Nightside 07 - Hell to Pay

something like that are mostly right here in this room.”
    “Have you talked with Paul?” said Eleanor, not looking at me.
    “I spoke with Polly,” I said carefully. “I heard her sing. She’s got a really good voice.”
    “I’ve never heard Polly sing,” said Eleanor. “I can’t go to the club. Paul mustn’t know…that I know about Polly.”
    She led me back to William, who was standing alone now. The Sea Goat and Bruin Bear were presumably off getting into trouble somewhere else. William scowled ungraciously at Eleanor as we came to a halt before him. All the old sullenness was back in his face.
    “Whatever she’s been telling you about me, don’t believe a word of it,” he snapped. “Hell, don’t believe anything she tells you. Dear Eleanor always has her own agenda.”
    Eleanor smiled sweetly at him. “Name one person in our family who doesn’t, brother dear. Even sweet saintly Melissa had her own life, kept strictly separate from the rest of us.”
    “A secret life?” I said. “You mean like Paul?”
    “No-one knows,” said Eleanor. “She always was a very private little girl.”
    “Best way, in this family,” growled William. “People find out your secrets in this place, they use them against you.”
    They fell to squabbling then, rehearsing old hurts and grievances and wounds that had never been allowed to heal, and I just tuned them out. So Melissa had a secret life, so private that none of them had even thought to mention it before. Perhaps because no-one in this family liked to admit to not knowing something.
    I looked round the ballroom. The party seemed to be going well enough, but I was interested in the other Griffins. Jeremiah was right at the centre of things, of course, holding court before a large group who gave every indication of hanging on his every word. Mariah paraded back and forth through her artificial rose garden, accepting and bestowing compliments, in her element at last. I couldn’t see Marcel or Gloria anywhere, but it was a really big garden. So if I wanted to learn any more about Melissa’s secret life, I was going to have to dig it out of Eleanor and William.
    “Have you told him yet?” said William, in a very pointed way, and I started paying attention again.
    “I was working up to it,” said Eleanor. “It’s not the sort of thing you can just spring on someone, is it?” She turned to me, forcing the anger out of her face through sheer force of will, and in a moment she was all smiles and charm again. “John, we need you to do something for us.”
    “Set up the security field first,” William interrupted.
    “No-one can hear us in all this babble,” said Eleanor. “And a privacy shield might be noticed.”
    “This isn’t the sort of thing we can afford to have overheard,” said William. “Better for someone to be suspicious than for anyone to know .”
    “All right, all right!”
    She glanced unobtrusively around her and produced a small charm of carved bone from a concealed pocket. She clutched it in her fist, muttered an activating spell, and the background noise faded quickly away to nothing. I could see lips moving all around me, but not a whisper got through the shield; or, presumably, out. Our privacy was ensured. Until somebody noticed. I looked curiously at William and Eleanor, and they looked back at me with a kind of stubborn desperation in their faces. And I suddenly knew that whatever they were going to ask me, it had nothing at all to do with Melissa.
    “What would it take,” Eleanor said carefully, “for you to kill our father for us?”
    I looked at them both in silence for a long moment. Whatever I’d expected them to say, that wasn’t it.
    “You’re the only man who might stand a chance,” said William. “You can get close to him, where no-one else could.”
    “We’ve heard about some of the things you did,” said Eleanor. “During the Lilith War.”
    “Everyone says you did things no-one else could,” said William. “In the War.”
    “You want me to murder Jeremiah?” I said. “Why exactly would you want me to do that?”
    “To be free,” said William, and his gaze was so intense it seemed to bore right through me. “You have no idea what it’s like, having lived in his shadow for so long. My whole life controlled, and ruined, by him. You’ve seen the lengths I have to go to simply to feel free for a time.”
    “With him gone, we could live our own lives, at last,” said Eleanor. “It’s