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Before I could formulate my next question, though, Chloe went on, “I guess she went by Kappas because that was Jack’s grandmother’s last name. Something about not wanting to perpetuate the oppression of the patriarchy.”
Well, I had to admit that sounded like something Athene would say.
Gathering myself, I said, “Was Jack close to his aunt?”
“Not really,” Chloe replied. “He didn’t talk about her very much. He just said that she’d fought with his father years ago when Jack was in junior high and didn’t have anything to do with the family after that.”
Hmm. I couldn’t pretend to know the exact timeline of Athene’s involvement with Lucien and GLANG, but I’d gotten the impression that they’d been together for at least seven or eight years, maybe longer.
Had that long-ago quarrel stemmed from her decision to enter the world of the occult and join the guild?
If it had, that wouldn’t surprise me very much. A lot of families had a difficult time accepting that their family members had chosen a different path from theirs.
“I guess the medallion was with Athene’s stuff, and it all came to Jack’s dad because she didn’t have any other close family,” Chloe said. “And his dad gave it to Jack, and Jack gave it to me because he thought it was pretty.” She stopped there and gave me a probing look. “Why would it be important? It’s just a pretty necklace, right?”
Oh, no, it was much more than that. I didn’t think it was necessarily magical, but the medallion certainly represented a period in my life I would much rather have forgotten. As a member of L.A.’s psychic community, I’d been invited to Lucien’s compound in Encino several times and had been unlucky enough to catch his eye. In fact, his unhealthy interest in me was the whole reason I’d fled Southern California in the first place.
“No,” I said, then paused. While I really didn’t want to go into the whole story, I knew I needed to tell Chloe why the medallion was important, and why it had a connection to me that she probably would never have guessed.
So I launched into the narrative as best I could, explaining what GLANG was, who had founded it — and how Jack’s aunt Athene had been Lucien Dumond’s right-hand woman, only to follow him in death during his brother Eugene’s unholy quest to get his hands on Lucien’s not-inconsiderable fortune…the same fortune that had come to me.
“You knew Jack’s aunt?” Chloe breathed. “That’s…wild.”
Well, I supposed that was one word for it. “She was…an interesting person. And she definitely didn’t deserve what happened to her.”
Those words seemed to echo in my mind. They weren’t so different from what I’d thought about poor Jack Speros’s death only a few days earlier.
Jack Speros’s death….
And then the cards flashed through my mind. The Devil…the Seven of Swords.
The Emperor.
Oh, dear Goddess.
“What is it?” Chloe asked then, brows drawing together in worry. “You’re white as a sheet.”
Of course I was. Because the terrible truth had awakened in me as I thought of the way Athene Kappas had been murdered, how someone had placed a hex on Travis’s car…just as they’d placed a hex on mine.
Jack’s murderer wasn’t from Globe.
The Emperor card could also signify a father figure.
Jack’s father, who’d been Athene’s older brother.
No wonder I couldn’t get Bryce Arsenault to neatly fit into the puzzle no matter how much I tried.
“Max Speros killed Jack,” I whispered.
Chloe stared at me as though I’d lost my mind. In a way, I wished I had. It would have been easier than acknowledging that a father could do such a terrible thing to his son.
“Why would you say that?”
I rubbed my suddenly damp palms on the knees of my leggings, the only kind of pants my waistline would tolerate these days.
“You told me that Jack kept talking about getting married,” I said, and Chloe nodded, expression still mystified.
“He did. But why would that make his father want to kill him?”
