“Hello, Cat,” said Nicodemus, as he walked to center stage. He was dressed in a white tuxedo, which matched his white hair and goatee, and black-and-white wing-tip shoes.
Catriona’s face was crimson with anger. She didn’t speak, but if her glare could have killed, Nicodemus would have gone up in a puff of smoke.
It hadn’t been a conscious decision for Tempest to leave Nicodemus out of the story she spun for the audience. She told herself it was because it was too complicated to introduce a second booby-trap maker into the equation. Catriona was the main culprit, so it was simplest to explain it to her audience that way. But now that he was here, what was he going to reveal?
Gideon handed his phone to Ivy so she could keep recording and actually get the right people in the frame.
Nicodemus glanced at the camera as it changed hands, then looked to Tempest. “It’s time for the truth to come out. You have no idea how sorry I am that I didn’t have the strength to tell you this earlier, but it’s time.” He spun on his heel toward the camera and gave a slight bow. “Good evening. I’m Nicodemus. Just Nicodemus. I was watching this evening’s entertainment, so I know you’ve heard about me. But Tempest’s neutral words were far more than I deserve. I’d like to fill in the gaps in Tempest’s true story. She figured it out. I’m simply here to tell you the last few details.”
Gideon had been scribbling a few words in his notebook and held it up for Tempest to see. Did you know he was coming? She gave a small shake of her head in response. What was he planning?
“You’ll never see him,” Catriona blurted out to Nicodemus. “If you say one more word, I’ll hide him away so you’ll never get to meet him.”
Nicodemus shook his head sadly. “Cat. It’s been thirty years. I’m an old fool in many ways, but I’m not that daft. You’ve been stringing me along this whole time with the threat of never letting me meet my son. But he’s a grown man now. Whether he chooses to introduce himself to his father or not is his choice. Whatever you do, it won’t affect that.”
“Son?” Sanjay repeated. “I didn’t know you—ohhhh…”
Tempest’s whole body buzzed. She had never even considered the possibility. “Moriarty,” Tempest said. Moriarty was Nicodemus and Cat’s son. And she still didn’t know his real name.
Ivy’s eyes grew wide, and her unsteady hands shook Gideon’s phone, but she kept recording.
“Moriarty?” Nicodemus squinted at Tempest.
“You missed the last part of the recording before you got here?” she asked him.
“I did.” He frowned. “My son is here? And his name is Moriarty?”
“He was here a few minutes ago,” said Tempest. “And that’s not exactly his name … He slipped out through the greenroom window.” She realized that even though Moriarty had spoken when he showed them the smashed backup video camera, he hadn’t ever stepped onto the stage. So Gideon’s clandestine recording wouldn’t have captured anything besides his voice anyway.
Nicodemus laughed without humor. “I suppose this is the part of the performance in which I say I have nothing left to lose. So I should tell you—”
“Don’t!” screamed Catriona. “I was tricked into confessing, but it was a lie. I was trying to escape. Nobody will believe the words of a kidnap victim. I said what I had to so they’d let me escape! They don’t know anything.”
“It’s over, Cat,” Nicodemus said calmly. “I’m sorry I didn’t put an end to your deviousness long ago, before you killed more people.”
“Deviousness?” Catriona’s face twisted in anger. “You’re calling me devious? You’re the one who stole my ideas and handed them to those dull Raj sisters.”
“They were our ideas,” said Nicodemus, “but you’re right. I should have asked your permission or changed the illusions enough to make them mine. I understand why you wrecked their show thirty years ago.”
Tempest gasped. “It was you,” she said to Cat. “The Selkie Sisters show that went wrong and caused a rift between my mom and aunt. Long before you killed anyone, you made my mom believe in the Raj family curse. That’s why she stopped performing magic and ran away to California.”
All the little things that had never made sense. All the questions her family had deflected because they either didn’t know or had wanted to put behind them.
“You should be thanking me,” said Cat. “You would never have been born without me.”
“If it had stopped there,” said Nicodemus, “we would all have understood. You were wronged. By me. You lashed out. You frightened two young women, but nobody got hurt. But you couldn’t stop there. You left for Canada with our son, whom I didn’t yet know existed. Elspeth Raj became successful in Scotland, which made you angry. And when the largest show to date was debuting ten years ago, you read that she would be performing an illusion similar to the one you and I created together. Why couldn’t you let it go? Did you do it to hurt me most of all?”
Cat glared at him but didn’t speak.
“Did you know I was in the audience that night you killed Elspeth?” Nicodemus asked. “Like everyone else, I believed it was an accident until you asked for my help to cover it up—telling me, for the first time, about our son. It was smart of you to bring a copy of the birth certificate with the date of birth, but with his name blacked out and no father listed. I wouldn’t have believed you otherwise. You promised you’d introduce us if I helped you cover up your crime. I did so, but you never followed through. I was now complicit, so you had me trapped.
“Then a little over five years ago,” Nicodemus continued, “Elspeth’s sister Emma figured out her sister’s death wasn’t an accident. She was going to reveal the identity of her sister’s killer. But you killed her first.”
“You didn’t have to do it,” Tempest cut in. “I don’t believe my mom ever realized that the Cat of Nine Lives was the killer. She believed it was Nicodemus. And she thought she was safe because he was on tour, performing in northern Scotland when she staged her midnight performance. She knew there was no way Nicodemus could get to Hidden Creek to stop her or hurt her. But she was wrong about him. Nicodemus isn’t a murderer. But you, Cat? All you had to do was get in a car and drive down from Canada. You thought you were about to be revealed as a killer, but you never were. You didn’t have to kill her.”
Sirens sounded in the distance.
“But you were afraid,” Tempest continued. “Afraid, just like you were this year, when I was investigating what happened to both my mom and my aunt. You were afraid I’d do the exact same thing my mom set out to do. If I was the person who was killed, the investigation would point to the fact that I was looking into their deaths, which could lead back to you. You must’ve been even more worried when you learned Secret Staircase Construction was being sued by a devious man who liked to leverage information. He had access to my research. He could have figured out the truth too. But he was only tangentially related to me. If he were to die, you could kill two birds with one stone. One—” She held up her index finger. “Remove a person who had access to my research. Two—” She held up a second finger. “Shut down the theater that might still have evidence of your past crime. Did you kill her on the Shadow Stage? Is there still evidence there?”
“It was underneath the stage,” Nicodemus said softly. “The same way the stagehand was killed all those years ago. From what Cat told me afterward, that was the safest place. Where they wouldn’t know to look.”
The sirens grew louder.
“Did you think I’d give up?” Tempest stared at Catriona, barely able to speak. “It wasn’t a very well-thought-out plan. Unless you think I’m that stupid.”
A smile curled on Cat’s lips. “Oh, you are.”
A shadow shifted behind Cat. The shadow of a man who wasn’t supposed to be there.
Moriarty sliced through the duct tape on her wrists. He was careful to keep his face hidden from the camera, but Tempest knew him well enough at this point to identify him. He hadn’t left through the greenroom window. That was misdirection.
“Come on,” Moriarty whispered to his mom, grabbing her wrist. “We need to go.”
“I don’t think so.” Cat grabbed the knife in Moriarty’s hand that he’d used to cut her free. He didn’t want to let go, but she twisted his little finger backward until it cracked and he gasped in pain, loosening his grip.
Cat grasped the knife and flew at Nicodemus. Tempest reacted before her brain could catch up with what she was doing. She crashed into Catriona and, taking hold of her arm, flipped her onto her back. But Cat didn’t fight clean. Keeping hold of the knife in one hand, she grabbed hold of Tempest’s hair and wrapped it around her fist.
Darius and Blackburn ran forward, but the two women flipped over once more, landing several feet from where the two men had pounced. This time, it was Tempest who landed on her back. In the moment Tempest had her breath knocked out of her, Catriona released Tempest’s hair and raised the knife over her head.
Tempest’s dad pulled Tempest backward to safety as Blackburn lunged for Cat, but Cat spun on her heel, out of his grasp—and closer to Tempest. A third man stepped in front of Tempest, shielding her, and Cat plunged the knife into Nicodemus’s chest.
As Nicodemus collapsed onto the stage floor, Cat backed off stage, keeping hold of the knife. “I won’t hesitate to use this again.”
Tempest saw both her dad and Blackburn flexing to charge Cat, but she knew if they did that one of them was going to get stabbed. She couldn’t look at Nicodemus or she’d fall apart. She could help him in a moment. She had to stop Cat first.
Tempest launched into a flip that ended with a kick to Cat’s nose. Cat cried out in pain and dropped the knife. Darius tackled her, and Blackburn wrapped her entire body in duct tape.
Tempest turned around to see Nicodemus in Moriarty’s arms on the floor of the stage.
“She never told me it was you.” Moriarty wiped Nicodemus’s brow. “I would have reached out to you if I’d known.”
Tempest knelt and took Nicodemus’s hand.
“I never meant—” Nicodemus paused to cough up blood as he laughed weakly. “I never meant to be this heroic.” Blood was spreading across his chest. “I’m sorry. Both of you. I’m so sorry.” He looked from Moriarty to Tempest with the hint of a serene smile on his lips, then closed his eyes.
Blackburn finished securing the screaming Catriona and rushed to inspect Nicodemus’s stab wound. He shook his head as a swarm of police and paramedics rushed into the theater.
HIDDEN CREEK, CALIFORNIA
Earlier today, before the midnight performance
Nicodemus isn’t able to write the truth in the first person. His first-person identity is Nicodemus the Necromancer, the performer. He is comfortable saying “I” when it comes to his stage persona. But he cannot bring himself to write the truth as if he’s the one confessing.
He wishes he felt more of a sense of relief now that Tempest knows the truth about him. But he is not that brave. He is a coward, if he is honest with himself. He has stolen ideas. He has enabled the stealing of lives. His misdeeds have enabled him to remain close to Tempest, whom he loves, and to her mother and aunt, whom he loved as well.
He helped Cat cover up her crimes in hopes he would have a relationship with his son. But now he no longer believes the young man exists. He thinks it is possible that Cat faked the boy’s birth certificate and baby photos. He would be happy to meet the lad, even once, before he dies. But even that is a fanciful dream. One he knows he does not deserve.
Nicodemus never knew how to dispose of Elspeth’s hand. Cat was convinced there were scrapings of her own skin under Elspeth’s fingernails, or on Emma’s body that she had hidden. So he did the only thing he could think to do. When you’re a stage magician who goes by the name of Nicodemus the Necromancer, nobody questions the use of skeletons in your collection. Of course they are fake. Only Nicodemus’s aren’t. He has kept Elspeth’s hand bones and Emma’s skeleton as his beloved automata in his magic workshop in Leith. Elspeth’s hand writes messages, and Emma tells fortunes.
He cannot verbalize the words to explain this to Tempest, how he believes he kept Emma and Elspeth as safe as he could, and that in his magic workshop, they are loved. But he can write these words. Writing the words in the third person, in his journal, in the shadow pages where he writes the truth, separate from the first-person narration he collects in his journal for his memoir.
He hasn’t yet decided which version of his memoir will be published. Now he knows how to decide—by giving the choice to someone else. Perhaps the one person in the world he truly trusts. Once he’s finished writing these words, he will pack his leather-bound journals into a package and mail them all to Tempest. She can decide which truth the world will hear.
Nicodemus sets down his pen and smiles. Perhaps he is happy with this turn of events after all. Not his mistakes of the past, but that Tempest finally knows the truth. He hopes it will set her free.
He imagines what her final show will look like. Tempest will take a bow as the audience rises to a standing ovation. The spotlight half blinds her, as it always does.
She can’t see her dad, her grandparents, or her friends, but she knows they are there. He imagines that one of them has snuck in Abracadabra for the event. That animal is smarter than any rabbit he’s ever encountered, and it’s a shame Tempest doesn’t believe in using animals in her performances.
In the spotlight, Tempest spins and spins. She has always loved the physicality of performance. She has told the world what happened to Emma and Elspeth, and laid the Raj family curse to rest for good. She is ready to create her own story. The eldest child is freed by magic.