Page 80 of The Exorcism of Faeries

“Just about.”

Just about? Atta scoffed. Crossed her arms. “I’d love to be caught up.”

“Of course,” Sonder directed the words at her. “Let’s just hear what the lad has to say first.”

“I think Lynch has tapped my phone.”

“Wait.” Atta put two fingers to her temple. “Lynch?”

Sonder turned to Atta, “Lynch is in Agamemnon. Along with Vasilios, Kelleher, and”—he gestured toward Gibbs—“this fecker here, which you knew.”

“Hang on. Does that mean Dony and Emmy. . .”

“No,” Gibbs jumped in. “I think Emmy is suspicious of Vasilios, but I don’t believe she knows for certain. Dony?—”

“Is an eejit.”

Gibbs shrugged and agreed with Sonder.

“Now you’re caught up.”

“I don’t believe you,” she accused Sonder.

She watched his jaw tense. “Atta, let the lad say his piece and we can fill in the missing bits after.”

“Ye’, this is sort of important. “What time is it?”

Sonder glanced at his watch. “7:03.”

“It’s already started! Hurry, turn on the news.”

“I don’t have a telly.”

“Christ in a cradle,” Atta muttered. “My room has one.”

“It does?”

“This is your house, isn’t it?”

She caught him shrugging out of the corner of her eye.

The telly was closed in one of the two armoires in her room and she opened the oak doors to reveal it.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Sonder muttered.

Gibbs took the remote Atta offered him and flicked it on. A few staticky channels flitted by until Gibbs stopped on a wide shot of a newswoman gripping a microphone.

“That’s the flat building from today,” Sonder observed, looking at Atta, then Gibbs.

He was right. It was dark out and the building looked less dingy under the cover of night, but it was unmistakably the same place.

“Yes, thank you, Adam. I’m here in front of Sunny Hills Apartment Complex, here to speak with a man who claims his mother was cured of the Plague this morning by two masked individuals.”

“Oh fuck,” Atta and Sonder said in unison.

The camera panned to the lad from that morning, standing there looking nervous in the same clothes he’d had on earlier, but he’d taken off the cap and combed his hair.

“Lisle McDonough, in your own words, tell us what happened today.”

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