Fire Raiser (30 page)

Holly sighed. “And I thought
I
could wander off on tangents.”

“Sorry. The Old Believers witness from the Calvary pulpit—and subsequently a member, with Ginny, of the amalgamation committee—was Thomas Van Slyke.”

“So you think I’m right?” she ventured.

“I think what I was about to say earlier, before you interrupted, is that Lisa Wheeler not only teaches dance, but she does it in the basement rec room of First Baptist. So I’m willing to entertain this—”

Cam stepped back through the wall.

“—concept that having sex at Westmoreland causes churches to burn down.”

Holly bit back an untimely giggle at the expression on her cousin’s face. Evan, right behind him and with his mouth open to say something, stopped short at the spectacle of Jamey’s cool self-possession, Holly’s incipient hilarity, and Cam’s wide-eyed suspicion that not only was Jamey not in his right mind, he didn’t even know its ZIP code.

“Uh . . . we found the maids’ break room,” Evan offered after a moment. “Cam locked the girls in. They’re safe enough for a while.” He waited. Holly grinned at him. A frown knitted his eyebrows together. “I’m not gonna ask. I’ve had it with encouraging you people tonight.”

She stubbed a toe against the cabinet and swore softly as she started after him up the stairs. “
Éimhín
,
Éimhín
,” she called, “there’s an explanation, truly there is!”

“Yeah?” He stopped, looked down at her, and blew out a long sigh. “Y’know what? This whole thing is making me crazy in ways that probably aren’t good for society at large. Okay, so tell me about sex and church fires.”

FLATTENING HIS HAND AGAINST the wall as he descended, Cam sought the sensation he’d found before. Nothing. There had to be more than one way into this place. Prudence alone dictated it. Unable to get in through the door from the outer staircase, Weiss—assuming it was Weiss—would seek out the other. Or others. But where? Was there a legitimate, non-magical way up to the attic? And if this had indeed been used for smuggling, there must have been an outlet at the ground floor, or maybe the basement—

Jamey interrupted his thoughts with, “Aren’t you going to cross-examine me about—”

Cam shook his head. “Jamey, at this exact moment I don’t want to discuss churches, or fires, or church fires, and I sure as shit don’t want to discuss sex. Not with you, not right now.”

“Later, then.”

“No.” He shook his head again, feeling like a dashboard Dodger with a negativity complex.

“Don’t be such a jackass. We have to talk sometime, you know. I’ll bring roses and champagne and a Sinatra CD if you want, but we
are
going to talk—” He broke off. “Cam!” And he was spun around as Jamey grabbed his elbow. “This is probably crazy, but take a look at the flowers and the cabinet, okay? What do you see?”

“Flowers. A cabinet.”

“Don’t things
mean
things in magic? That amber necklace of yours—you said it symbolized—I don’t remember, but it
means
something, right?”

“Confidence, luck . . .” he said absently, concentrating on the cabinet and the bouquet. The former was carved with three large keys and a portcullis. The flowers were more lavender roses, more sweet peas, and others that startled and then worried him. “Enchantment. Departure. Lust. Pleasure and pain—”

“I’m guessing the obvious for the cattail,” Jamey said. “But what’s the green stuff, and the little white rose?”

“It’s a dog rose, and that’s the ‘pleasure and pain,’ ” he responded dully. “The other is lemon grass.”

“Which means—?”

“Let’s just say that Morgan’s parents—or Erika Ayala—would never grow it in their gardens. I don’t like this, Jamey. If I’m reading this right, this is another doorway. Keys indicate guardianship, but they’re also as obvious as the cattail. The portcullis—”

“I knew it had a name. It’s on the cabinet where the doorway was. So were the keys.”

“Of course. But the flowers were different.”

“There was a griffin up there, too.”

“Vigilance,” Cam said shortly. “Stand back.” He felt the silk wallpaper smooth and slick beneath his fingertips. It had to be here, another door had to be here someplace. Hands exploring, eyes squeezed shut, Cam sensed more silk wallpaper, more wool—and beyond it more silk, and some leather. “There
is
a door.”

“Where to?”

“Do we really care all that much where it goes?”

“Not so much, no.”

So they walked through a wall again. Wool: the Persian carpet on the floor. Silk: black sheets, crimson velvet upholstery and bed curtains. Leather—

A quantity of cheap black leather decorated with silvery studs and festooned with a few chains encased the meaty form of the man from the shower in Room 208. The chains rattled as he turned, and what was visible of his face through a leering leather mask was startled, then curious, and then intensely interested. In Jamey.

Teeth gleaming like searchlights from the black mask, he said something that sounded Russian but wasn’t; Cam knew that much. He also knew he was less than thrilled by the way Jamey smiled back and walked toward the bed, an atypical swing to his hips that earned a distinct reaction within the black leather codpiece.

“Cam?” he said in a sugar-soaked voice as he unbuttoned his shirt. “Get your ass over here, please.”

“You’re doin’ just fine on your own,” he snarled back.

“He outweighs me by about seventy pounds and I don’t have the proverbial blunt instrument to hand,” Jamey answered in the same sweet tone.

“You—oh. We’re gonna double-team him, right?”

“Not in the way he thinks, no,” he purred. “But that’s the general idea.”

Cam began his own approach, knowing better than to mimic the swish. Instead, he made a bid for the man’s attention by stripping off his shirt. He wasn’t in Jamey’s league, of course, but the dark gaze crawled over him like spiders.

The man cooed something in not-Russian. Cam deployed his dimples and said pleasantly, “Your mother was the diseased mutant offspring of a bald gorilla and a camel with terminal syphilis, and I’m gonna slug you right in your black leather jaw in about two seconds.”

“If that’s your idea of verbal foreplay,” said Jamey, “I have to tell you it really isn’t making me swoon.”

They hit the guy at the same time. Cam took the more direct route, slamming his fist into the man’s chin. Jamey, executing a graceful half-turn, drove an elbow into his stomach, and stomped on his foot for good measure. He whooshed sonorously, like a deflating bagpipe, as he went down.

They used the sheets and pillowcases to tie him up on the bed. Cam got creative with the chains, unhooking them where he found fasteners and looping them around the bedposts, then reattaching them to the leather.

“Hurry up,” Jamey said.

“Sorry, no experience with Bondage and Discipline.”

“Pity. You’d look good in black leather pants.”

He decided he really couldn’t afford to react to that, and stuffed about a square foot of sheet into the guy’s mouth.

“Not that I’m really into that sort of thing,” Jamey continued. “No silk neckties around the wrists and ankles, no fur-lined handcuffs, and certainly no whips, not even the feather kind. About as kinky as I’m ever likely to get is silk sheets—blue, I think, to match your eyes—oh, and maybe some sandalwood massage oil. By candlelight.”

The images this conjured up—
Nope, not going there
, Cam told himself. “Hand to God, Jamey, if you don’t shut up—”

He mimed astonishment, eyes dancing. “Don’t tell me I’m finally getting through to you! Was it the candles or the sheets? I could think up some other stuff—whipped cream is even more of a cliché than leather, but I could definitely entertain the idea of chocolate—”

Cam choked on slightly manic laughter. “Oh, God—M&M’s—a mouthful of M&M’s—”

They stood there staring at each other across the bed, grinning like mental patients, until the ripped sheets rustled and a moan issued from their trussed-up victim. Cam wondered how hard you could hit somebody over the head without causing permanent damage, then kicked himself mentally.

“I’m always forgetting,” he mourned. “I spend so much time not doing magic that sometimes I forget that I
can
.”

EVAN HEARD OUT HOLLY’S EXPLANATION, and shook his head. “How many points do I get if I don’t make the obvious comment about you, me, and religious experience?”

“Oh, wipe that smirk off your face. In a lot of the old religions, there were temple prostitutes—male
and
female—it’s what Leviticus is about. The passage isn’t about executing gay men—and why is nothing ever said about lesbians? If same-sex sex is wrong, then why point at men and not at women?”

“And she’s off and running,” he commented, tempted to time the tirade by his watch.

“It’s one of the Clobber Passages. Two different words are used for
male
—one means an ordinary man, but the other is almost always applied to a man or male animal dedicated to a god for a sacred ritual. What it means is that Jews become unclean if they go to temple prostitutes, because that’s worshiping somebody who isn’t Jehovah. Deuteronomy forbids the daughters and sons of Israel from
becoming
temple prostitutes. And—”

“Just for the sake of intellectual curiosity, what about St. Paul?” he asked as they climbed the stairs.

“Mangled in translation,” she told him. “Plenty of Greek gay erotica survives, and none of it uses the term Paul uses for ‘homosexual’—and why anybody takes his word for anything, he didn’t even
know
Jesus of Nazareth, who said absolutely nothing about gay people at all—anyway, the word Paul uses has to do with homosexual acts in connection with religious worship—just like in Leviticus, only this time it’s in Greek instead of Hebrew. Ritual sex in honor of a god or goddess—which is what I was talking about in the first place.” She slanted a look at him. “Do I flatter myself, or do you recall our first Beltane celebration?”

“Religious experience,” he grinned. “The very definition of.”

“Denise Josèphe was pretty much the ritual prostitute at The Hyacinths that night,” she reminded him. Neither of them said anything for a few moments. “And remember Hallowe’en, what Noel said about sex, death, the primal power of orgasm—” They had reached the top of the stairs. “What happened to Cam and Jamey?”

CAM COULD FEEL JAMEY WATCHING him as he prowled the room looking for anything he could use. But he wasn’t at all prepared for the sudden question.

“Is this how life goes with you people?”

Cam turned slowly. “ ‘You people’?”

“Weeks and months, maybe years, of being ordinary—taking care of the kids or the farm, going to work, out to dinner or a movie—and then all at once the magic starts up again?”

“ ‘You people’?”

Jamey had the grace to look slightly abashed. “Well, yes.”

“We’re not normal, is that it?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Cam! I never understood why you’re so paranoid about being gay, but now I do. It just gets reinforced with you constantly, doesn’t it?”

Cam grabbed a crimson silk pillow, tearing at its fringe. “Did you know that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—that’s Vatican-speak for the Inquisition—still has an Index of Prohibited Books?”

“This isn’t Salem in 1692, or Madrid during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella.”

“No, it’s the good ol’ U. S. of A. in 2006, where Erika Ayala can threaten blackmail if Holly won’t make her son straight. And there’s very little difference between bashing a queer’s brains out on a curb and piling up the faggots for the auto-da-fé.” He tossed a black velvet pillow at Jamey. “Rip off the tassels, will you? I need the gold threads.”

“You want me to react to that word, don’t you? Faggots.”

“Look, Jamey, most of ‘us people’ have things we want to do with our lives that have nothing to do with magic. When I was a kid I spent time studying with the man who probably made that wooden talisman Lulah gave me to use tonight—yeah, another cousin, Louvena Cox’s nephew. Leander’s bowls and plates and cups are in museums—the ones he doesn’t sell to collectors, anyway. That’s his real work, and it doesn’t have anything to do with magic.”

“But he
does
do magic. And I’ll bet he selects those woods as carefully as those he makes into bowls and things, when he’s making wands.”

Cam set aside the strands of red silk and started shredding the white roses from the bouquet on the bedside table. “As you’ve learned by now, like just about everything else, trees have magical associations. In Wales, it’s unlucky to cut down a juniper. Juniper is said to be protective. Is that because when a fox shelters beneath a juniper, the stronger scent of the tree confuses the hounds? Black locusts grow from Georgia to Pennsylvania. Legend says they’re the burial place for evil—but could that be because they’re incredibly poisonous?”

“Folk magic—” Jamey began.

“—is something people say in the same tone of voice as ‘superstition.’ But it’s different. It’s learned wisdom, reinforced over centuries. And it’s all over the place in everyday life. We live with magic all the time.” He went on plucking and tearing velvety white petals. “For instance—did you know that meeting Holly was very lucky?”

“Well, I knew right off that I liked her, but—”

“Meeting a redhead is good luck. A redhead on a white horse is even better.”

“But if she’d been riding sidesaddle she’d just be somebody who got lost from the Shenandoah Ridge Hunt Club?”

“Oh, quick—write that one down,” Cam said sarcastically. “With red-haired men, it’s the opposite. We’re incredibly bad luck. It’s said that Judas Iscariot had red hair, but personally I think it comes from the English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish being terrified of the Vikings—”

“Erik the Red,” Jamey interrupted. “I can see that there would be reasons for traditional beliefs like that, but—”

“Can’t quite get your head around real magic, huh? How about this, then. Uncle Nicky is part Gypsy, and Gypsies believe that a lock of hair from a redheaded woman on a pregnant woman’s belly ensures an easy delivery and a healthy child. I’d bet the dollar amount of every contract Halliburton has with the U.S. Government that a lock of Lulah’s hair got clipped tonight. Tell me if it’s coincidence that Lulah’s a skilled midwife, she’s here, and she’s got red hair.”