"The Roma have traveled many lands," he said, voice lowering as if he was about to launch into a tale. "And given our peculiar abilities, we're drawn to those who exist outside of the norm, like we do. The Jury family and the Baudelaire family are two such examples. Elite witches who exist just outside of the norm, but still contribute to the structure of their respective countries. The Dukes of Darkness carry more weight in England than Parliament. The Baudelaires instigated the French Revolution."

  Tessa already didn't like where this was going.

  "As Roma legend has it, at some point, the Jurys and the Baudelaires joined together with one purpose. Building the ultimate weapon."

  Pops inserted a pregnant pause, the type Gisele lived for, and Tessa was about ready to kick him when he started up again.

  "According to legend, they succeeded. There was only one problem. They only managed to make one, and no matter how hard they tried, a second one could not be fashioned. Since they couldn't agree on who should possess it, they broke it into two pieces, and each half was hidden someplace they were certain no one would ever find it."

  Another puzzle piece fell into place in Tessa's mind.

  "This is a dark tale to be sure," Pops went on, tone dropping another octave. "For as it is told, they each chose their least favored son for the job of hiding it, sent him to the other family, and after the Baudelaire son had hidden the Jury portion, the Jurys killed him; likewise with the Baudelaires."

  "Witches," Tessa muttered.

  "It was the only way to maintain the balance of power," Pops said.

  "What did the artifact do?"

  "No one knows," Pops shrugged. "It's called the Staff of Dunamis."

  "Meaning?" Tessa asked.

  "The Staff of Power, or ability depending on who you pick to translate it."

  "Definitely an artifact worth stealing," Tessa said, failing to hide her glee.

  "Definitely," Pops agreed.

  "You two are a little scary together," Julian broke in.

  There was more she needed from Pops. Much more. But there was no sense in upsetting him until she had convinced the other player in her drama.

  "Can I get out of the box now?" Julian asked.

  "He never did like tight spaces," Pops said confidentially. "Not after—"

  "Pops!" Julian snapped.

  "Not after what?" Tessa inquired.

  "I'm leaving," Julian said as he popped open the door and stepped out into the more natural light of the basement.

  Tessa gave into a strange impulse and leaned over to kiss Pops on the cheek.

  "Thanks," she said.

  She left just as quickly as Julian had, but not before she saw the red color flood Pops's face.

  She jogged quickly up the stairs, trying not to smile. She liked Pops; she really did.

  "What now?" Julian asked when she joined him outside.

  "Solo mission," she replied with a smile.

  "Are you ever going to explain what you figured out?" he demanded.

  "Tonight," she said. "And if you're lucky, Gisele will read one of the really naughty parts."

  "If I'm really lucky, you'll act it out," he said, leering suggestively.

  She laughed at him, just as he wanted, kissed him quickly, and left. She needed to pass off Ian's artifact to Curtis. She didn't have time for Ian today. She had much, much bigger fish to fry.

  There was a chance Mrs. Jury would say no. But there was a chance she would say yes. Tessa would risk it either way.

  She had been pacing Mrs. Jury's parlor for over an hour now because Mrs. Jury wasn't home, but Della had opened the door anyway and let her in. Della had talked to Tessa for quite a while before curling up on the couch and falling asleep, and that was when Tessa had started to pace.

  She didn't want to waste any time waiting, but she needed Mrs. Jury. No one else would make any sense. After all, the patron, of the arts, wasn't stupid.

  The pain was steadily increasing, mostly because she wasn't doing anything, not really. She also hadn't sent out a report to the patron last night, and she had mentally kicked Virgil's corpse a few times.

  She turned around and paced past Della once more. And again, and again.

  She wished she had whiskey. She wished she had Julian. She wished Mrs. Jury would get the hell home so this torture would end.

  "You're wearing a hole in the carpet, Ms. Graves."

  "Mrs. Jury!" Tessa exclaimed.

  "I rather think I know my own title," Mrs. Jury stated. "Although I am considering getting rid of it."

  That statement threw Tessa for a moment, and she stared at Mrs. Jury in confusion.

  "By remarrying," Mrs. Jury explained.

  "Why?" Tessa asked, investigator mind always curious.

  "I don't think that's any of your concern," Mrs. Jury replied icily.

  "You brought it up," Tessa pointed out.

  "So I did. I find myself caught in a moment of indecision," Mrs. Jury admitted.

  "In my experience, although things are a little different for you," Tessa said wryly, "life's too short to waste on indecision."

  "I think that is true for everyone," Mrs. Jury said softly. "Sit," she added. "Before you do the carpet permanent damage. I'll ring for tea, and you can tell me why you've come. Again."

  Tessa sat and studied Mrs. Jury, investigator mind taking note of all the little nuances.

  "What do you see?" Mrs. Jury suddenly asked.

  "I don't…" Tessa stuttered.

  "Humor me."

  "But what if it doesn't?" Tessa snorted.

  "I'll endeavor not to take offense."

  Tessa shrugged and said, "I see a woman who is carrying a lot of responsibilities. You don't get enough sleep or whatever it is that witches need not to have dark circles under their eyes. You adore Della because you keep watching her instead of me, and every time you switch your gaze to her, your face softens, but for some reason that makes you feel guilt. You like gardening, but you don't want anyone to know."

  "What makes you think that?" Mrs. Jury interrupted.

  "Your fingernails are long and very nicely shaped. Very clean too. Too clean. No one's fingernails are as clean as yours. So either you're a compulsive hand washer, which you don't strike me as; or you're going out of your way to keep your hands clean. And there simply aren't very many hobbies you might have that would make your hands dirty."

  "But how did you arrive at gardening?"

  "The pictures on your walls. Pressed plants with botanical drawings and notes. Only someone really into plants would have that as their decoration."

  "You're not wrong," Mrs. Jury said stiffly.

  Tessa grinned ever so slightly. Of course she wasn't wrong. She was never wrong.

  Just then a maid carried in a tray of tea, bobbed a curtsy, put down the tray, and left.

  "Suppose you tell me why you're here," Mrs. Jury said as she poured the tea.

  "I need some bait."

  "And I am this bait because?"

  "You're the not the bait per se. You're the location of the bait."

  After saying this, Tessa took a sip of her tea so that Mrs. Jury wouldn't be offended, and then she put it to the side. Her stomach was too tight to drink anything other than whiskey right now.

  "Because?" Mrs. Jury pressed.

  "Because you've suddenly come into possession of the Staff of Dunamis."

  "I have, have I? That would be quite a feat. Phillip searched for our half of the artifact for nearly three hundred years. Unsuccessfully, I might add."

  "He didn't have me working for him," Tessa stated.

  "I would be inclined to mock your hubris, Ms. Graves, but I'm not sure that it is. How did I get ahold of the Baudelaire half?"

  "Me," Tessa said. "Easy."

  "The pieces of the artifact were hidden over six hundred years ago. There are no clues."

  "There's always a clue," Tessa retorted. "Not the point though because I don't actually have the artifact, and I would never look for it anyway."

  She hoped. She could hardly say what she had done for the patron and Virgil over the years. She could have located a dozen artifacts and never known the difference.

  "Anyway, you have the artifact, but you didn't know what it did, so you took it to an artifact dealer to have it appraised."

  "Mr. Sydney LaRoche, I assume?" Mrs. Jury murmured.

  Tessa wasn't quick enough to hide her surprise.

  "I am the head of the witches' council," Mrs. Jury said with a small amount of humor. "It would behoove me to know the main dealer of artifacts within the Hidden. Everyone who's anyone has gotten something from Mr. LaRoche at some point or another."

  "If everyone knows…" Tessa trailed off.

  "How is he still in business?" Mrs. Jury asked.

  "Yes!"

  "The world is a strange place, Ms. Graves. Laws are only in place so that they can be enforced if someone wants them enforced. Otherwise, they remain dormant. Sometimes for years."

  "I hate politics," Tessa muttered.

  "Anyone with half a mind and half a soul hates politics," Mrs. Jury sighed.

  "And you?"

  "I utterly loathe it, but I feel I must work to undo some of the damage my husband did while he was alive."

  Tessa knew exactly how that felt, and she understood the weight it placed on a person.

  "It's not really our responsibility," she said softly. "We didn't commit the wrong."

  "That is true, but what is the use of our abilities if we don't attempt to make things better?" Mrs. Jury replied.

  Tessa could hardly ask for a better lead-in.

  "If the patron thinks you have the Staff of Dunamis, he will send someone after it," Tessa said.

  "But how does that help you?" Mrs. Jury replied.

  "Because that someone will lead us right back to his hole."

  "Assumptive."

  It really wasn't. Tessa's mind had already looked at it from several angles. She knew he would send the imp. That was how he stole everything. So all she needed was another imp; one that worked for her. And that was only part of her plan. Her plan had many parts. Too many maybe, but right now, everything seemed just right.

  "I will allow you to do this," Mrs. Jury said before Tessa could launch into any of her decided upon arguments. "However, I would ask something in return."

  Tessa had expected nothing less.

  "What?" she asked.

  "I'm not ready to ask it yet," Mrs. Jury replied.

  "I wouldn't wait too long," Tessa advised.

  "I suppose not," Mrs. Jury murmured. "You do look rather the worse for wear. And that's because of the compulsion?"

  "The body magic that's enforcing the compulsion," Tessa admitted.

  She didn't know a lot about Mrs. Jury, and she really didn't like the woman, but somehow she knew that she was trustworthy. At least in this instance.

  "That must be quite painful," Mrs. Jury stated. "I have been on the receiving end of body magic. It is not a pleasant thing."

  They were both silent for a long moment, and it was the silence of those who have suffered much.

  "Do send me a note when you're ready," Mrs. Jury said, standing to signal the end of their meeting.

  Tessa quickly stood as well, glad that Mrs. Jury had so easily agreed.

  "Thank you," she said earnestly before heading for the door.

  She had only just begun to lay her trap, and she had a lot of things yet to put in place before she could run her teeth through the rabbit's neck.

  Chapter 11

  Tessa could have gone back to Pops right away, but she knew Gisele would be expecting her for dinner so she went home instead. She needed their help to figure out the rest of her plan anyway. Ollie certainly knew more about killing people than she did, and Gisele had a knack for suggesting the oddest, but somehow most effective, options.

  When she opened the back door of the house, Magnus met her almost instantly.

  "Everyone is gathered in the dining room," he said evenly.

  "Th— Good," Tessa stated.

  It was getting more and more difficult to be rude to Magnus, but she had to keep trying. For both of their sakes.

  "May I say that you are looking a bit better today?" Magnus added.

  "You may," Tessa replied with a grin. She winked at him, then moved past him down the hallway.

  "I was just about to call you," Gisele said when Tessa stepped inside the room. "Julian told us that you left him in rather a lurch."

  "I doubt if he said that," Tessa replied.

  Each of them was studying her; Gisele quite openly, and the others with slightly more subterfuge; and Tessa saw varying degrees of relief cross their faces at whatever they saw.

  She sat beside Julian without further comment and started spooning up her soup. She was ridiculously hungry.

  Gisele cleared her throat, and Tessa looked up.

  "Aren't you going to tell us what you figured out, dear?"

  "After supper," Tessa said vaguely.

  She didn't want any distractions. And she was finding the expressions on their faces a little amusing. She wouldn't have been able to note the expressions on their faces a day ago. Or she would have, but she wouldn't have been able to understand them.

  By the time she finished her bowl of soup, they were all still looking at her.

  "Aren't you going to eat?" she asked.

  "I'm really not that hungry," Gisele said carelessly.

  "Eat," Tessa ordered. "I'll go write my report. Come get me when you're ready."

  She stood and feathered her fingers over the back of Julian's neck as she passed him.

  Her mind had already slowed a little, but it was still firing faster than it had in days. The idea of losing it altogether tried to terrify her, but she reminded herself that if she did lose it, she knew the trick to regaining it. Dirt and Julian's kisses.

  And even if that didn't work, she had a plan, and she refused to be scared. Without even knowing it, she had been scared most of her life, but not any more. She was no longer the hunted; she was the hunter.

  She held onto that thought as she entered her office and sat behind her desk. She opened her desk drawer, removed the whiskey waiting for her, and drank half of the bottle. She could immediately tell that Badri had added a little something extra to it, but she was past questioning him. Whatever he had added could only help.

  When her body was as numb as it could be, she put the whiskey away, took a deep breath, pulled out a piece of paper, and started writing.

  She wrote a little vaguely about a job for Mrs. Jury. Chances were pretty good that the patron, of the arts, knew she was lying, so she could hardly tell him about the artifact. She hadn't given him a single piece of useful information thus far, and to give him something useful now would be much too obvious.

  When she had finished the portion about Mrs. Jury, she made up a job that she didn't actually have, but she solved it easily enough, after all, it was only a missing cat.

  Once that was finished, she said that her two new investigators, the ones she had made up previously, had discovered a smuggling ring in the Hidden, but that she had ignored it because it didn't pertain to any of her cases. She didn't mind making such a claim because there were at least a dozen smuggling rings in the Hidden so discovering one more was hardly of any note.

  Then, since she wasn't convinced of Sagena's ability to weed out the bad Magistratus agents, she wrote that the tetrarch had hired her to look into some missing artifacts.

  By the time she finished the report, she was exhausted. She had had to restart it three different times, which was not too bad in general, but trying to keep track of her lies and make up new lies as she went was both painful and draining.

  She had managed though, and that was the point. She didn't need anyone to hold her hand and walk her through it anymore. She had learned to lie. Maybe not well, but she could do it.

  She quickly addressed the report and put it in the box, then she sat back down to write everything of importance in her journal.

  She should have started with her revelations about the patron, but somehow that seemed slightly less important than her moments with Julian. She could recover her plan if the worst happened, but she wasn't so certain of recovering her feeling of well-being when she was with Julian. Or her feeling of happiness when he told her he loved her.

  She didn't want to lose herself again, but more than anything, she didn't want to lose Julian. She wanted to die remembering him, remembering his gentle and talented hands, remembering his voice as he whispered Romani words in her ear and across her skin. She closed her eyes, trying to burn the memory of him into her soul, and then she started writing again.

  When she had finished noting everything she could remember about their time together, she flipped to her Tessa page and wrote about the troll scale and how it seemed to work.

  Part of her mind and most of her body knew that the pain constantly pulsing through her head was quite debilitating, but with the scale against her skin, she didn't care. Nothing, not even the gradual mushing of her brain, was going to stop her now.

  After making one final note about being barefoot on dirt, Tessa moved on to her patron of the arts page and wrote down everything Pops had said, her conversation with Mrs. Jury, and the vague scaffolding of her plan. She had just finished when Julian said, "We're ready."

  Tessa stood and smiled at him.

  "You're being nice to me," Julian said softly. "I'm not sure I like it."

  "You would rather I be mean?" she teased.

  "Not at all," he said as he took her hand and started kissing each of her fingertips.

  Tessa knew what he was leaving unsaid. It wasn't that she was being nice to him; it was why she was being nice.

  "They'll be waiting for us," Julian pointed out. "On tenterhooks Gisele said."

  "She's so goddamn dramatic."

  "She is that," Julian said with a grin.

  "If you put her and Pops in a room together, there's no telling what would happen."

  "I can only imagine," Julian laughed.

  He kissed her softly, then drew her down the hallway behind him.

  The moment Tessa sat in her normal spot, Gisele said, "Well?"