the Grail Keepers are about, more power to you.” He smiled a lopsided smile. “So to speak.”

“So you can believe in the Grail Keepers—or at least not actively disbelieve,” Maggi clarified, “because our secrets don’t limit people. But a society of powerful men running the world…”

“Especially a hereditary society like you described,” he agreed. “Wielding power over others,
dominating.
It’s not in human nature to be perpetually dominated. So, yeah. That would be one hell of a tough secret to keep.”

Drawing a breath, he looked sternly at both me and Maggi. As stern as he could look, with those long, loopy curls. “Especially from one’s own family.”

“But what else makes sense?” I insisted. “Why would Victor steal our Hekate Cup unless he believes it is worth killing over? And why would he believe it has power unless he’s part of this society?”

“No.” Ben shook his head several times. “No. Because for him to be part of this group, our dad would have to have been part of this group. By blood. Right?”

He asked Maggi that. Then again, she knew more about this group than I did.

As soon as she nodded, Ben kept going. “Am I supposed to believe that after murdering our parents, these people sought Vic out to bring him back into the fold? Or that Vic knew about this even as a kid? That he’s kept this secret all these years?”

“Because Victor’s big on the sharing,” I challenged.

“I keep telling you, I’m not saying he’s a good guy! But he’s my brother. My responsibility. My
twin.
How could he know something this huge and keep it from me?”

Maggi and I exchanged a quiet glance. She said, without conviction, “You may be right.”

“This is a secret that, according to you, killed my parents and your sister. And that’s not something that can be kept quiet indefinitely.”

So…that was that, right?

Ben’s scowl softened. “Hey, maybe this is an indication that Victor
didn’t
kill your sister. If there really is a murderous secret society after goddess cups, by not being part of this society, Victor’s less of a suspect, right?”

“Except for the him-trying-to-kill-me part,” I noted, annoyed. “And
taking our cup.
”

“You didn’t initially say he took a cup. You said he took ‘something.’ It was only later that you noticed the cup missing.” Bastard.

“And the him-trying-to-kill-me part?”

Ben’s gaze held mine, almost pleading. “You’re
sure
it was him?”

“Yeah.” But my annoyance faded. I’d lost my sister, but at least I hadn’t lost my faith in her.

“Because the accuracy of eyewitness recall is notoriously flawed,” Ben insisted. I was starting to notice a pattern with him. Get him upset, and he retreated into data. “It can be affected by numerous factors, including outdated police procedures.”

“Ben,” I said.

“In fact, recent studies show that the mood of the eyewitness alone can seriously—”

“Ben.”
I reached across the table and covered his hands—which were tearing at a napkin—with my good hand. “It was either him, or you.
And it wasn’t you.
”

He dropped his gaze, scowling. “I want it to be a mistake.”

“I know.”

“I knew he had problems. I was even afraid he might be dangerous. But your sister…it just doesn’t make sense.”

Maggi said, “Especially if he’s not Comitatus.”

Ben blanched. His gaze flew to her. “What?”

“Comitatus,” she repeated. “That’s the secret society trying to destroy the goddess grails. Actually, they’ve recently split, so there are two groups using that name…not important.”

“Why?” I asked, and waved away Maggi’s attempt to answer about the split. “No, I mean Ben. Why are you looking like that?”

“I’ve got to go.” He pushed his chair back.

“You recognize the name,” guessed Professor Maggi. Well,
duh.

“I’ve got to check this myself.” He stood, dug out his wallet, dropped a twenty on the table. “I’ll get back to you.”

“I’m leaving town in a few hours.” Maggi caught Ben’s arm before he could leave. “Listen to me. See if you can take Kate into your brother’s house, maybe his office. Safely, of course. Sometimes I can sense when a goddess grail is nearby—since this one’s hers, I bet Katie will have the best chance of finding it. Will you at least do that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t—” He stopped himself and took a deep, troubled breath. “I’ll try to help. But I have to go now, do you understand? I have to leave. Now.”

Maggi let go of his arm.

Ben met my gaze once more, then left the restaurant.

“What do you think that was about?” asked Maggi. But beyond him recognizing the name, I couldn’t have guessed.

I mean, I
really
couldn’t have guessed. I went with her and her bodyguard, Sofie, to the train station—Maggi wasn’t flying in her third term—and saw them off to New York. I went home. I went to work. Still feeling helpless, I began to take inventory of Diana’s—my—magic cabinet. One night passed. Then another.

Then Ben Fisher called.

“Is your passport current?” he asked, his voice strained.

What?
“I don’t have a passport.”

“Then you should probably get one. I’ll meet you in Athens.”

This time I said it. “
What?
Ben, you’re not making sense. I’ve never even been to Canada. I have a job. Why would I want to go to Athens?”

“The word Comitatus,” he explained.

“Yeah. You recognized it because…?”

“Because my brother has used it as his computer password for years. He didn’t know I knew, but…anyway, I hacked into his system.”

“You can do that?” Wow.

“And he really is involved with it. All of it. The Comitatus. Your…cup. And now he’s gone to Athens.”

Something about Ben’s voice, a waver of concern, said that this was about more than just the secret society. Something was wrong.

I braced myself. “Uh-huh…?”

“Kate, I think my brother might go after your cousin Eleni next.”

I
can tell you exactly when I stopped thinking of Victor, however briefly, every single time I saw Ben Fisher.

It was when Ben met me at the Athens airport.

I’ve sometimes wished I was one of those women who speaks three languages and regularly jets off to exotic places. I wasn’t.

I’m Greek on my mother’s side, but it’s not like she spoke the language, and YaYa and Papou only used it for secrets. Now we were in our approach to the Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport, which I’ll just call the Athens airport because it really
was
all Greek to me.

I stared out my thick airplane window at a sprawling white, distant city beside an impossibly blue sea, sunlight spilling across me despite my watch saying it was the middle of the night. We must have flown into morning.

I was in Greece!

And since I apparently have a hard time sleeping on airplanes, what with all the usual worries about hijackers and crash landings, I was exhausted.

Once we touched down and taxied to a really modern terminal, I simply followed the other passengers—and tried not to worry about all the soldiers standing guard with machine guns. First came baggage claim. Despite the big purple bow I’d tied onto my red suitcase, at Nonna’s suggestion, I missed it the first time it went around the luggage carousel and had to wait, worried that someone else would take it, for it to circle back.

Then came customs, and more guards with machine guns. I got into the blue line marked EU, because it was moving fastest, but a nice lady noticed my United States passport and directed me to the green line. Apparently EU was only for the Europeans.

The first stamp in my brand-new passport was in Greek.

Finally I escaped into the arrivals area, with people shouting in all kinds of different languages, and I thought,
What the hell am I
doing
here?

Which is when someone called, “Katie! Kate Trillo!”

I turned, and Ben was pushing through the crowd to reach me, and I could have hugged him. I
wanted
to.

Except for the looked-like-my-sister’s-murderer thing. Even that didn’t stop the twinge of magical recognition between us before he looked away. “Here, let me take that.”

I was glad to let him have custody of my suitcase. And me. Traveling with one hand in a cast is a bitch, and at least he seemed to know where he was going.

He said, “I’ve checked a lot of the major hotels, starting with the kind Vic’s most likely to frequent, but so far no go.”

“That took you a week?” I asked.

“Do you know how many hotels there are in Athens?”

I considered the huge sprawl of city that I’d seen from the air. “Good point.”

The Athens airport had to be the shiniest airport I’d ever seen, with clean white floors, white walls, white ceilings, high windows, and lots of lights. Our way out was lined with bright shops and Internet kiosks. Not exactly what I’d expected from listening to YaYa’s stories of the old country.

“They built a new airport for the Olympics,” Ben explained, noticing my distraction. Then, because he was Ben, he had to continue. “They’ve got a new metro system, too, which is incredible—marble floors and walls, escalators, glass displays of museum pieces. But it’s taking a lot longer to finish than they’d hoped. You see, every time they dig, they find urns or graves or temples and have to call in the archaeologists.”

He’d retreated into lecture mode. Did
I
make him nervous?

Anyway, it was mind-boggling, this melding of the supermodern and the superancient. Also mind-boggling? The weather. I’d worn a coat and scarf and mittens to O’Hare when I left…was it only yesterday? The coat was still draped across my bad arm, partly so nobody saw me as weak. But when sliding doors spilled us out into the springlike sunshine, I could tell I wouldn’t need it.

Definitely
not the mittens and the scarf.

We stood in line for a taxi, and I scanned the crowd. There were a lot more dark-haired, dark-eyed, olive-skinned men around here than I was used to, and I hang around Little Italy. Victor would blend in way too well for comfort. I stood closer to Ben. “Have you seen my cousin?”

“You asked me not to approach her,” Ben reminded me.

I’d only spoken to Eleni Pappas once, over the phone, to let her know I was coming and beg her to be careful. Luckily, she spoke okay English. “I couldn’t think of any way to describe you without describing Victor. I didn’t want her thinking he’s safe.”

“I’ve seen her,” Ben admitted. “I’ve been keeping an eye on her when she goes to work and back. I haven’t seen Vic.”

“But he’s here all the same, isn’t he?” I asked, looking up into the cloudless blue sky.
I could sense it.

“Yeah,” agreed Ben, and then it was our turn for a cab. It smelled of cigarettes. “Yeah, I can feel him.”

He told the cab driver to take us to an address in “the Plaka,” and for most of the very long drive into central Athens, I stared out the window, still amazed that I was here, wondering what the hell Victor Fisher would want with my cousin.

A cousin I’d never even met.

I knew Eleni Pappas was a few years older than Diana. Than Diana had been, I mean. The families kept in touch with Christmas cards for the holidays and sympathy cards whenever someone died. Sometimes we sent pictures. But that was about it.

And now Victor was after her?

“Tell me again what you found on his computer,” I said, and was startled to see how closely Ben had been watching me with his dark, intense eyes. “Please.”

“Not enough,” he said, but looked quickly away, like maybe he was lying. “Nothing that we could take to the police, even if I’d found the information legally, which I didn’t. He’d recently made a list of all your and Diana’s relatives in general, and collected a bunch of information about Eleni in particular—her address, her job, a handful of pictures from her driver’s license and college records.”

“Those are available for download?”

“Not all of them. But I’m not the only one who can hack into a computer.”

Oh.

“Maybe I overreacted,” Ben said, though the fist he tapped against the cab window didn’t agree. “I hope so. But him researching her, coupled with the fact that he’d just flown to Athens himself, and…”

And the fact that he’d already murdered Diana?

But I didn’t expect him to say that part. Neither of us had forgotten, would ever forget, that part.

“No, it’s worth coming,” I agreed. “I don’t know exactly what we can do, but we had to do something.”

“Telling her in person will help. Showing her pictures of Vic. Maybe convincing her to get some protection.” Ben was doing that thing with his eyes again, that thing where he focuses on nothing, on something in his head. “If we can figure out what Vic’s really after, that would sure help.”

The farther we drove into Athens proper, the worse the traffic got. At times it snarled up completely, and the rest of the time we went really, really fast, as if to make up for the gridlock. All the chaos and congestion and concrete weren’t exactly what I’d imagined Greece to be. Every once in a while we would pass an ancient church, or a vacant lot full of white-columned ruins—but they were crowded on either side by apartments or shops, and the blue sky was dulled with smog. Anyway, it was hard to sightsee with all the lane changes and sudden turns, with other cars going against traffic and with scooters and motorcycles zipping along between lanes and darting in and out of traffic and even onto the sidewalk.

“I’m glad I’m not driving,” I gasped.

Our driver, who’d introduced himself as Panos, let out a bark of laughter but said nothing. The string of blue and white worry beads on his rearview mirror swayed dramatically as the cab hurled itself across lanes to avoid stopped vehicles in front of us.

“Me, too.” Ben shook his head, and I thought he looked tired even without the transatlantic flight. Something seemed different about him. Not Victor-different, but…something. “I don’t know what it is about me and cars lately, but I’ve had more close calls in the last week…”

The curse,
I thought.

“Close calls like back home,” I murmured. Something niggled in the back of my jet-lagged mind. Something I was supposed to do. “You were taking the El a lot.”

“Even as a pedestrian I’m doing pretty badly, here,” Ben admitted, watching me closely. “Just yester—”

But he broke off.

I looked, just in time to see a big, black dog standing on the street in front of us, staring at us with yellow eyes.
Like a dare.

Panos braked and yanked the wheel at the same time. A sudden impact accompanied the boom of us clipping another vehicle. We bounced off of that into an out-of-control spin.

Panos swore, fighting the wheel. Strange storefronts whirled by my window. Gravity pushed me hard into Ben as the whole world of high buildings and smoggy sky and utility wires swooped around once, twice—

The car lurched as we jumped a curb. People screamed.

“One, two, three,” I whispered through my teeth, and visualized a bubble of safe blue light, like a force field, around us.
“Protected be.”

And suddenly we stopped. Horns blared from the street. People shouted from the sidewalk.

“My God,” muttered Ben, yanking his door open.

I struggled one-handed with my seat belt, which felt like it was cutting me in half.
No….

Panos continued to swear—at least I assumed that’s what he was shouting, to judge by his gestures and how hard he punched the wheel. If he was hurt, it wasn’t his lungs.

No, no, no.
My sense of panic had less to do with the damned seat belt, and my damned cast hand, and more to do with what I’d forgotten. But the belt wasn’t helping. “Ben!”

He glanced back, then quickly leaned through the open door and across the backseat to unlock my belt.

“Nobody seems to be hurt,” he assured me, helping me out of the cab. His hands felt solid on my shoulders.

Not this time. “But where’s the dog?”

“Was that thing huge, or what?” Ben also looked around. No dog. “I would have swerved to avoid it, too.”

But I wasn’t thinking of the size of the black dog versus the size of the cab, or the way it had stared at us as if laying down a challenge.

I was remembering all the howling that had been bothering me for almost a month, back in Chicago.

I was remembering that dogs were one of Hekate’s totem animals. Especially black dogs.

And I was remembering that I hadn’t done my protection spell for me and Ben the night before. I’d flown through the night, remember?

The curse still haunted me, haunted Ben. It’s not like what I’d done with Nonna could fix it permanently.

A pilgrimage,
Nonna had said.
You must find Her source. Where She is most remembered. Where She was once worshipped….

And look where I’d found myself. Freaking
Greece.

On a pilgrimage without even knowing it.

That made me shiver—the shiver that goes with something happening beyond my normal perception. Like somehow Victor and Hekate had worked together to get me here. I didn’t like being manipulated. Not by either of them. Not by anyone.

Panos was in a screaming match with the driver of the car we’d clipped, all in Greek. One of his many gestures was to point toward the road where the dog had stood, then to throw his hands in the air.

For a moment, I considered hailing a cab and returning to the airport, returning to the United States of America. Katie Trillo was
nobody’s
pawn.

Except…

I looked over at Ben, who had unloaded my suitcase from the trunk of our wrecked taxi and collected my coat without me even asking. He was an innocent in all this, despite his scowl. So was Eleni. Victor was the one who’d dragged them both into it. And through my curses and my genes, I’d helped.

I sure had no faith that Victor would do anything to see anyone out the other side.

So I guess it was up to me.