“I didn’t say that. I still have a voice. I can still be heard. The old mysteries rest somewhere in my blood and things still happen when I speak. But I don’t control those mysteries. I don’t know that I ever did. They come and go of their own choosing. Mostly they seem to leave us to muddle through our lives as best we can.”

I nod.

“But I will speak to Minisino,” he says. “Perhaps he will listen. Perhaps it will make a difference.”

“That’s all I can ask,” I tell him.

I see Chloë smile.

“You seem disappointed,” she says.

“I’m not. It’s just . . . I’m hearing things I didn’t expect. They make perfect sense, of course, but it’s just . . .”

“Here’s something to remember,” Lucius says. “Respect the old spirits. Even venerate them. But don’t set them above you. The world in which they lived and the one in which we do are no longer the same.”

But a funny thing happens while he tells me that. The room seems to swell with a presence too large to be held by these book-laden walls. Too large to be held by a cousin’s mind.

Then the moment’s gone and it’s only Lucius in the room with me once more. Still massive. Still a big presence. But the scale is so much more normal.

He rises from his seat with a lightness and grace that belies his size.

“Let’s go see the buffalo,” he says. As I get up, he turns to Chloe. “Can you look into this business with Jilly while we’re gone?”

“I will.”

“And Odawa . . .”

“I’ll have Brandon talk to him.”

“I want him alive enough to face trial.”

Chloë nodded, a grim look in her eyes. “That’s why I won’t do it.”

At my upraised eyebrows, Lucius explains, “Chloë was very close to your wife at one time and is deeply resentful that she didn’t live long enough for them to be reconciled once more.”

I want to ask what the rift between them was, but this is neither the time nor the place. For now, I keep my mouth shut and simply follow Lucius as he leaves the library. But when this business with the buffalo is over, I’ll have questions for him.

Instead of taking me back through the house, Lucius leads me down another hall that brings us into a large kitchen. He opens the door and after we go through a summer kitchen and another door, we step out into the Rookery’s backyard. He looks up at the trees, still filled with all those gossiping blackbird cousins.

“I know you were listening,” he says to them. “Now make yourselves useful. Find those bogans for me.”

They rise in a noisy cloud of black wings and fly off in all directions. He turns to me and smiles.