Page 73 of Wicked Deeds

I laughed. “Good to see my sister is classy.” Gwen turned an even deeper shade and for some reason, I lost it completely, doubling over with laughter. Damon joined in and after a few seconds Gwen did, too.

“It might not be him,” Gwen said when she finally stopped.

“It’s possible.” My gut told me otherwise, the brief tension relief from the laughter fading fast as it tightened all over again.

“We’ll figure it out soon enough,” Damon said.

“How do we do that without making contact with him?” Gwen asked.

Damon and I exchanged a long look. I waited to see what he proposed. I wouldn’t push him to do something not strictly legal if he didn’t want to.

“I’ll get Mitch to talk to the lawyers,” he said. “Jack is wanted in this country, so we may be able to get a court order to break the privacy on the database.”

“How long will that take?”

“Through the courts? Probably a while.” He sounded displeased at the prospect.

I suspected the instruction that Damon was going to give Mitch would be more along the lines of ‘by any means necessary’.

“We’ll have to wait and see,” Damon continued. “Don’t worry, my lawyers are the best.”

“What if he used a fake name on the database?” Gwen asked. “Like on my birth certificate.”

Crap. I’d forgotten that.

“There are other routes,” Damon said. “We know his real name and we can track down other relatives. From what I understand it’s difficult to submit a sample these days without having your identity thoroughly confirmed. So maybe we won’t have to. We can start with when your father’s sample was submitted to the database and take it from there. In fact, when Cassandra gets here, we should get her to start that process. He can remove his records just like you two can. And he might if he tries to find Gwen and her record vanishes. It could tip him off we’re on to him. Though he doesn’t have the advantage of having Cassandra on his side to expedite his request. Particularly if he went through the regular database. She might be able to freeze his record. Though that could tip him off, too.” He paused, looking into the distance, thinking hard. “Cassandra should just copy the record. So we have his analysis even if he manages to pull it.”

Gwen was starting to look overwhelmed again.

“We’ll take it one step at a time,” I said, trying to sound confident. “Cassandra will be here soon and we’ll figure this out.”

Cassandra arrived about forty minutes later. I took her back to the kitchen and introduced her to Gwen, who was sitting at the table, still looking pale and pushing the empty package from her pain patch back and forth with anxious flicks of her fingers. She’d asked to see the picture of Jack. I’d sent a copy to her email. She’d stared at it for a long time before she said, “Your mom was very beautiful.”

To which my reply was, “Only on the outside.”

Cassandra said hello to Damon, asked if we’d confirmed we were sisters and when I said yes, smiled approvingly and informed us she’d requested the name of the man who had matched with Gwen using her authority as Head of the Cestis.

I avoided looking at Damon. Friends in high places were good. Especially if that meant he wouldn’t have to crawl around in the low ones to help me out. “Thank you,” I said.

“Thank you,” Gwen echoed.

“You’re welcome.” Cassandra nodded, eyeing Gwen. Her head tilted and her eyes narrowed slightly. I recognized the look. Someone was about to get tea. I stifled a sigh.

“Maggie, why don’t you show me Amy’s herb garden?” Cassandra said. “I’ll make Gwen something to help with her healing. Gwen, you wait here, we won’t be long. Then we can all talk.”

I let her hustle me out of the house.

“What’s wrong?” I asked when we were admiring the neat rows of herbs that Amy grew in the small kitchen garden the gardeners had ceded to her. She’d explained the whole system to me once when I’d asked her for some mint to practice something Cassandra had been teaching me. There were strategic shade panels and UV blockers that protected the plants from getting fried, a recycled water irrigation system—Amy’s explanation of that had gone over my head—and solar lights along the paths, highlighting the neat labels for each group of plants.

Cassandra smiled approvingly as she moved along the paths between the beds. I didn’t have to look to know she was building extra layers of wards. I felt them as they wrapped around us, ensuring privacy. Lianith would tell me if there were any nixlings nearby and I doubted anyone short of a Fae Elder or a demon could get through Cassandra’s wards, even if they managed to get through all the other layers of protection around the garden without alerting us.

Her emerald-green shirt went well with the plants. The sunlight caught her silver hair as she tugged a leaf off a mint plant and crushed it between her fingers, before inhaling the scent. “You realize if Jack is your father, Gwen has the potential to have both witch magic and Fae magic.”

“Yes, I worked that out. Is it a bad thing?” I asked.

She pursed her lips. “It’s unusual, and if she’s untrained, she’s either potentially vulnerable or potentially dangerous…”

I didn’t need her to finish the sentence. I knew it was dangerous to not control your magic. I’d burned myself the first time I’d used mine. And Gwen was half-Fae, too. Who knew what she might be capable of?

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