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“When the pipe burst, the water was a few degrees shy of boiling temperature, five at the most.”
“Okay . . .”
“Industry standards dictate that baseboard heating water usually runs around one hundred and eighty degrees.”
“And water boils at two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit,” she supplied most unhelpfully.
He nodded, encouraged that she’d caught one of his unraveled threads, and continued. “I switched to my brass armor to protect myself from being burned, and also because my metallic power can manipulate and sense when my metal’s components are present . . . and when they’ve been tampered with.”
That got her attention. “Tampered? You can tell that just by changing your body into?—”
“Brass. Yes. It was a power that came to me once I landed in the mortal realm, and thank the mages it did because I’d happily endure a geyser full of boiling water if it meant its attentions were trained away from you.”
Her heart stammered at the simmering aggression and the implications of his words. Their eyes locked, and ochre flames overtook the gentle amber that was so bright and eager in her memory from when they last held her as he helped shape her future with a mountain of hotel pans and hard maple taffy.
A strange calmness soothed her senses, and she could finally see the accompanying signs of what his fire, as she understood it, cost him. Strained muscles, tense jaw, eyes dipped down at the corners. Even his lips curled back slightly, as if he was fighting off something.
Molly put her hand on his thigh. “Brass?—”
“Baah!” He heaved himself off the couch and stalked toward a row of books not far from where Molly had begun her earlier perusal. She felt the loss keenly but said nothing. Regardless of what her emotions were lighting up with, she wouldn’t do him the dishonor of calling him out on his emotional dysregulation, not when he was clearly troubled by something she couldn’t yet understand.
Once Brass had found his selection, he lifted the glass case—the seal around its perimeter releasing with a soft sigh—removed the book, and offered it to her by way of the strangest explanation she’d ever received to dismiss one’s angered outburst.
He kept his back turned to her. “Forty pages from the last. Read it.”
“Um, all right.” The book in Molly’s hands wouldn’t have been a book by today’s standards. Loose leaf sheets of similar-sized parchment were bound between two wooden covers. Symbols she didn’t recognize were scrawled on the front. When she opened it, to precisely no one’s surprise, there were no page numbers, so she did as instructed and counted forty pages backward from the last one. What she found were letters in a language that wasn’t the least bit rooted in Latin and, therefore, one she had no hope of reading.
What she could read, however, was the translated notes on a loose white piece of modern-day notepaper that had been stuffed between the ancient pages. Molly barely had time to comprehend what she was reading before Brass turned back around, a new mix of composure and compromise armoring his stance.
“That book dates back to first-century Latvia and holds the recorded accounts of a tribe of Baltic pagan elders,” Brass explained.
Molly carefully set the book down on the coffee table. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be touching this.”
“Of all the gods and goddesses those ancient people prayed to,” he continued, ignoring her attempt at levity, “Ragana was the most mercurial.”
“Ragana . . .” Molly leaned forward to consult the translated notes. “Goddess of witches and death. She sounds peachy.”
Brass nodded and, having seemingly recovered himself, resumed his seat next to Molly on the couch. “She’s a shapeshifting goddess who is queen to all of her kind, lesser goddesses and such. When it comes to mortals, she’s the great equalizer and balancer of excess among the seasons and during the harvest months. In her realm, life cannot exist without death. The Baltic people would pray to her, leaving her sacrifices and the shearing of their first crops of the season to ensure healthy harvests and prosperity for their tribes.”
Molly didn’t know where Brass was going with the story or what it had to do with a blown pipe in her restaurant, so she remained silent while he continued.
“She is named for the moon, and like the moon, her moods and powers come in phases.” His words took on a darker tone. “A tribe can only experience prosperity for so long. According to Ragana’s principles, in order to appreciate how fortunate a group of people truly are, they need to endure periods of drought and pain. That was her edict, and the reason for all the sacrifices. They weren’t just any sacrifices, however, but the best and, in many cases, rarest. The first eggs of spring, the cow’s first milk after its calf was born.” Then his voice softened abruptly, and Molly had to strain to hear him. “Blood from a girl’s first cycle into womanhood. A virgin’s evidence when she no longer was one. The sick and twisted list goes on and on.”
“Oh my God,” Molly rasped.
“It was a power move, like any god or goddess of legend. For Ragana, she required the people to give her their best so they always knew she could take it all away at any moment. That the balance of their lives existed only because she allowed it to.”
“That’s . . . intense and, as a modern woman, if I’m allowed to be a little judgy on the subject, really awful.” They were pitiful words for a pitiful ancient belief system, but she couldn’t think of anything more forceful to say that would change anything. Most of humanity’s less-than-stellar moments were recorded by the era’s winners who never knew better and never cared to learn.
“Yes,” he agreed solemnly. “And it seems she is not quite finished with her balancing act.”
Molly’s thoughts ground to a halt. Her head snapped up from the open book in front of her. “What?”
The stiffness in Brass’s jaw had returned. Golden flames danced in the depths of his gaze and melted any amber that had been there a moment ago. “The water in your baseboard pipes was frozen repeatedly but not at a time when you would have noticed, and it was done so in a way that was otherwise undetectable. With speed, efficiency, and perfect fucking timing.”
“You’re not suggesting that?—”
“In the evenings, while you were away from the building, the water in the pipes froze quickly and remained frozen during the night. Then, what I suspect would be an hour or two before you opened up the place in the morning, the ice thawed just as quickly, and the heating system returned to normal before you noticed. Two nights of this would have been all she needed to cause the explosion.”
