Chapter 3

D emigodhood, of course, had failed to provide me with the one superpower that would save me.

“Why would I…?” Kierce tensed as the purple haze finished solidifying before him. “Hello.”

“Don’t you hello me.” Madam Vionette Fontenot—mentor, friend, and force of nature—gave Kierce no consideration for his status or title. “Step back and let me see what she’s done to herself now.”

“Stay put, Kierce.” I kept my head down and eyes on the grass. “Don’t move.”

“Frankie Talbot, I hear you back there.” Vi drew closer. “I see you too.”

Still hiding behind Kierce’s knees, I yelped when she shoved her head through them to glare at me. “Hi.”

“No, ma’am.” She waggled a finger and sent her bangles clacking. “You have some explaining to do.”

“You okay over there, Frankie?” Carter grunted when a pinecone hit its mark. “Fucking bird.”

“One of her friends has come to visit,” Kierce explained to Carter, ignoring the woman with her head protruding through his knees. “Do you require assistance with Badb?”

“I do not .” She took off one boot and flung it with all her strength. “I have the situation under control.”

Ring-bedecked fingers snapping at the end of my nose brought my attention swinging back to Vi.

“I’m waiting.” A single dark braid escaped the floral wrap on her head. “Start talking.”

“Now isn’t the best time to have this conversation.” I cut my eyes toward Carter. “Call me later?”

“Ha.” She sat back on her haunches, still half in/half out of Kierce. “You wouldn’t answer.”

Unscheduled calls from her, which were as rare as rain in the desert, always quenched my worries. But not this time. I had been trying to avoid trapping myself under her speculative gaze until…I don’t know…our monthly video chat? I couldn’t push it out further without this happening. An in-person scolding.

“Sure, I would,” I lied through my teeth. “I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks.”

That much was true, but those old worries had expired to make room for new ones.

“I haven’t gotten any messages from…” Her face mottled with ire. “I’m going to tan Rollo’s hide.”

“Yes.” I kept right on clinging to Kierce like a barnacle. “Do that.”

“I see you, cher .” She mimed pinching my arm, and I had no trouble recalling the bite of her freakishly strong fingers. “You’re not getting away without explaining this to me.”

“Come back here,” Carter hollered, her voice fading, “and say that to my face, bird.”

Peering around Kierce, who monitored their antics, I watched the crow taunt Carter. Badb lured Carter down the road using the boot Carter had thrown at her as bait, dangling it from her beak just shy of Carter’s grasping fingers.

That was when it hit me. They were moving away from us. Fast.

Badb was giving me privacy. With an irate Vi. Who had yet to break eye contact with me.

“You did this.” I gripped Kierce’s (very nice) thighs and shook him. “You egged Badb on.”

“Me?” He threw out a hand to brace on the wagon. “Badb requires no encouragement to misbehave.”

“Yes.” Of all the times for another layer of his ice to thaw, allowing this teasing side of himself to emerge, he had to melt when I couldn’t enjoy it. “You.”

“Flirting with your boyfriend isn’t going to distract me.” Vi clapped her hands. “Get in the wagon.”

With a swirl of purple motes, she breached the door behind me, landing on the bench, waiting for me.

“Do you mind giving us a minute alone?” I was grateful Kierce helped me stand. “This is gonna get ugly.”

Had Vi been in the flesh, she would have pinched my ear and led me around by it while yelling at me.

Another sensation I had no problem conjuring from my time spent in New Orleans with her.

“I’ll keep an eye on Carter,” Kierce offered. “Make sure Badb doesn’t lead her into oncoming traffic.”

A very inappropriate snort blasted out of my nose, and I cleared my throat. “You are bad .”

“Yes.” The amusement slid off his face, and he angled his chin away from me. “I am.”

That emotional land mine had been buried so deep, I hadn’t felt the activating click when I stepped on it.

“I’m only teasing.” I fisted his shirt and shook him until he cracked a tiny smile. “We’ll pick this up later.” I let him go. “I have to get in there before Vi comes back out here, and nobody wants that. Trust me.”

With his tight nod cramping my stomach, I rounded the wagon and climbed behind the wheel.

“I just put it together,” Vi said softly, her gaze skating between Kierce and me. “I understand now.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.” I hung my head. “I was— am —having trouble with being dead.”

“Dead?” Her shriek rattled the glass. “You died?”

“Wait.” I backpedaled as fast as I could without making things worse. “What did you mean?”

“No.” She gripped my chin between her fingers, or she would have, if she could touch me. Lucky for me, the worst she could do was mime the action, which was threat enough. “What did you mean?”

“I died. Ten days ago.” I bit the inside of my cheek. “But Kierce assures me I’m not actually dead.”

“You’re lit up like a Christmas tree on the spiritual plane, which is how I spotted you all the way from New Orleans.” She released me. “Your powers have been fluctuating, so I wondered if I caught you in flux. I watched for a bit, whenever you were home, but when you didn’t dim, I panicked and rushed over.” She wiped a tear off her cheek. “How?” She scowled at the wet mark on her hand. “How did this happen?”

From start to finish, I told her. All of it. Leaving nothing out.

By the end, I was breathless, and she was sobbing and blaming herself for not being there for me.

“You couldn’t have saved me.” I squeezed her ethereal hand. “Not against a god.”

“I could have tried.” Her nose was swollen, and her eyes were puffy. “You haven’t told anyone?”

“Kierce was there. He knows. Everyone else thinks I survived.”

The all-encompassing light of the divine had blinded us. That was how Harrow ended up getting shot.

“I taught you better than that. You pour that misery around like bourbon sauce on warm bread pudding. The more you share, the less your burden. That is how you survive what would otherwise break you.” An annoyed tear escaped her, and she dashed it away. “Are your powers different? Do you have new ones? Have any of the old ones atrophied?”

Straight into problem-solving mode. She couldn’t help it. Her big heart always kick-started her brain.

“I did mention the part where I haven’t accepted I’m dead, right?”

“Couyon.” Her palm went through my forehead instead of smacking it. “Since when has ignoring a thing made it go away?”

Weakly, I injected hope into my expression. “There’s always a first time?”

“First time for everything like...” she adjusted the bangles on her wrists, “…dating a demigod?”

“He’s more like a god’s personal assistant.” I gaped as it dawned on me. “ That was what you meant?”

Forget the shimmery skin. Forget the blazing aura. Forget death. Kierce was what had caught her eye.

“You haven’t been in a relationship since you came to me.” She twirled a finger in the air. “I’m not blind. I can see the bond forming between you two.”

“On the spirit plane?” I realized my hand had lifted to cover my heart. “What kind of bond?”

Had the summoning mark Kierce placed on me bound us tighter than I thought?

“What do you think?” She thumped my forehead. “Quit distracting me.”

Curious to know more about the bond thing, which was news to me, I let her get back to her point.

“He can teach you.” She cut him a glance. “That man is ancient.” A frown tugged at her mouth. “Anything worth knowing, he can tell you.” Her eyes grew darker. “The aura of death surrounds him.”

“He does work for Dis Pater.” I spat out the name. “The god who killed me.”

“I don’t like this.” She thinned her lips. “You need to find out who possessed his crow to feed you intel.”

More like find out if it had really been Badb or another god, etc., appearing to me in a form I would trust. I might have questioned it more had I not been suffering from a concussion, but then I was dead, and all my curiosity burned up along with the flesh off my bones.

Bitter?

Why, yes. I was. This was not part of my five-year plan.

“Yeah.” I tapped the fuzzy purple dice hanging from my rearview mirror. “I just sort of shut down after.”

“You’ve been through a lot the last couple of months.” She stroked above my hair, and the gesture soothed me. “You’ve got a right to grieve your losses. You’ve got a right to take a moment to breathe. But you don’t get to curl up in a ball and let this ruin you. You’re too strong for that.”

“Thanks, Vi.” I studied the shimmery hands folded on my lap. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You don’t have to do anything except what you’ve always done. Learn how to control your new powers and keep yourself safe.” She leaned forward to catch my eye. “You want to live so close to Savannah? So near those damn necromancers? Then you better be able to take on the whole of the Society and win.” I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “Or you could pack up and move your family to NOLA. With me.”

For her to ask, and mean it, tightened my throat. “And see Rollo every day for the rest of my life?”

A life that stretched infinite and unflinching before me? The reminder soured my stomach.

“He’s always had a crush on you.” She tutted at my expression. “That’s the problem.”

That was not the problem, but I was done rehashing the old argument. “Mmm-hmm.”

Suspicious of my easy acquiescence, she hummed softly. “You’re talking big picture, aren’t you?”

“Do I have responsibilities? Do I have a duty to do…whatever it is demigods do? Would it be so selfish of me if I elected to stay home and keep living my life instead of using those powers for the greater good?” I admitted my biggest fear. “I don’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention.”

“You don’t mean the Society.” She leaned back. “You’re afraid your divine parent would notice you.”

A prickle on my nape gave me a taste of how it might feel to earn the full weight of their attention.

“Yes and no. Kierce and Ankou are both subject to their gods’ whims. I don’t want that.”

“They’re not born of gods, though.” She retied her head scarf. “They’re sworn into the gods’ service.”

Ankou relished his role, that much was clear, but Kierce was frayed along his edges. His retreat from the world might have saved his sanity, but it was clear he remained exhausted and disconnected to a degree that troubled me. Waking him, fully shaking off his malaise, might provide the catalyst for an entirely different man to emerge than the one I first met walking through the cemetery with mud on his shoes.

“You’re thinking too big.” She mimed rubbing my shoulder. “Start smaller, like telling your siblings.”

“Smaller would be learning I was the necromancer messiah risen from the dead to save the world.”

“You are ridiculous.”

“What? I’m serious. That’s much smaller than telling my siblings. Tiny in comparison to what Josie will do after she finds out I kicked the bucket and didn’t tell her, and it will break Matty’s heart.”

“I love you, cher , I do, but no. You’re too caught up on how this will affect everyone else to process what it means for you. This happened to you . Prioritize yourself for once. Let everyone else worry about themselves. You have a right to boundaries. You deserve your own thoughts and feelings and priorities.” She glanced at Kierce. “I can’t imagine Matty and Josie approved of him in the beginning, and yet there he stands. A choice you made. For yourself .”

“Yeah.” A smile tickled my lips. “His weird matches my weird.”

A strobe of light in the woods drew my eye beyond the window to the trees.

“What’s wrong?” She twisted in her seat. “What did you see?”

A piercing white beam exploded from the limbs and swept over the wagon, including Kierce, Vi, and me.

High-pitched whining filled my ears, and I screamed for Kierce, but I couldn’t even hear myself.

Lavender mist burst inside the cab, and then the brightness dimmed to nothing.

The seat beside me was empty, so I stumbled out and into Kierce’s waiting arms. “What was that?”

“I don’t know.” He glanced over his shoulder. “It came from the woods.”

“Hold on.” I thumped back against the side of the wagon. “I have to check on Vi.”

Before I could finish dialing Rollo’s personal number, it flashed on my screen as an incoming call.

“What have you done now?” he yelled in my ear. “Mamaw’s unconscious.”

“What?” Stomach tumbling like clothes in a dryer, I slid lower. “She was fine a minute ago.”

“I’m here with her body, maringouin .” His fury was palpable. “You better start explaining.”

Maringouin meant mosquito. As in I was a pest. To him, I always would be.

Quickly as possible, I explained what brought me here, where here was, and what I had seen.

Halfway through, Rollo started cursing a blue streak in Creole. Kierce’s temper was getting up, so I dispatched him to locate Badb and Carter. Since her phone’s guts littered the road, he set out on foot to search for them. They couldn’t have gone far, but I would be lying if I claimed that I wasn’t anxious being left alone.

“If she doesn’t wake in the next five seconds—” Rollo’s temper boiled on the other end of the line, “—I’m gonna drive to your shop, snatch you up by the scruff, then drag you to the first necromancer I can find and tell them who you are, what you’ve done, and order them to turn you in to the Society for punishment.”

Oh, yeah. He had a crush on me. Those were definitely the words of a man in love.

Vi really had to move past her generation’s he’s only mean to you because he likes you mentality.

When a man treated you like dirt, it was because he wanted to scrape you off his shoe.

“I didn’t ask her to come. I didn’t know to expect her before she appeared to me.” I spun it around on him. “Why didn’t you call to warn me? Why would you let her zip out to the middle of nowhere on a whim?” I clicked my teeth together before I pivoted toward blaming Vi for dropping in unannounced. “What can I do? How can I help?”

“Forget her number.”

The call ended with a snarl that would have made a warg proud and did a fine job of breaking my heart.

Rollo never had cared for me, but after I took his spot as Vi’s apprentice, he enjoyed hearing from me about as much as receiving a letter from the IRS. I understood he was hurt, but that was years ago. Did he plan on holding it over my head for the rest of my life?

Butt thumping onto the grass, I drew my knees to my chest and rested my forehead on them.

A warm beak nudged the hair from my eyes moments later, and Badb rasped comforting noises at me.

“They were a mile up the road.” Kierce waded through grass to reach me. “Already on their way back.”

For him to have gone that far and returned, Rollo had been chewing me out for longer than I thought.

“How is your friend?” Kierce crouched beside me. “Did she return to her body?”

“She’s unconscious.” I rubbed the phone screen with my thumb. “Rollo will call with an update soon.”

Otherwise, I would be driving to New Orleans to see her condition for myself.

A doctor, an old family friend, as in he had been the Fontenot family doctor since Vi’s mother was a little girl, lived next door. Jean-Claude Dancosse. He was always on standby when she traveled via astral projection.

Usually Jean-Claude waited in the next room with a vintage comic book spread across his lap. He would have reached her bedside in seconds. He would be, right this very minute, working his magic on her. She would wake up in no time.

Vi would be okay. I had to believe that. I couldn’t wrap my head around the alternative.

“This isn’t your fault.” Kierce smoothed his palm down my back with halting strokes. “You couldn’t have anticipated this.”

“I should have told her—and Matty and Josie—the second I understood what happened to me, but I was a coward. I could fool my siblings for a while, I knew that, but then I convinced myself Vi wouldn’t notice a damn halo the next time she checked on me from the spirit plane. I knew she would find out, and I knew I would get an earful when she did, but I didn’t expect her to appear out of thin air on the side of a road. That was my mistake. Scaring her so badly she projected herself into an unknown situation.”

“Vi couldn’t have located you if she hadn’t reached out to Josie or Matty,” he reasoned. “The spirit plane is vast. She can check on you when you’re home, because it’s familiar ground, but she couldn’t have isolated your whereabouts without help.” He waited to see if that made a dent in my self-loathing. “Josie had already told Carter where you were, and you updated Josie on the situation here. She would have told Vi exactly what she was walking into before she decided to visit you.”

“You’re right.” I hadn’t seen through my guilt to the facts, but Kierce was right. Vi had a fail-safe for every possible outcome. She was neither impulsive nor reckless. “Her first line of defense is her grandson. Rollo hates me. He wouldn’t have anchored her if he felt she was at risk, and definitely not for my sake.”

“Rollo.” Kierce repeated the name as if committing it to memory.

As dragging steps neared, I craned my neck for a glimpse of Carter. “Oh Lord.”

Her other boot was now missing, and so were the top buttons on her dress shirt. She must have—what? Ripped them off and flung them at Badb? Sadly, I could picture her doing just that. With malicious glee.

A few yards from where I sat, she gave up and dropped onto the grass to catch her breath.

That was when my phone blared, further hollowing out my stomach as I picked up on Rollo. “Well?”

“Anyone ever tell you your voice buzzes at a frequency not meant for human ears?”

The dulling edge of his hostility told me Vi was okay, but I knew better than to ask to speak to her. He would only laugh in my face and block my number on her phone. I had experience with that trick.

There was nothing for it but to beg. “Please, Rollo, tell me.”

“Since you ask so nicely, I’ll answer. Mamaw was in shock from snapping back into her body, but she’s as tough as old shoe leather.” His jubilant tone conveyed how worried he had been when her eyes didn’t open. He was too hyped up on relief to make me work for the rest. “She on bed rest for forty-eight hours, per Jean-Claude, but she make a full recovery. No spirit work for a month, which will get her hoppin’ mad, but I can’t help she pay the cost of the damn fool thing she do.”

Another thing about Rollo was his accent thickened as his mood improved, which was proof enough for me that Vi was out of danger.

“Tell her I love her, and I’m glad she’s okay.”

“I’ll do no such thing.”

He hung up on me before I could protest, but she knew both those things without him saying them.

“Rollo is an asshole, huh?” Carter had fallen onto her back at some point. “Power-hungry jerk.”

“He is an asshole,” I agreed, “but he loves Vi more than anything in the world. I can’t fault him for that.” Our love for her was the one thing we had in common. “She raised him as her own. They’re very close.”

“It sounds like he grew up expecting to be the heir apparent,” Carter said, barely able to move and yet a distinct crunching noise came from her vicinity, “and didn’t care much for being usurped.”

“No one usurped anyone.” I puffed out my cheeks. “I was raw power and hormones without a clue what to do with either, except get in trouble. Rollo was quiet and competent. He had been given small lessons here and there all his life. It was natural for him to be upset when a total stranger walked in and took his place when the next apprentice to come into the house should have been his first and not her second.”

“So,” she drawled, “he’s a crybaby and an asshole.”

A snort ripped free of me, but it was time to get down to work. “We need to search these woods.”

“Hold on.” She shot upright on the spot. “What happened to leaving this to the professionals?”

“They took my client, my loaner, and hurt my friend.”

The whole reason the flow of my clients had dried up in the first place was because the spirit community learned about the dybbuk targeting my lessees. Spirits had been too afraid to book my services and risk becoming targets.

If word got out I had lost another client, I would be shoved back to square one. Tameka might be a repo, which meant any fallout was her own choice, but any blowback so close to the dybbuk fiasco could ruin my reputation for good.

And harming Vi?

Well, I wouldn’t be me if I stood back and watched rather than getting my hands dirty.

“Then let’s do this.” She sat upright then stood. “I’ll call in backup, and we’ll get boots on the ground.”

“Badb will help.” Kierce traced her arc across the sky. “We didn’t notice anything peculiar during our initial search, but we didn’t go far. I didn’t want to leave Frankie alone for long.”

“Turn on location services on your phones,” she ordered, heading for her truck. “I’ll radio this in.”

Leaving her behind to coordinate the effort, Kierce and I entered the forest with Badb as our scout.

The light—tractor beam?—hadn’t damaged the foliage one bit. No burn or char marks. No broken limbs or bent leaves. How had it spared the forest yet teleported the other victims and their vehicles?

“Why didn’t it take us?” I couldn’t move beyond how he and I escaped unscathed, and even Vi was only sent back to her body. “It left the wagon too.” I slipped in a patch of leaves wet from yesterday’s rain, but he caught me by the elbow. “Not that I’m complaining.”

“I’ve been wondering the same thing.” He kept hold of me, and I didn’t mind one bit. “Perhaps its power doesn’t affect divine beings?” His lips twitched in the promise of a smile. “Or their vintage wagons?”

There was a whole lot more steel in old cars than in new ones. “Good point.”

I had to start thinking of myself in those terms. This incident with Vi woke me up in more ways than one. It was okay to fool myself. That didn’t hurt anyone. Faking like everything was okay when it put my loved ones at risk? I couldn’t justify my take no prisoners attitude while endangering them.

I had shown myself grace. Okay. Fine. I had wallowed more than a pig in a sty. For a whole ten days.

Now it was time to stand up, dust myself off, and get serious about figuring out this new me.

For their sakes. And, yeah, maybe for my own.

“Alien technology or not, it’s harder to disappear a vehicle than a person.” Kierce held a branch aside for me to duck under, which was good since I hadn’t noticed it and would have smacked right into it. “Any ideas why they would want what must seem to them like outdated technology?”

“Maybe they crash-landed and need the parts to repair their ship?”

“Then why not steal unoccupied vehicles?”

“What if their tech only works in close proximity to their ship?” I felt like an idiot saying it out loud, treating it as if it were a possibility. “The majority of humans believe aliens visit Earth to perform experiments on them—most involving anal probing for whatever reason—or to breed human women or to eradicate mankind or to steal our planet because theirs is dying or to further their goals to colonize the universe. Something along those lines.”

“The abductees have all been women,” he reminded me, his jaw tight as possibilities sank in.

Women were popular targets for predators, so that didn’t surprise me. The light show and vehicle snatch were unconventional methods of abduction, but that didn’t mean it was dreamed up on another planet.

“Tractor beams aside, how are they disappearing tons of metal from an active roadway?”

The universal symbol for alien was a small, neon-green man with a giant oval head leaning out of his silver flying saucer to watch as a cow was sucked out of its pasture inside a cone of blinding light.

“Magic is the only logical answer.”

Magic was my first thought. How could it not be? But the vehicles made it dicey. “Iron repels magic.”

“Black magic could accomplish it, but not without sacrifice. Iron-touched fae are rare, but they do exist.”

Iron-touched fae. Say, gremlins. Like the one I was hunting.

One gremlin because Tameka lost her magic in death. Only Keshawn retained hers, but gremlin talents weren’t a magician’s disappearing trick. Even if they were, to have a role in this, Keshawn would have had to know where to go and what to do. Which meant she would also know what happened to the others.

As much as I wanted to avoid further involvement with the 514, I didn’t have much choice if Tameka was involved in this. I was allowed to run my business in peace because it harmed no one. Leasing to Tameka for the purpose she gave, one confirmed by her daughter, meant nothing if they had lied to me. But that didn’t make sense either. Pascal became obsessed with Pink Panic after meeting Tameka. He tracked her wins across the circuit. She had accomplished what she set out to do. She couldn’t be responsible, right?

“We need to get the makes and models of the vehicles from Carter, see if those have any relevance.” I touched my pocket then let my hand drop. “We’ll have to walk back to tell her.”

“Badb has offered to replace her phone,” he said after a moment. “She feels bad about breaking it.”

I doubted that very much, but Badb had him wrapped around her little claw.

“Carter probably has insurance on it,” I rushed out. “Most folks do. Her cell provider will replace it.”

“Ah.” Crinkles fanned out from the corners of his eyes. “You don’t want her to steal one.”

“Remember the tracking app? Everyone uses location services these days. Phones cost an arm and a leg, so people want to find them if they get lost. Or if, say, a crow steals it. Carter enforces the law. She would be in trouble if she got caught breaking it by the owner, who was desperate to save their score in Candy Crumble.”

“I’ll let Badb know.” His focus slid outward before returning to me. “I passed along your concerns.”

Once the road came into view, I noticed two patrol cars parked behind the wagon.

And sitting on the passenger seat of the nearest car smiled a man I wasn’t eager to see again.