Page 46 of Wayward Daughter

Rainer had written down parts of the diary that Solomon was having trouble reading and Solomon went back and tried to fill in the blanks of what he’d done so far. Caleb and I had been busy, so I didn’t know what he had learned.

Saul and Solomon both knew what we had done because I wasn’t exactly quiet. Solomon’s ears were red and Saul wouldn’t stop grinning. The giant was two seconds away from giving me a double thumbs up and shaking my hand. I was ignoring both of them because if Rainer guessed, he was going to shoot someone in the ass with rock salt when they least suspected it.

“Yes. Ranting about the Yellow King wasn’t the only reason Agnes was sent to the convent. Her intended took her to a friend’s house with her chaperone. That was where the painting was. She wrote that the portrait’s eye kept following her, and she thought it was a demon. She searched the house until she found a knife sharp enough to stab it with. She described it as black with green stones.

“Agnes describes a whoosh of air from the painting when she stabbed it and then she heard a voice that called itself the Yellow King who thanked her for freeing him. She ran and tried to warn the owner of the house. They yelled at her and sent her home, but she didn’t stop trying to warn her family. She wrote the Yellow King possessed her intended and raped her.”

Rainer stared at me over his pot of seafood. I knew that knife. My mother shoved it into my hands before she hid me in the floor boards the night she went missing.

“Anything else?” Rainer asked.

“That’s as far as I’ve been able to piece together from what you wrote down from the words I couldn’t figure out. It’s a thick diary, and that’s just the beginning. She kept writing until the fire and she wrote a lot. Agnes would have been an intelligent, educated girl based on her station. The writing is completely erratic because she was terrified, but maybe she kept digging.”

Rainer cocked an eyebrow at me. He was leaving it up to me if I told them about the knife. It was a huge mystery from my childhood and frankly, kind of a sore point. My mother protected me and that knife, but she never told me anything about it or what she had been hiding under the floor.

I trusted these guys, and I was coming to care for them. I would have thought that was impossible before a bunch of demons possessed a group of tourists at Jazz Fest, but I did.

“So, the knife my mother shoved at me when she stashed me in the floor was black with green stones. We’ve managed to figure out the stones are Moldavite. We’ve researched the knife extensively and found nothing. Prehistoric humans used to make tools out of Moldavite and we haven’t been able to identify what kind of stone the blade is made from. It’s stone, but it’s deathly sharp, but it’s completely unblemished. If this is the same knife, the blade should have nicks and imperfections from cutting, especially if it was violent thrust into a painting.”

“Where is the knife now?” Caleb asked.

“I have a lot of friends,” Rainer said. “It’s currently locked in an iron box with warding from witches and demons and it’s being kept somewhere away from Logan just in case.”

The knife couldn’t be tracked magically. Rainer was the only person who knew where it was. Even I didn’t know. It was probably in one of his rented storage containers, but he had those all over the city. Some of them were filled with iron boxes full of magical items we didn’t know how to destroy and some just had furniture and stuff because Rainer didn’t like to get rid of anything.

“Can we see it?” Solomon asked.

“Well, I can’t bring it here, can I? As soon as I open that box, whoever is looking for it can track it. Logan, do you still have the photos on your phone?”

“Yeah. I can text them to all of you, but I only have Saul’s number.”

My phone went off. Saul had sent me their numbers with another selfie. When did he have time to snap a selfie doing bunny ears behind Solomon while he researched? One of the mysteries that was Saul. I texted them all the photos. Caleb emailed them to himself so he could blow them up on his laptop.

“Well, it’s pretty considering it might be the key to an Eldrich horror’s prison,” Saul said.

Fuck me. That was probably exactly what my mystery knife was. Why did my mother have it? She wasn’t a witch. She wasn’t even part of the Flame. My mother hadn’t even taken a Flame adjacent job. She taught public school. She didn’t teach at any of the schools shifter or witch kids went to either. It was a regular school with humans.

If the Yellow King was real and the knife was the key, then it belonged with the Starfall Coven to protect. They could have defended it much better than my mother did. She had a young kid in the house too.

She had to have known what the knife was because she gave it to me instead of letting anyone ransack the house for it. She knew exactly what they were after.

“She knew,” I said to Rainer.

“Yes. And I still don’t know what she was up to. She had been gung-ho to join the Flame right up until she turned eighteen. She went on a trip with her friends and came back not wanting to do it anymore. She wanted to go to college. No one stopped her because it’s just not what we do. We all figured she’d change her mind given how into learning about it she was, but then she decided to get her masters and teach.

“She got pregnant with you as she was finishing her masters. She never would say who your father was, just that it was a one night stand and she didn’t want to hunt him down and be connected to him in any way. I thought she’d at least teach shifter kids, but she didn’t want to do that either. She had been fully out of the life, and we didn’t try to bring her back because she seemed happy. I can’t imagine why she would keep a knife like that with you in the house.”

I had been close to my mother when I was a kid. It was just the two of us. I was around my other family, of course, but outside of family functions, it was just her and me. But Rainer knew sides of her I didn’t know and even he didn’t know what she had gotten herself into.

“What about friends she would have had? She might not tell her brother, but she might confide in a friend,” Caleb said.

“That’s the thing. My sister grew up with Sasha, Ariel, and a whole bunch of other witches. They had been inseparable. Sasha and Ariel went on the graduation trip with her. Even they don’t know what made her change her mind and she pulled away from both of them after that. They still don’t know what they did to upset her.”

“What did they do for their graduation trip?” Solomon asked.

“Backpacked through Europe for the summer. Stayed in hostels, worked odd jobs, and moved on when they saw what they wanted to see. They visited a bunch of sites sacred to witches. It was a pilgrimage for Sasha and Ariel. Elenor went for research and moral support.

“Elenor knew better than anyone not to pick up ornate knives that look like they are used in rituals and if Agnes really accidentally released the Yellow King, I doubt their magic knife is that easy to get their hands on.”