Chapter 19

S ame night sky. Same bonfire. Same dance. Same laughter.

If the eerie monotony of it broke me out in chills, how much worse must it be for those trapped here?

Whatever refuge the Morgans had envisioned for these bruised and battered souls, this couldn’t have been it. This was another form of torture. Perhaps not physical but mental for certain. These women had lived in fear, and now they lived in terror.

“We stick together.” Vi walked up beside me. “We start at the fire.”

“No.” I sensed a low hum in my bones. “Not there.” I stepped forward and was rewarded with a stronger resonance. “This way.” I retraced my steps from our first visit, ducking into the brush where Tameka had brought me to beg for her daughter’s life, and discovered a campground littered with tents. “Here.”

Women armed with knives and guns and flashlights—so many flashlights—patrolled the perimeter.

One of them I recognized. Keshawn. The remnants of her intricate braids were tangled atop her head as if she had given up on styling her hair or even washing herself.

Since Keshawn wasn’t able to see me, I skipped over her and went in search of her mother.

Most of the residents were sleeping. The ones who weren’t had gone to bed only to stare at the ceiling. I imagined they were the ones fresh off their shifts, too worked up for rest, but a few sported dark circles under their eyes that convinced me this was part of their nightly routine.

The lying awake. The wondering who would be next. The fear it would be them or someone they loved.

We searched the tents and surrounding area before soft conversation drew us to a small gathering in a makeshift cemetery. Five women stood over what appeared to be the most recent grave, though it must have been days old now, supporting a woman who sat in the mud with no care for her clothes, her head braced on her knees.

Stinging energy swept through me, and I sensed without turning that Tameka had appeared behind me. “How many have died?”

“Too many,” she rasped, frailer than the last time I saw her.

Jerking her head for us to follow, Tameka led us into a tent she zipped behind us.

“I don’t have much time, but we know what’s been preying on the women here.” I did my best to sit, but I must have resembled a drifting balloon. “A divine beast. A goddess named Anunit. She bound herself to the bones of her kin, and when the Morgans began stealing them, she was summoned to fulfill her oath of protection.” I saved the worst for last. “Anunit will take one life every night until the bones have been returned to their proper resting place.”

“Speak to the Morgans,” Vi told her. “Convince them what must be done.”

Vi tapped her finger on my palm to remind me time was running out.

“Do this for me,” I bargained, “and I’ll wipe Keshawn’s debt clean. The ward will fall, you will come to the shop, and you will return the loaner. Then we’ll be even.”

“I’ll do it.” Eyes bright with unshed tears, she sprang to her feet. “I’ll go now.” She reached for my hands but couldn’t touch them. “I can’t thank you enough for this. Really, Frankie. Thank you.”

Seeing as how no one had been afraid of me a day in my life, the urgency edging her actions, her fraught desperation to please me, I attributed to the obsidian corona marking me as someone she ought to fear.

And I hated how different her treatment made me feel.

“I’ll be back in two hours.” I checked with Vi, who frowned when she realized I planned to skip the nap and recharge via magic yet again but nodded. “Have their answer ready for me then.”

“I can’t promise anything.” She fisted the tent zipper. “I’ll do my best, though.”

“The bones are the cost of Keshawn’s pardon,” Vi said, sparing me from being the bad guy.

“Then you’ll have the bones.” Newfound determination carved hollows in her cheeks. “With or without the Morgans’ blessing.”

Striding out with a sense of purpose, Tameka set herself to her task.

“We have a few minutes left,” Vi told me in the quiet. “Do you want to locate the Morgans? Get their take on this latest attack?”

“Good idea.”

We retraced our earlier steps, but the sisters seemed to have vanished into thin air. Vi and I only had so much time left, and the commune encompassed a large tract of land. We couldn’t search it all. That meant ditching the Morgans to focus on another problem.

“I can’t sense the bones from outside the ward.” I had been turning that over in my head for a while now. The Plan B to save us from the promised death branded onto anyone who touched those bones. “I need to determine if I can sense them now that we’re on the inside. Watch my back?”

There had been no immediate indicator pinging in my head, but with so much magic thick in the air, and so many bones in play, I might not be able to distinguish individual signatures.

The tree, at least, would be easy to locate since the Morgans weren’t keeping its location—only its purpose—secret.

“Of course.”

Together we walked until we reached the ward and then we edged along its rippling surface until I felt Kierce caressing my hand in a plea to return to him. Time was up. Again. I should have gone with Tameka. They couldn’t see or hear me, but I could have helped her present an argument to the Morgans complete with a firsthand account. This had been a waste of…

A cold presence began thrumming in my head. “Do you feel that?”

“All I feel is Rollo counting down the minutes on my wrist.” She scanned the area. “What do you sense?”

Allowing the hum to guide me, I walked until the cold turned to ice and pierced me. “Bones.”

About to kneel and investigate for signs of the bones, I bent my legs…and tumbled forward into nothing.

“Damn it,” I muttered, jerking upright in bed to find my arm stuck in one of Matty’s long socks that had been tugged up past my elbow. Flexing my fingers, I discovered it was filled with…dirt?

How long had I been out? Had I missed my window to meet with Tameka?

There was only one way to find out, and it involved dragging my sorry carcass out from under the covers.

I tensed as movement fluttered near the window, jerking as Badb lit on the tall headboard behind me.

“Hey.” After freeing myself, I scratched under her chin. “Where did Kierce get off to?”

Nibbling on my finger with her beak, she chased me out of bed and into the kitchen where a brown bag I recognized as coming from a local diner leaked congealed grease on the table. The crow ripped a tear in the side of the paper, revealing two clamshell containers that smelled like heaven had been scooped into them. I breathed in deep, filling my lungs, and noticed a small detail she was usually too clever to forget.

The receipt.

Ripping it off the bag, I read the name of the intended recipient and gasped, “How could you?”

Badb decided to clean her feathers rather than answer, which was about what I expected from her.

“You hate Mr. Mittens. I respect that. I do. But this is going too far.”

Mr. Mittens, the cat, lived one street over. His owners lavished him with gifts. Or they would have, if she hadn’t stolen a solid half of them for herself. She kept her thefts confined to punishing Mr. Mittens, but I could tell something had changed that put his owners on her naughty list right alongside him.

“I will eat this.” I was magnanimous about it. “Because I don’t want it to go to waste.” And also because it smelled delicious. “Then we’re going to talk to Kierce about boundaries.”

I gobbled down her gift then showered and dressed before searching out other signs of life.

A commotion in the parking lot drew me down to check on Kierce, who stood beside the golf cart.

The hyena cackling beside him was definitely Matty, which meant Kierce had performed the switcheroo.

Uncertain how I felt about that becoming a habit, I moseyed on down to find out what set Matty off.

“You boys having car trouble?” I cocked an eyebrow. “Anything I can do to help?”

“You could maybe not tell Josie that Kierce committed vehicular shrubslaughter?” Matty wiped tears from his eyes. “That shrub came out of nowhere.” He tried and failed to pull himself together. “It wasn’t Kierce’s fault.”

“A possum crossed in front of me,” Kierce mumbled, looking anywhere other than at me.

“And Kierce proved the brakes do, in fact, work.” Matty slapped him on the back. “He saved us from a dangerous collision.”

The top speed of a golf cart might be thirty miles per hour. Cut that in half for the one he was driving. An accident at fifteen miles per hour was more jarring than most people realized, especially without a seat belt to protect them.

Forearms braced on the roof, sweat on his brow, Kierce slanted Matty a glance. “You’re mocking me.”

“In this family…” he backed away grinning, “…that’s how we show love.”

“I would ask if you’re okay,” I said as Matty passed me, “but you must be if you’re tormenting Kierce.”

“There are things for which I will always have energy, and that is one of them.”

“You sound fancy.” I squinted at him. “Who are you seeing tonight?”

Much like the Buckley Boys, whose accents thickened when excitement made them forget to enunciate, Matty often embraced his chameleonic nature to set his dates at ease. Since he avoided relationships, he never had to come clean about, well, much of anything, really.

“A soon-to-be SCAD grad who invited me to watch her performance in a Broadway melody.”

Savannah College of Art and Design was the SCAD in question, but he didn’t usually go for performers. Even if he was a bit of one himself.

Humming a showtune, he climbed the stairs to prep for his night out as I went to inspect the damage.

“The good news is, the golf cart was already in such bad shape, I can’t tell anything happened to it.”

More interested in me than the cart, Kierce asked, “What’s the bad news?”

“There’s definitely a limb stuck in the undercarriage, so Paco will know when he spots it first thing.”

“I froze when I saw the possum. Matty started yelling at me to swerve. I did, and then he was screaming at me to stay on the road.” Kierce rested his forehead on his forearms. “I am a failure.”

“You’re learning. Learning takes time.” I stepped behind him and linked my arms around his waist, resting my face against his back. “You can pop in and out in a blink. You don’t have to do this.”

“I want to help you, and that means mastering this machine.”

Because Matty couldn’t blink from here to there and back again like Kierce, and Kierce couldn’t take people with him when he did it.

“Thank you for handling the drop-off,” I ventured. “The sock idea was inspired. I’ll have to remember that trick.”

“You’re welcome, though I might have done more harm than good with the golf cart.”

“We have to make mistakes to learn from them.” I chuckled at his obvious disappointment. “You’re trying, and that’s more than anyone else has ever done for me.” I lifted a finger. “More than any guy, anyway.”

“I’m glad.” A frown settled onto his face. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Oh? Let’s walk and talk.” I set out in the direction of the garden. “What’s bothering you?”

“The bones.”

“Ah.” I slowed down to straighten a tomato cage. “What specifically?”

“I am…thorough…in my duties.” He addressed a shining fruit. “No mortal knows of the burial ground.”

That sounded a lot like he was confessing to multiple cleanups in the wake of previous discoveries. But if he feared scaring me away by admitting to atrocities, he didn’t know me very well.

Kierce was bruised by the world’s rough handling. The gods’ too. That was why he retreated from the chaos of our world into the static existence of his. He wanted no part of Earth or its people. But I sensed no malicious intent in him. Just because he had no interest in humans didn’t mean he wanted them dead.

No.

I saw Dis Pater in this. His crimson fingerprints smeared those crime scenes.

Kierce might be his instrument, but I doubted Kierce would call what Dis Pater required of him justice.

And he would dismiss me if I told him I could accept the dark parts of his past while also asking him to dim himself. Did he view it as me picking and choosing what pieces of him I found worthy? Desirable? Was he still half convinced I was intrigued by his legend, the myths of all those who had come before him, rather than him?

There was only one path forward. If I wanted this to work, I had to try harder at accepting more than his god aspect. How I made peace with his zoomorphic appearance before his divine radiance probably said a lot about me. What, I didn’t know. But definitely something.

“You want to know how the Morgans knew where to find the bones.” I decided not to play into those deep-seated fears, uncertain if they were his or mine. “You’re worried they didn’t stumble across them but that someone told them where to go.”

And I had an excellent guess as to the culprit.

Someone who intercepted prayers and answered them to suit himself.

Someone who thrived on twisting the heart’s wishes into dread.

Someone whose help cost more than anyone could afford.

“Yes.” Kierce rubbed a leaf between his fingers. “I am.”

“They have Ankou’s tree.” I was certain of it. “Who’s to say this wasn’t all his idea?”

“He shouldn’t be strong enough to appear to them yet, but the tree is a powerful conduit.”

Mention of the Morgans reminded me. “What time is it?”

“You slept for ninety minutes.”

“That sounds weirdly precise.”

“Vi told me you would return to the commune in two hours, so I asked Badb to wake you at a certain time by matching the number I wrote on a pad of paper to the stopwatch app I left running on my phone.”

“Smart.” I grinned. “You and her.”

“Thank you,” he said dryly, his gaze lifting to spot her in the night sky.

Now that I was running on all cylinders again, I had to check on how well Tameka had done her job convincing the older women to return what they had stolen before more was taken from them.

“Let’s hope the Morgans are more forthcoming after Tameka offers them a solution.”

“Frankie.” He still hadn’t looked at me. “This situation is spiraling beyond our ability to contain it.”

“The thing about the modern age that old gods might not appreciate is the transfer of information is instant. Proof is a snapshot and text message away. Evidence is a video on your phone you email a colleague. It’s not like the olden days when you could smite a whole village and be done with it. There are digital trails, ones a technomancer can’t fully erase. There are eyewitnesses to the scene and the crimes. How is a god like Dis Pater—who’s always typing away on his laptop—not aware of this?”

“There are lines the gods honor and lines the gods cross. Their logic is unfathomable.”

“You’re saying they do what they want and justify it any way they want, and no one can fight back.”

“Yes,” he said softly. “Some are too weary to even try.”

“Good thing you’re not one of them.” I wouldn’t let him be. “We have a deal. We’re going to handle this. I’m not one hundred percent sure how yet, but one problem at a time. First we have to find out if the Morgans want to do this the easy way or the hard way.”

The grit in my tone, or maybe his inclusion in my plans, brought his attention swinging to me and affixed it onto my face. “I admire the fight in you.”

A flush threatened me, but I did my best to play it cool when he looked at me in something like awe.

“Yes, well, blame it on having siblings. You can’t spend your whole life knocking heads together at home, hoping it smacks some sense into them, but not apply it to the outside world as well.”

That wasn’t entirely true, but standing between Matty and Josie—my two extremists—had made me an unwitting middle ground that refused to be tread on. The habit of mediation did work small miracles in a customer service industry like ours, but I hadn’t inflicted the talent on anyone else without invitation.

The good people of Commune Doom were about to count themselves among the first.

“You remind me of…” his brow furrowed, “…I’m not quite sure.”

A smidgen of jealousy threatened to stain his earlier compliment, but the persistent ring of my phone forced me to check the ID, which told me it was Carter. “Hey.”

“We found our missing officers.”

“You didn’t say alive, so is it safe to assume they’re dead?”

“Kim was eaten by your creature, probably the same day she went missing. Her remains were found in a tree, as if cached there. Tate died the night before last, after emptying her service weapon. We found holes in tree trunks from the bullets, but there were no signs of blood. Either she didn’t hit the target or…”

“She hit the target, but it didn’t matter.” Anunit could be as substantial or insubstantial as she chose. Her paw prints, or lack thereof, proved she could materialize at will or slink about immaterial and invisible to the eyes of anyone who lacked the ability to perceive the dead. “I’m sorry, Carter.”

Anunit likely gave precedence to victims caught in the act over those already in the commune. Those were trapped like fish in an aquarium she could scoop out as necessary to meet her quota.

“Me too,” she said gruffly. “We have to stop this thing before it takes more lives.”

This thing. The angry words ruffled my feathers for no good reason. Anunit was protecting her family. As a victim of a purging that cost Anunit her entire species—pantheon?—I couldn’t blame her for what she had done to keep them safe in death the way she must have felt she failed to do in life. But more death wasn’t the answer. The scales of justice don’t balance with the more atrocities you heaped on them.

“You mentioned an inside source.” She stirred me from my thoughts. “How did that pan out?”

“That has yet to be determined. I should have an answer for you soon. Just not yet.”

“You’re not in danger, are you?”

“Not exactly,” I hedged, aware she could leak details to my sister.

“Frankie,” she warned in her best redcap voice.

“Oh.” I faked brightness and enthusiasm. “I see a customer. Gotta go. Byeee.”

“There is no customer. The shop is closed.” Kierce appeared to consider this. “You lied to Carter.”

Carter wouldn’t buy it for a minute. She knew our shop hours too well. But it did get me off the call fast.

“I did.” I winced under his questioning gaze. “I need answers before I drag her into this.”

The more she knew, the harder it would be for a witch to wipe her mind. Assuming a witch could erase a fae’s memories. Carter was old. How old, I didn’t know, but old . With age came certainty of your identity and an expectation of behavior. Carter’s mind would rebel against any inconsistencies, and a rebellious mind could cost Carter her life.

Appearing to catalog this reasoning, he tipped his head to one side. “That’s acceptable?”

Afraid I had taught him a new trick—that lying was okay to protect loved ones—I backpedaled. Fast.

“Between me and you? No. A relationship can’t survive lies, even when they’re meant well.”

The tightness in his expression smoothed before it finished gathering. “I agree.”

“Good.” I rubbed my face, tired all of a sudden. “Maybe I shouldn’t have suggested a walk.”

“You’re exhausted.” He pulled my hands away. “You’re spending too much time outside your body.”

Part of me wondered if that was why I shone brighter—I was loosening my soul’s tether to its shell.

Not the best mental picture to hold in my head when I had more trips to make before I was done.

“I hope I have a solution for that.” I quirked my lips. “We need to learn the Morgans’ ruling first.”

Uncertainty warred across his features. “What happens after that?”

“Tameka buys her daughter’s forgiveness by digging up the bones from inside the commune.”

Not gonna lie. I felt dirty phrasing it that way. I felt worse realizing that was how it had to be.

More than the hurt her daughter stealing a loaner would do to my reputation, lives were on the line here. I couldn’t turn away from the women and children inside the ward with no way out. I had to act, even if it grated on me how I achieved the action.

“The person who set the ward will sense when it begins to falter.”

That was the problem rolling around in my head too. “Could Tameka make a gap to weaken it?”

There would be a reckoning long before she dismantled the entire barrier. I had known that. But she had the best chance out of anyone. There must be a way to use her to our best advantage. The biggest one, I had to admit, was even more mercenary.

Tameka was dead. She couldn’t be killed again. The Morgans couldn’t harm her, and neither could Anunit.

That not-quite-invincibility, paired with her desperation to save her daughter, made her motivated too.

“If she starts on the farthest edge of the commune, she might have time to dig up two or three bones.” He considered this with a frown. “The person maintaining the ward will pinpoint the issue in minutes, but enough distance would buy her time before they caught up to her.”

“I didn’t notice motorized vehicles on the inside,” I murmured. “They would have to track her on foot.”

That would give her a head start if she moved fast enough.

“Holding the bones will make her a target in more ways than one.”

“Anunit will notice her too, especially if she carries them on her person.”

Scenarios poured through my head, visions of how it could all go wrong, including what I would tell Camaro’s family if I returned her to them in pieces. The other family business was falling apart and falling to the wayside as this divine drama disrupted our lives.

From the time my powers manifested, and I learned who the Society was—and what they did to people like me—I had lived on the fringes. I had kept my head down and been careful to only offer services they deemed beneath them or were incapable of providing. That was my comfort zone. Not this.

To blackmail and coerce good people in bad circumstances wasn’t me.

But I was doing it anyway.

“You don’t want to force her.” Kierce dipped his chin. “I wish there was a better way.”

“Me too.”

Ready or not, it was time to return to Commune Doom.