Chapter 20

T he entire commune was in an uproar, so finding Tameka was easy. She was the one with her hands tied behind her back with rope while Patty quizzed her on what evils she had welcomed inside the ward. I had to admit, it was clever. Blaming her for the deaths of her fellow refugees. Short-sighted, though. As an excuse, it would only buy them twenty-four hours before the others learned the truth.

Unless the Morgans found the victims’ bodies and hid them first.

“You did this to us.” Patricia cast her voice for all to hear. “You brought death within our midst.”

Rosalie, I noticed, elected not to be present. That, or Patty purposely excluded her.

“We only just got here.” Keshawn stood on the fringe with her hands in fists. “What about the ones who died before we arrived? If you had been honest about the threat, if you had sent word through the club, I never would have come.” Her chest heaved. “ I brought my momma here. Why is she being punished?”

“Keshawn…” she gentled her voice, “…you’ve helped women all over the country to relocate during your tours. Tours of duty, we call them.” She softened her features. “You more than earned your place here. So many of the women and children present owe their lives to you.”

“I couldn’t have done it without Mom,” Keshawn protested. “She’s the reason I got to travel?—”

“She might have been a rising star on the monster truck circuit, but you are so much more.”

Might have been.

Not might be.

The reasons for the torches and pitchforks became evident, and I could have kicked myself. Or Keshawn. The Morgans had believed Tameka was alive. The truth must have come out when she went to them to ask for permission to remove the bones to their rightful place. Now that she had given them a doorway, the Morgans would be fools not to walk through it if they had no intention of honoring the request.

“The Morgans are gonna run.” Vi sounded as tired as I felt. “Bet the other one is packing their bags.”

How did they expect to cross the ward? Had they stayed because they could leave at any time? Or had the same person who goaded them into using the bones offered to protect them as part of the bargain?

“We need to defuse this situation more than we need to check escape routes.”

“How do you figure we’re going to do that? Your loaner is the only one who can see us.”

“There is that.” I tunneled my fingers through my hair. “Think, think, think.”

An insane idea sprang to mind that would either fix the problem or create a host of new ones.

“Anunit.” I spread my hands. “We summon her.”

“We’re trying to save these people from her.” Vi had earned her right to sound skeptical of my plan. “Not ring a dinner bell for her.”

“Whether they know it or not, they’ve paid their tithe for today.”

“If you’re sure.”

With an exhale, I willed myself to believe it. “They’re safe from her.”

For now.

“Then let’s do this.” Vi took my hand, and I took hers. “I’ll sing harmony.”

Without candles or lighters or herbs or crystals, I was winging it. I had this knot in my gut, an odd tangle of confidence that I could do this without those props. I was more now than I had been. I had more magic. I could do this. All I had to do was partake in the lifeblood of the gods.

Faith.

Matty, Josie, Vi, Kierce.

They believed in me. Not in a worshipful way—that would be weird—but with a no less profound certainty. And that was before I ascended. Then I was just me .

Searching deep within myself, I identified that shimmer of power in my core and dipped a hand in, allowing the magic to sluice over my skin and drip from my fingertips. I launched into the sweet chorus of a French lullaby Vi had taught me. I suffused it with my will, pictured Anunit in my mind, and sang.

The gathering continued to churn with unrest, the women fearful and uncertain, but I narrowed my focus to Anunit. I prayed she would come, or as near to it as I was able, that she would help us and not decide she felt snackish.

Keshawn screamed, her voice splitting the night in two like kindling after the fall of an ax. Anunit. Her presence weighted my shoulders, lending her mass even as the others couldn’t see her. Vi sucked in a breath and made the sign of the cross.

“Anunit.” I risked it all on my interpretation of her emotional investment in this. “Please, help her.”

“You ask me to reveal myself in front of them.” Her rasping voice slipped through my head with the roughness of a fox tongue. “There is a reason I am an ambush hunter.”

“You can be harmed in your corporeal form, the same as me.” I stiffened my spine. “They’ll scatter if you drop in on their party.” I stepped closer. “All I’m asking for is a distraction.”

“What is this tethered soul worth to you?” Anunit eyed my client. “Her daughter’s life?”

“What’s it worth to you for all your bones to be put safe where they belong?” I jabbed a thumb into my chest. “I can do that.”

Until I said it, really thought about how she was both incorporeal and corporeal, I hadn’t grasped a basic truth. She could have broken the ward, retrieved the bones, and returned them herself. She must be able to sense them. So why hadn’t she?

The binding.

Curse more like it.

“You can’t touch them. You’re as trapped as they are, aren’t you?”

“Magic requires sacrifice. Great magic requires greater sacrifice.”

“To protect the ones you love, you agreed to be this…guardian…but you can’t save yourself.” I thought back on old legends, myths, the bread-and-butter of my childhood. “Someone has to choose to save you. Someone affected by the curse has to be the one to lift it.” I stared at my hands, which had dug bones as surely as the other women. “I qualify.”

“I pardoned you.” She sniffed, but her ears canted forward, alert. “You have nothing to fear from me.”

“Or do I?” I recalled Kierce’s fear and used his logic for my argument. “Did you pardon me for good or only in the moment?”

A gleam lit her eyes, but it was doused almost as fast. “I do not always select my victims. I do not always have the facilities to do so of my own accord. During such times, instinct takes over.”

The warning was clear. I would be stripping off my protection. I would be as vulnerable as the others.

But not quite. I was a demigoddess. There had to be perks to that. Right?

“Your friend needs to decide.” Vi shifted her weight. “They’re about to hamstring her mother.”

Hoping against hope this wasn’t a colossal mistake, I demanded of Anunit, “Do you accept my bargain?”

“Yes,” she hissed into my mind.

Power radiated down her spine, and she stepped from the spirit plane to the earthen one, taking form before the crowd.

Screams assailed us in an instant. The women scattered like ants after someone stomped on their hill. Their warnings rang out, alerting others to the danger. More than half of them, by my estimation, had stayed behind with their children.

The ensuing chaos accomplished the immediate goal of sparing Tameka, but I had lost sight of Anunit.

Vi and I rushed to Tameka, but it wasn’t like we could untie her.

“Mom.”

Fear brightened Tameka’s gaze as Keshawn fought against the surge of bodies to reach her.

“Hide,” Tameka pleaded with Keshawn. “You can’t stay out here in the open.”

“I’m not leaving without you.” Keshawn stepped up behind her mother, using a knife from her pocket to cut her free. “You can forget that.” She embraced the loaner with hot tears rolling down her cheeks. “It’s my fault we’re in this mess. I’m so sorry. I was selfish, and now…” Her bottom lip trembled. “I’m scared.”

“It’s going to be okay.” Tameka broke the embrace and hauled her daughter away. “I know what to do.”

“Let me help.” Keshawn clung to her mother’s hand like a small child. “Please.”

Vi and I were right behind them, and I had to admit, “Two sets of hands are better than one.”

A warning and a plea filled Tameka’s voice. “Frankie…”

“Frankie?” Keshawn dug in her heels. “She’s here?” She glanced around. “Can she help us?”

Had I not been on the receiving end of similar dressing-downs as the one Keshawn gave me the day she kidnapped her mother from The Body Shop parking lot, I might have indulged the speck of pettiness left in me that encouraged me to throw her words back at her. I could remind her I was a charlatan, a fake, a scam artist who preyed on the grieving.

But I had been intimate with death for so long, I didn’t have it in me to blame those experiencing their first great loss for the things they said or did. Within reason. My only gripe with Keshawn was that she had stolen Camaro when she took her mother.

“Only in spirit.” Tameka dragged her daughter back into motion. “She came to tell me how to get us out of here.” Her sense of direction was better than mine. No doubt the result of searching for ways out. She aimed straight for the location where I found the first bone. “We have to dig up the anchors the Morgans used to create the ward.”

“You want to collapse the ward?” Her mouth fell open. “If we do that, the commune…”

“This place was a good idea, but it was made the wrong way. Until the bones have been returned to the graves the Morgans stole them from, people will keep dying.” Tameka dropped to her knees, using her daughter’s knife to dig. “This is no utopia. It’s a slaughterhouse.”

Keshawn stood frozen behind her mother when she should have been falling to her knees to atone. That was a problem for someone who could speak to her, and that someone wasn’t me. Instead of pressuring Tameka, I turned my attention toward locating the next bone.

“Dad beat you.”

Now it was Tameka frozen in place, but she thawed just as quickly. “Who told you that?”

“Grams.” Keshawn shook off her daze. “She warned me about men when I was old enough. She always thought it was her fault you stayed with Dad, because she stayed with Grandpa.” She lowered herself next to her mother. “Even after she had you, she couldn’t escape him. They got married out of high school. She didn’t have an education, a job, or money. She couldn’t support you on her own. Then you showed up on her doorstep bruised with a baby in tow, and she promised herself it wouldn’t happen again. That the cycle would be broken with me. The beatings, the threats, the psychological abuse.”

“She had no right to lay that on you.” Tameka dug harder and faster. “Our choices weren’t your fault.”

“They weren’t yours either.” Keshawn found a stick and got to work. “You had no good ones.”

“I could have left sooner. I should have left sooner. I saw what Daddy did to Momma.”

“And you internalized it. Part of you grew up believing that was just how it is. It was like that for so many of the people you grew up with. Same for Grams. You both normalized it. You lived it every day. How could you not?”

“I’m starting to regret paying for those psych classes,” Tameka mumbled. “Don’t analyze your mother.”

“It’s rude,” they said together, as if this conversation was familiar then faced each other and smiled for a precious few seconds before returning to the task.

A shadow had fallen across Vi’s features as she listened to the mother and daughter go back and forth.

She was no stranger to domestic abuse, having set broken arms for her neighbors and wept tears of rage with her friends. I had witnessed both during my time in New Orleans under her roof. Yet she had never, to my knowledge, abused her power to exact revenge on behalf of those who had been hurt.

She did use some of her money, which was its own kind of power, to get the ones who wanted lawyers the best representation she could afford. More often than not, it was in vain. The victims returned to the abusers who refused to let them go.

That was the cycle Keshawn’s grandmother wanted broken. That was the fire she had lit in this girl’s soul. That was the generational power of women lifting up women, and it was beautiful.

“I see your thoughts all over your face, cher .”

“I’ll pay for her to relocate to the Quarter, if she’ll go.” I kept my voice down to avoid distracting Tameka with problems for another day. “What do you think?”

“The girl doesn’t have the gift. That much is clear.” Vi pursed her lips. “Just because she can’t apprentice doesn’t mean we can’t put her to work. We can find ways to help her help others that won’t end in tears and blood. If she wants it. I ain’t making nobody do nothing. That’s the quickest way to get nowhere fast. I don’t want more trouble than I’ve got on my doorstep.” She pinched the back of my arm, and I yelped. “And don’t go thinking I mean you.”

“I found it.” Keshawn held up a bone the length of her palm. “What do I do with it?”

“You give it here.” Tameka crammed it in her pants pocket. “Where next?”

The question had been addressed to me, and I had my answer ready. “Twelve feet to your right.”

The women hustled to the spot, Tameka directing her daughter as I, in turn, gave her instruction.

Once I had them settled into their tasks, I took a chance on contacting Anunit from a short distance.

“You’ve spent more time among these women than anyone else. Do you know who told them about the burial ground? The Morgans couldn’t have just stumble across it. They must have planned for it.”

“I woke when the first bone left the safety of its resting place. I do not know what came before. There is a darkness in this place that is not of me or of my doing. The Morgans go there each night, behind a ward I cannot penetrate. They return in the morning full of purpose and magic, their breath heavy with apples they refuse to share with the others.”

Fresh screams rose behind us, from the direction of the bonfire, and Anunit fell silent in my head.

“We need to hurry along.” Vi rubbed her hands. “I’ll stay with Keshawn. You take Tameka down one.”

“All right.” I angled myself in Tameka’s line of sight. “Come with me.”

A brief hesitation tensed her shoulders, but the panicked cries must have convinced her to listen.

“This one feels bigger than the others.” I paced as she dug, wishing for substance. “Be careful with it.”

“Got it,” Keshawn hollered behind us, tugging a thighbone from the dirt.

“Go on down.” Vi walked with Keshawn to Tameka, her hands shooting out a few times to help the girl with her burden before cursing her own limitations. “We’ll finish here. You get Tameka started on the next one. We only need maybe two more.”

I couldn’t fault her logic, not when Keshawn couldn’t hear or see us to take our cues. It was better for us if I directed Tameka where to begin then we let Keshawn come behind us. As yelling and weeping grew, I found myself fisting my hair and tugging with frustration. I couldn’t do anything but course correct when Tameka got too far to one side or the other.

God, I was unraveling as Anunit roared and chased the others, who must be scared out of their wits.

A warm, steady pressure in my hand sent my fingers curling into my palm. “Almost time.”

“Five minutes.” Vi leaned over Keshawn’s shoulder. “She’s got the last one.”

Rocking back on her heels, Tameka wiped the sweat from her brow. “Where do we hide them, Frankie?”

“Somewhere remote.” We couldn’t risk someone else finding them. “Keep watch over them.”

Gathering the bones, Tameka watched her daughter unearth her last one. “When will you be back?”

“An hour.” I balled my fists, hating I had no better answer. “I’ll send people sooner, if I can.”

Astral travel was quicker, but we needed all hands on deck. That meant I had to come in person. With as much backup as I could beg, borrow, or steal.

“An hour.” Tameka drew herself up taller. “We can make it that long.”

Determination hardened Keshawn’s jaw as she did her best to meet my stare where she figured my eyes would be. “Thank you for this, Frankie.”

About to tell her she had more than earned her way into my good graces, I spied a pair of yellow slits glowing in the darkness.

Gone was the intelligent spark in Anunit’s eyes. Wildness stared back at me, her lip quivering over her teeth.

“No.” I made it an order. “Anunit.” I slid through Keshawn to stand in front of her. “Stop.”

A growl revved up her throat, and she leapt as the whirlpool in my stomach twisted me out of time.