Page 75 of Dead Beat

“Really?” Dawes asked, her curiosity overcoming her shyness.

“Mother—” Turner said warningly.

Celeste waved him off. “Abel says it’s all nonsense, but I know what I know.”

“Come on,” he said to Alex, eager to make his escape. “Room’s down the hall.”

“Grandmother and great-uncle, huh?” she asked as she followed.

“I’m good at my job because I work hard at it, not because Uncle Sal could find a dime in a mountain of pennies.”

“Can’t both be true?”

“I can still kick you out of this house.”

Turner shepherded her down a short hallway to what looked like an office that had been turned into a bedroom. There was a desk next to the bed with a small TV perched on it. Mercy was curled up under a blanket. The sound of her snoring made Alex feel a little more hopeful. She had been so still and quiet on the beach.

“Mom can’t do the stairs anymore,” Turner explained. “But she’s not ready to leave the house.”

Alex remembered that Turner had used the money from Lethe to help out with his mother’s mortgage. “She doesn’t know about us? About the Ninth House?”

Turner shook his head. “No. She worries about me enough. I don’t need to add waging occult war to the list.”

That much Alex understood. She forced herself to say the words she’d been turning over in her head through the frigid drive from Savin Rock. “I’ll call Mira. If she won’t talk to me about my dad, Dawes can … nudge her.”

“What changed?”

Alex nodded toward Mercy sleeping in Celeste’s narrow bed. She looked fine, but Alex knew this wasn’t just going to slide off her. “The artifacts, the golem. Whatever they mean, we need to end this.”

“We might still find the other two pilgrims.”

He was trying to be fair, but fair wouldn’t stop Golgarot. “I’m not sure that would be a good thing. I don’t want to tangle with another monster like Reiter or Kittscher.”

Or something worse. She wanted to believe somehow the soldier had made it through, but if Good Ol’ Hec hadn’t survived or if he’d become his own unique monster, she didn’t really want to know. And it wasn’t just Reiter or his threats. Professor Girard had scared the hell out of her, and he hadn’t needed fangs or familiars to do it.

“I need to know if there’s a why to all of this, to … what I can do. Maybe if we get my mom talking she’ll finally have something to say.” Alex paused. “You didn’t sit on the couch.”

Turner frowned, then lifted a shoulder. “That was my dad’s spot. I still can’t bring myself to sit in it. I don’t know why.”

“Don’t you?”

Turner’s gaze was steady, but there was an unfamiliar softness there, the hope that drove them all to want to peer behind the Veil. “Does he … Is he okay?”

“I think so. He seemed happy to me. But I don’t always know what happy looks like.”

Turner gave a brief dip of his chin. “You’d make a good detective, Alex. If you weren’t a complete degenerate.”

“I am a good detective, Turner. I just don’t have to wear a suit. Thanks for bringing us here. I know you don’t like people in your business.”

“I guess you’re not just people anymore.”

He vanished down the hall.

Alex watched Mercy for a while, then pulled one of Celeste Turner’s books off the shelf, a murder mystery set in a quaint English village. She must have dozed off, because she woke with a start to Mercy pushing herself up in bed.

She blinked slowly, then seemed to snap awake. “Where are we?”

“Detective Turner’s mother’s house in Edgewood.”