"I answered a personal ad."
"What did the ad say?" I asked.
She shrugged. "The usual stuff, except for the end. At the end of the ad it said he was looking for a magical relationship. I don't know what it was about the ad, but after I read it, I had to meet him."
"A compulsion spell," Jeremy said.
She looked at him. "What?"
"If you're powerful enough, you can put a spell on an ad so that the ad brings to you what you truly desire, not necessarily what the ad says you want. It's the way I ran the ad that Ms. Gentry answered. Only people with magical ability would have noticed the spell on the ad, and only people with exceptional gifts would have been able to see through to the true writing underneath. The true writing listed a different phone number than the ad. I knew that anyone who called that number was capable of the job."
"I didn't know you could do that with a newspaper," Naomi said. "I mean, it's printed, and he couldn't have touched every paper." Just by knowing that not touching the paper physically made the spell harder to cast meant Naomi knew more about magic theory than I thought she did. But she was right.
"You have to be powerful enough that the ad, the words that you read into it, carry the spell. It is very difficult, and that he was capable of it lets us know the kind of skill we'll be up against."
"So the ad called me to him?" she asked.
"Maybe not you specifically," Jeremy said, "but something about you was exactly what he wanted or needed."
"Most of the women look fey," Frances said.
We all looked at her. She blinked at us. "Pointed ears. One woman had these cat-green eyes that seemed to glow out of the picture. Skin colors that no human has, like green, blue. Three of them had more... parts than a human would have, but not like it was a deformity, like it was just part of the way they looked."
I was impressed. Impressed that she'd noticed and put it together in her head. If we could save her, get her away from him, she'd make it. "What did he say about Naomi?"
"That she was part sidhe. He really got off on that, if the women were part sidhe. He called them his royal whores."
"Why fey women?" Jeremy asked.
"He never said," Frances answered.
"I think it had something to do with the ritual," Naomi said.
We all turned to her. Jeremy and I asked in unison, "What ritual?"
"The first night he took me to the apartment he's rented. The bedroom has mirrored walls and this huge circular bed. The floor was this beautiful gleaming wood with a Persian carpet under the bed. Everything seemed to glow. When I climbed up on the bed, I felt something, like I'd walked through a ghost. I didn't know what it was that first night, but one night I slipped on the rug, and underneath was a double circle set into the wood of the floor with symbols in a band around the circle. I realized the bed was the center of the circle. I didn't recognize the symbols, but I knew enough to know it was a circle of power, a place to work magic."
"Did he ever do anything in the bed that seemed like ritual magic?" I asked.
"Nothing that I recognized. We just had sex, lots of it."
"Was there anything that was the same every time?" Jeremy asked.
She shook her head. "No."
"Was the sex always in this apartment?" Jeremy asked.
"No, sometimes we met at a hotel."
That surprised me. "Is there anything he does in the apartment inside the circle that he doesn't do anywhere else?"
She blushed bright red. "It's the only place he brings other men."
"Other men to have sex with him?" I asked.
She shook her head. "No, with me." She looked up at us, as if waiting for the cry of horror, or maybe whore. Whatever she saw reassured her. We all knew how to give good blank face when we needed it. Besides, a little group sex seemed tame after knowing that he showed pictures of his lovers to his wife, with details. That was a new one. Group sex had been around a lot longer than Polaroids.
"Was it always the same men?" Jeremy asked.
She shook her head." No, but they knew each other. I mean, it wasn't like he brought in strangers off the street." She sounded defensive, as if that would have been so much worse, and it wasn't as bad as all that.
"Were there any repeats?" Jeremy asked.
"There were three men that I saw more than once."
"Do you know their names?"
"Just their first names. Liam, Donald, and Brendan."
She seemed very sure of the names. "How many times did you see these three men?"
She wouldn't meet our eyes." I don't know. Many times."
"Five times," Jeremy asked, "six, twenty-six?"
She looked up startled. "Not twenty times, not that many."
"Then how many?" he asked.
"Maybe eight, maybe ten, but no more than that." It seemed important to her that it hadn't been more than ten. Was that the magical cutoff? More than ten times and you were worse than just eight?
"And the group sex, how many times for that?"
She blushed again. "Why do you need to know?"
"You called it a ritual, not us," Jeremy said. "So far there doesn't seem much ritual to it, but numbers can have mystical significance. The number of men inside the circle. The number of times you were inside the circle with more than one man. Believe me, Ms. Phelps, this is not how I get my jollies."
She looked down again. "I didn't mean to imply..."
"Yes, you did," Jeremy said, "but I understand why you'd be suspicious of any male, human or not." I saw the idea float over his face. "Were all the men human?"