Chapter 10

“ B ijou,” a familiar voice singsonged as chapped lips brushed my ear. “Bijou.”

“No.” I swatted at air but couldn’t touch Ankou. “Get away from me.”

“But I like you. You used to like me too. Remember the fun we had?”

“You lied to me. To Josie. To everyone. None of it was real. It was as fake as the skin you wore.”

“Do you really want to pick this fight when your boyfriend hides his true face from you too?”

“It’s not the same.”

“You have no idea how alike we are.”

“No.” I ruffled my hair. “Get out of my head.”

Oxygen flooded my lungs as I gasped awake, clawing at my bed to escape the dream of Ankou.

Bed. I was in my bed. In my apartment.

Safe. I was safe. I was…

…drawing blood on Kierce’s arm from raking my nails at a dream.

Kierce had assumed the position, sitting on my mattress with his back flush against my headboard. His legs bracketed mine where he held me in his arms, my spine to his chest. Before I snapped alert, my head had been resting on his shoulder, judging by the warmth at the base of my skull.

Ankou hadn’t tiptoed into my dreams since I died, and I convinced myself it meant he couldn’t reach me. Either he had been biding his time, waiting for the right moment, or the toll of neutralizing and then metabolizing the death magic had scraped my mental barriers low enough for him to slip in through the cracks of my consciousness.

“Oh, God.” I recoiled from the crimson smears, less sparkly than my own, on my fingertips. “I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t care.” Kierce pulled me back to him. “How do you feel?”

“We need peroxide, antibiotic cream, and bandages.” I wriggled against him. “We need to treat that.”

“Breathe.” He pressed his lips to my temple. “The wounds have already closed.”

A quick glance confirmed he was correct, and my heart slowed from its sprint.

“The good news is—” Matty stepped into my line of sight, jolting me. The look on his face made me consider rushing back to finish hearing what Ankou had to say. “Josie was playing housewife at Carter’s and missed this fiasco.” He walked closer, looming over me. “The bad news is, I was here for the whole thing. You slept for nine hours, Mary, and I couldn’t breach your dreams to check on you. All I could do was sit here and wait for you to wake up so I could yell at you.”

An oneiros barred from my dreams? Had Ankou learned a new trick? “I’m sorry?—”

“Nope.” He mashed a finger to my lips. “You don’t get to talk yet.” He waited until I offered a meek nod. “You never bar your dreams to me. Even the gross ones I wouldn’t force my worst enemy to sit through. If you planned to change that, you would have warned me so I wouldn’t panic. But you didn’t warn me.”

“Mary—”

“Still talking.” He glared at me. “There’s something wrong with you. I can sense it. Josie can too. You haven’t been the same since Kierce carried you out of that train shed with grill marks on you. But we let it go. We gave you space. We gave you time.” He glowered. “What have you given us? A heart attack.”

“I was wrong…” I squinched my eyes, waiting for him to shush me again, but apparently I had been given the floor, “…not to explain things to you and Josie sooner.” I sank back into Kierce’s arms, taking comfort from knowing he could fill in any blanks I left empty. “I’m ready, now, as I’ll ever be.” I wet my lips. “But I would prefer to only say this once.” I inhaled deeply. “Can you get Josie here before I lose my nerve?”

“Already on her way.”

“Okay.” I withdrew from Kierce. “Good.” I smacked my lips. “I need to drink a gallon of water and take a shower before she gets here.”

“Keep the door cracked, so we can hear if you try to escape out the window,” Matty grumbled, tapping a foot. “We both know I’m not afraid of dragging you in here naked to face the firing squad.”

A peculiar look crossed Kierce’s face, but Matty just shrugged at his expression.

“Part of the psychological trauma of having siblings is you’re bound to see them naked at some point.” Matty massaged his temples. “There’s not enough therapy in the world to heal some memories.”

That explanation didn’t appear to answer Kierce’s unspoken question, so I tried my luck.

“Josie, being a dryad, was a nudist as a child.” I snorted at the reminder of her youthful shenanigans. “She could strip so fast, it was like magic. She would be talking to you one minute and then bam . Naked as the day she was born.”

“We spent a lot of hours wrestling her into clothes before the sisters caught her.” Matty turned somber. “The punishment was…” He shook his head. “Josie couldn’t help it. She came into her powers young and had no one to teach her. She took what plants told her as gospel. Including when they shared stories the oldest trees recalled about nymphs, who danced naked under the moonlight and seduced men. God only knows what other ideas they put in her head.”

“She was too young to grasp the difference between nymphs and dryads.”

“Frankie and I were kids too. We didn’t have the answers.” He shared a pained glance with me. “All we knew for certain was, the sisters would punish Josie if they glimpsed her ‘wicked heathen’ wildness.” A shudder rippled through his limbs. “Which meant we both became expert-level naked-sister wranglers.”

Thankfully, she grew out of the worst of it before her preteen years.

“Frankie hasn’t told me much,” Kierce hedged, “about your time as children.”

A creeping dread swept through me at the reminder. “Nothing to tell, really.”

“Mary,” Matty scolded me. “You know that’s not true.”

Tales of our childhood at St. Mary’s Home for Children earned me pity from Harrow. Pride came later. But that first slap of shock across his face was the expression that stuck in my memories. I didn’t want that to be the case with Kierce. I didn’t want a matched set of sympathies to bookend my mind.

“You were raised by the Perchten.” Kierce found a wrinkle on the fitted sheet of particular interest then began smoothing it with his fingertips. “The handmaidens of Frau Perchta.”

“What?” Matty and I screeched together.

We had known the sisters were something other . Something terrible. But we never found a name for them.

“How do you know that?” I twisted away from Kierce to goggle at him. “Even we didn’t know that.”

“A spirit told me. Years ago. Decades most likely. I didn’t track time well then.” He dipped his chin lower. “She visited St. Mary’s nightly to watch over her son.”

“Where did you bump into this spirit?” Matty demanded. “Why not tell us this sooner?”

“My god sent me to investigate a string of suspected murders. The victims were all young children. Their souls burned so brightly he couldn’t help but notice the influx. I located St. Mary’s, spoke to what spirits I could find, then confronted the creatures.” He risked a glance at me. “I didn’t mention it, because Frankie hasn’t entrusted that part of her history to me. I didn’t want to obligate her to share.”

“Good answer,” Matty mumbled then his eyes sharpened on Kierce. “Did you see her then?”

“Frankie?” Kierce lingered on my features, as if reassuring himself of his answer. “No.”

“What are Perchten?” I cut to the heart of it. “Who is Frau Perchta?”

“Frau Perchta—or Berchta—was a goddess who cared for the Heimchen, spirits of unbaptized children. She’s an Alpine deity. Sightings of her, or her followers, on this continent are rare. I credit ignorance for why the nuns weren’t identified until after they had done harm.”

“A goddess who cares for children’s spirits?” Matty burst out laughing. “You’re pulling my leg.”

“Wait.” I lifted a hand to quiet Matty. “Hurting kids is how they got identified?”

As the guardians of orphaned children, these Perchten should have been in their element.

“The Catholic church demonized Berchta when it was discovered the people prayed to her to guard their children instead of calling on the Virgin Mary,” Kierce explained. “They renamed her Perchta, and rather than a benevolent goddess, they painted her as a twisted crone with a hooked, metal nose who carried a knife in her skirts to slit the bellies of anyone who disrespected her.”

“Those lies would piss me off too,” Matty said, “but the nuns who raised us weren’t misunderstood. They were straight-up evil.”

“Belief.” I followed the logic. “The scare tactics of the church transformed Berchta from her true self into Perchta.”

Had that been the reason the nuns hid behind their quasi-Catholic personas? Revenge? Mockery? Hatred? Their purpose had been twisted until they became the monsters they once guarded against.

“And, through their belief, Perchta she became,” Kierce agreed, his tone grim.

“These Perchten ate children.” Matty crossed his arms over his chest. “For misbehaving?”

Ours had for certain, but he appeared to struggle with affixing a label onto our childhood nightmares.

“They did,” Kierce confirmed, his expression distant. “Misbehavior was the excuse for punishing children as the Perchten saw fit, yes, but they also despised children who failed to complete chores or disobeyed their orders. A worse fate than the children they would eat was when Perchten slit their bellies, stuffing them with straw and stones.”

Glad to find our tormenters had their limits, I told him, “We never bumped up against that.”

“We were almost counted in that number. If not for Frankie taking us out of there, we would have been.” Matty frowned. “You knew what they were doing. Why not put a stop to it?”

A curious tilt of Kierce’s head proceeded a soft question. “What makes you think I didn’t?”

“St. Mary’s burnt to the ground thirty years ago.” Matty scowled. “The sisters attacked a teenage pyromancer, and he burst into flames. He killed himself in the process, but he took them out with him.”

As if he expected the answer, Kierce nodded. “Where did you hear that?”

“From a kid who was there at the time.” Matty hesitated. “Are you saying it’s not true?”

“How many children were harmed in this sudden explosion of fiery power?”

“None that I know of.” I checked with Matty who agreed that was the story he had heard too. “But we were gone by then, already living on the streets, so it’s hard to say for sure.”

Had Matty not dream-walked into the mind of a boy about his age, one who had picked on him mercilessly before I broke his arm, we wouldn’t have known that much. Had I wondered at how quickly Matty heard the news? Yes. Had I also suspected he had been tormenting his bully in his sleep? Also yes. Did I care he was maybe taking his revenge fantasies a step too far? Nah. Matty might have sparked the occasional nightmare as a child but only when provoked and never anything drastic. He didn’t have the heart for it.

Lucky for him, he had me. I could still recall the oddly satisfying snap of bone if I tried hard enough. Josie wouldn’t have stopped at the boy’s arm, which left me as the henchman of our group to spare others from experiencing the firsthand rage of a murderous dryad.

“Our paths almost crossed then.” Kierce stared at our joined hands. “Strange, isn’t it?”

“Quit being romantic and focus.” Matty horned in. “Are you telling us you did it?”

“What else could I do after identifying the Perchten?” A line bisected his brow. “I destroyed St. Mary’s to conceal their bodies but also to prevent more from taking their places. Lightning kindled the fire, not the self-sacrificing pyromancer hero from your story. The decision left twenty-four children homeless, but I judged the trade to be worthwhile.”

“They were moved into another facility.” I set his mind at ease. “We made sure of it.”

Penance, perhaps, for not doing more for the kids we left behind. They had suffered as much as us Marys, but we hadn’t given them a second thought as we escaped, leaving them trapped there. We had been too afraid of getting caught, of being dragged back to St. Mary’s, never to leave it again.

“Thank you.” Kierce shut his eyes for a moment. “For telling me.”

A yelp shot out of me as the door slammed open, revealing Josie, whose gaze zeroed in on me.

“Start talking.” She blew in like a storm and stomped over to stand next to Matty. “We’ve been patient. We gave you time. We gave you space. We gave you—” Matty whispered in her ear, and she cleared her throat. “I see Mary here read you part of the riot act while I was en route. Let’s skip to when you explain yourself.” She mirrored his pose and began tapping her foot. “Well? What’s up with you? Spit it out.”

So much for the shower. And the drink.

“You might want to sit down for this,” I said weakly, swinging my legs over the edge of the mattress.

“I prefer to loom,” she declined, “the better to instill fear in your heart.”

“I’ve already had too much excitement.” Matty sank onto the floor in front of the bed. “You take over.”

That earned him side-eye from Josie, but she was too worked up to hold still.

“You remember how badly burned I was after the train shed,” I began, my heart kicking up speed.

“Hard to forget.” Josie started pacing. “Aretha said it was a miracle you survived.”

“She more than earned her fee healing you,” Matty agreed. “She worked a miracle.”

“No.” I linked my fingers in my lap. “She was too late.”

“Too late?” Josie’s voice jumped an octave. “What does that mean?”

“Kierce brought you home. Aretha treated you. We were here the whole time.”

Panic sank claws into my chest, and I expanded my lungs. “I didn’t make it.”

“You didn’t make it,” Matty repeated, looking to Josie. “Is she speaking English?”

“I don’t understand.” Her knees wobbled, though, and she joined him on the floor. “Use smaller words.”

Nothing for it but to rip off the bandage. “I died.”

“And Kierce brought you back,” Matty supplied, waiting for me to elaborate.

“No, Mary.” I dropped my chin to my chest. “I died.”

“B-b-but you came back,” Josie babbled. “You’re sitting right there.”

Hand trembling, Matty gripped my knee as if checking to see if I was real. “Are you a vampire?”

“She’s not a… That’s not… No. She can’t be.” Josie lunged at me, capturing my jaw between her palms. “I want to see your teeth, Mary.” She wedged her thumb past my lips. “Open up and flash your fangs.”

“I donth hath fangths,” I mumbled around her fingers.

“She’s not a vampire.” Kierce extracted her more gently than I would have if I had gotten to her first and set her back a few feet. “Necromancers can’t be resuscitated. Not even half-blood necromancers.”

Jabbing a finger of accusation at me, she demanded, “Then what are you?”

Shoulders bowing in, I made myself small. “A demigoddess?”

“You don’t sound convinced.” Matty climbed onto the bed next to me. “Are you sure?”

“There’s no denying it.” Kierce returned to me. “I can perceive the divine energy beneath her skin.”

“You told him before you told us?” Josie deflated. “You get that we don’t care if you’re undead, right?”

“He was there.” I could never forget his rage against Dis Pater. “That’s why he knew before you.”

“She’s as alive as I am,” Kierce said, eliciting the same blank expressions that I had given him.

As much as I would prefer skipping the gory details of how I transitioned, and whose fault it was, I didn’t want to end up in this situation again. I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt because I kept my secrets. I did my best to calm my galloping heart then dove into the story of what had really happened that night.

“A god killed you.” Josie’s fists balled on her lap. “Just to see what would happen?”

“Where do we find him?” Vials of dream sweet appeared on Matty’s palm. “See also: How do you kill a god?”

“Only a god can kill a god.” Kierce shook his head. “They’re truly immortal.”

“They’ll die without any worshippers.” I shut my mouth with an audible click. “Not that we have any way to identify their followers or convince them to switch teams.” I rubbed a finger between my eyes. “They’ve adapted their perception of prayer to intercept enough energy to keep themselves going. Death gods can prey on the beliefs of anyone who visits a cemetery. Their energy seeps into the ground, into the bones, and then into the souls who have chosen to linger.”

“We can’t let him get away with killing our sister,” Matty growled, his sweet disposition slipping.

“You can’t square off against a god and win.” I slung my arm around his thin shoulders. “Especially not a death god. It’s right there in the name.” I hugged him close. “I still eat, sleep, drink, pee, etc. I’m still me. I’m just juiced up and possibly immortal.”

That last bit hit them over the head with a resounding thud, and their reactions were complicated to say the least. Joy Matty wouldn’t be alone. Fear we would lose Josie. Anger this world kept kicking us harder no matter how far we came from where we started at St. Mary’s. And, eventually, acceptance.

Not the real deal. Real acceptance would take time. For all of us.

This was more of a Band-Aid slapped over a crack spreading through the wall of a dam about to burst.

“I’m sorry you didn’t feel like you could tell us.” Josie crawled to me and rested her head on my lap. “I’m a lot. I know I am. You and Matty are saints for putting up with my crap. I can’t keep my mouth shut, and I can’t stop being angry, but I’m here for you, Mary. Always.”

“You have nothing to apologize for.” I raked my fingers through her hair. “This was a me thing. I couldn’t grasp what happened to me, the changes I see in myself.” I had felt myself die. Horribly. Painfully. “I thought I had to accept it, or begin to accept it, before I could break it to you guys.”

“You always think you have to be strong for us.” Matty ruffled my hair. “You can lean on us, Mary. We’re here for you. Next time, maybe bring us your confusion. Let us help you figure things out. You can admit, I don’t know, when you’re scared or mad or hurt.”

“You’re allowed to have feelings,” Josie added. “You’re not some rock the world breaks against before it reaches us. You’re a person. You’re allowed to be confused and admit you don’t have all the answers.”

“It would be a relief.” Matty dragged a hand down his face. “If there were things even you don’t know.”

“I’ll do better,” I promised them. “It’s just hard for me.”

“That’s our fault.” Josie turned her face into my leg. “You became this way for us.”

“I would do anything for you two.” I pinched her arm, and she yelped, jumping back out of my reach. “Including ground your butts and take away your phones for disrespecting me.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Matty slumped against me, his head on my shoulder. “What happens next?”

“Kierce is going to teach me how to god,” I said, “and I’m going to teach him how to people.”

Rubbing the red mark, Josie grinned. “Can I watch?”

A flash of embarrassment threatened to strike before her devious tone reminded me. “You.”

“Meep.” She leapt to her feet and scurried behind the kitchen counter. “The cupcakes were a joke.”

“Not funny.” I stole a pillow off the bed. “You’re going down this time, Mary.”

“I’m so lost.” Matty collected a pillow from the couch. “However, I won’t let that stop me.”

“Two on one isn’t fair,” Josie wailed, darting left and right to avoid our swings.

“She’s right.” Matty smacked me in the back with his pillow. “You scared ten years off my life.”

“Hey.” I retreated under the onslaught. “I apologized, didn’t I?”

“She kissed Kierce,” Josie yelled as a distraction. “She laid a big old smackeroo on him.”

“You kissed Kierce and didn’t tell me?” Matty hesitated, and I whacked him in the face before he got his arms up again. “Actually—” the fabric muted him, “—I’m okay with that. I don’t need or want to know.”

“Yeah, well, I do. I want details.” She climbed onto the counter and began chanting, “Spill, spill, spill.”

“I make food on that.” I recoiled from her grubby bare feet leaving prints on my granite. “Get your butt down from there.”

“You never cook,” Matty pointed out. “You might unbox takeout on that counter but?—”

A firm knock on the door froze the pillow fight, and we fell silent then exchanged loaded glances.

Mouth set in grim lines, Kierce strode toward the door to identify our uninvited guest.

And if I slipped a knife from the butcher block into my palm, well, that was my life lately. No one could blame me for being cautious.