Rooke’s words came easily, and it felt as if he was being honest, but I wished Lon could verify it for me. I briefly glanced over my shoulder to spy him talking with Evie, who was smiling and using sweeping hand gestures to point out things along the path. I supposed if Lon heard something in her emotions to raise his hackles, he’d let me know.

“What exactly did the detective want to know about me?” I asked Rooke.

“If I knew whether you were alive and, if so, where you’d been hiding. As I said, I suspected you might be alive when I saw the Duvals on the news. But it was just a passing curiosity, and I didn’t care one way or another, to be perfectly honest. No offense.”

“None taken. What else did he want to know?”

“Mostly about your parents. How well I knew them, for how long, whether I believed they were capable of all those killings.”

“Believe me, they were.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, my dear. Enola was one of the reasons I left the order.”

“I remember you fighting with my parents. And with the caliph.”

Rooke sniffled and glanced at me. “You heard he passed away last month?”

I nodded stiffly.

“Made me sad to hear it, frankly. I don’t know how he’s fared over the last decade, but when I knew him, the caliph was a decent man.”

“Not decent enough to keep you in the order?”

“He wasn’t the reason I left, but I’ll admit that his lack of action frustrated me. He was blinded by his loyalty to Enola and her New Occult Order malarkey. Anyone could see she had no interest in uniting all the orders. She was a power-hungry manipulator who’d use anything at her disposal to get her way—sex, medicinals, dark magick. Nothing was sacred. The E∴E∴ was her playground, and she used every resource it had for her own personal agendas.”

That I could believe.

“Even your father was her dupe. I apologize for being frank, but he worshipped the ground she walked on and would’ve done anything she asked, no matter how immoral or dangerous. Enola was a tornado ripping through the order, and Alexander was her one-man cleanup crew, sweeping all the evidence beneath the rug.”

“Even bodies?”

“Takes a special kind of evil to murder your own child.”

“My brother,” I murmured, studying Rooke’s face. “You’re the one who told Wildeye.”

He nodded. “I hadn’t thought about little Victor Duval in years. When I was grandmaster of the Pasadena lodge, I traveled to Florida twice a year, so I saw Victor a handful of times. Your parents proclaimed him the first Moonchild, but he was a sickly child, physically and mentally. I think they knew fairly early on that their conception ritual was a failure.”

“So they killed him?”

The garden path split in front of us. A wrought-iron signpost held two hand-lettered signs, one pointing to a succulent garden, and the other to “Sacred Trees.” Rooke headed toward the trees. “I don’t know for certain, but a rumor circulated among some of the officers. One of the caliph’s magi, Magus Frances—did you ever hear about her?”

“Vaguely. I think she died when I was a toddler.”

He nodded. “Back before you were born, she had a vision during a psychotropic ritual and claimed to have seen your father drowning Victor in a bathtub.”

“Dear God . . .”

“The caliph dismissed it, was furious at Frances for making accusations. Frances wasn’t exactly the most stable of magicians, so the rest of us dismissed it, too. And your parents appeared to be grieving. I didn’t know your mother very well at the time, so I just chalked it up to Frances partaking of one-too-many magic mushrooms.”

“When did you discover her vision was real?”

He pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose. “No one did, to my knowledge. It was only the word of one crazy old magician against your parents’. But as I came to know your mother, I began to wonder.”

“Why? What else did she do?”

“Nothing concrete, really. Just the way she treated people. She was beautiful, and she had this way about her that made you feel as though she were royalty—aloof and bored one moment, ripping you to shreds the next. You never knew what to expect. People secretly called her Queen, comparing her split personality to one of two Lewis Carroll characters. Was she the calculating Red Queen today or the furious Queen of Hearts? We never knew.”

This astounded me. Growing up, I never saw her angry. Not really.

Rooke stooped to pick up a slender broken bough and, after snapping off a few dead branches, wielded it like a walking stick, tapping its tip against the path. “People were frightened of her anger, but it was the coolness that bothered me.”

As I kept an eye on Lon and Evie, Rooke went on to relate a story about my mother unemotionally slapping a teenage boy in the middle of a ritual for flubbing his Latin and another about a time she calmly stabbed a waitress’s arm with a fork after the girl accidentally knocked a glass off the table. When Rooke started a third story, I cut him off.

“You don’t have to convince me that she was damaged,” I said. “I know it firsthand. I’m more interested in the circumstances of my origins, my conception. What can you tell me about the Moonchild spell?”

He lightly tapped the end of his walking stick against an open-mouthed gargoyle molded into the arm of a cement bench. “Ah, yes. Call down a great spirit into the womb, and give birth to a goddess. A classic ritual. I’m assuming you’ve researched my grandfather’s version.”