The other girl stepped closer, “Are you going to say something or do I need to talk even slower?”
Tristin gaped at her. Even when she was asking for a favor, she was horrid. She wished Isa could see the real her, “Well, gosh, when you put it like that how could we refuse?”
Her lip curled, “I’ll kiss your ass when my brother is back safely, until then I’m not interested in anybody else’s feelings.”
Tristin’s stomach clenched, eyes dropping to stare at her feet. She hated Astrid for even hinting at the possibility. It’s not like she didn’t want him back. There wasn’t a single part of her not aching for him to be there. She didn’t know how to be her without him. She hated herself for that but it was true. He forced her to be stronger, harder, and more self-aware. Bringing him back wasn’t an option. He wasn’t a puppy. He was a human.
“Please tell me your whole plan doesn’t revolve around Ember because she is the worst reanimator ever.”
Tristin didn’t know if that was true or not but she would say anything to stop her insides from shaking right now. Ember was the only reanimator she knew, but given her track record, she was sure she was probably right.
“Ember is the plan.”
“You’re nuts. It will never work. Ember blows up as many animals as she reanimates. Besides, reanimators can’t bring people back permanently.”
“Then it’s a good thing she’s not a reanimator.” Astrid snapped, losing her patience.
Tristin’s head snapped up. “What?”
Astrid smiled, expression smug. “Don’t you think it’s weird that none of the animals she’s returned have crossed back over?”
Sure, Tristin thought it was a little odd but Mace insisted it wasn’t permanent. Reanimators lack the ability to anchor a soul to a body. It was only a matter of time before the magic wore off and they crossed back. It’s why he didn’t want Ember getting so attached. Yet, all the animals were still here, none of them slobbering corpses.
“I guess.” Tristin said carefully, “So if she isn’t a reanimator, what is she? Witches can’t bring somebody back from the dead.”
“A necromancer can.”
Her heart sank. Astrid really was crazy. Necromancers, she thought, Astrid was smarter than that. She’d put all her hopes into a fantasy; a witch/reaper hybrid with god-like abilities. They talked about them in mythology class along with Loki and Icarus. They weren’t real. “Necromancers don’t exist.”
Astrid shrugged. “Neither do banshees and yet here you are.”
Tristin chewed on the inside of her cheek. She wanted to believe it was possible so badly but it just couldn’t be. “What makes you think Ember is a necromancer?”
“I overheard my father talking. He’s planning something, probably something super horrible. He told somebody on the phone that she was a necromancer. My father doesn’t throw words like that around easily. If he thinks she’s a necromancer then so do I.”
Allister had more information than any of them. If he believed it…It made more sense than anything else currently happening in her life. Still, she couldn’t help but remind Astrid, “Ember might be able to restore the souls of dead animals but the last time she tried it on a human it didn’t go so well.”
“You mean her mother?”
Tristin narrowed her eyes.
Astrid just smiled. “Yeah, I know about that too. My father is far too casual about the conversations he has in our house now that Quinn’s gone. She was five years old. Imagine what she can do now?”
“I don’t have to imagine. I’m not talking about Ember’s mom. I’m talking about Ms. Carlton, our math teacher and Mike from the garage. Ember accidentally yanked them back too, well their bodies anyway,” Tristin said. “Her powers are out of control. She blows up a dead animal at least once a week. It’s pretty gross.”
Astrid’s face contorted. “Well she can’t blow my brother up because he’s currently occupying our mantle in a tacky cardboard box marked temporary while waiting for the gaudy urn my father purchased. Now, some would call that box ironic but I consider it a sign from the other side that they aren’t quite ready for my baby brother yet. Either way, she can’t do much more harm than that.”
Tristin stared at her, annoyed at herself for even entertaining this crazy idea. “Just suppose I said I’d consider this. You just said Quinn’s been cremated.” She choked on the last word. “Where do you plan on putting his soul once Ember yanks him back from the other side?”
Her eyes shifted to the left and she tapped her manicured nail against her temple. “I’ve got that all figured out. All that’s needed is an empty vessel and I know exactly where to find that.”
A chill crept up Tristin’s spine. Astrid was as smart as her brother and way more cunning. She didn’t want to know why the witch looked so pleased with herself. “So, let’s pretend everything goes according to plan, then what; Quinn spends the rest of his days masquerading in somebody else’s body?”
Astrid rolled her eyes, “Oh buck up, sourpuss. One little glamour spell from me and all you will ever see is the face you fell in love with. Consider it an early wedding present.”
Tristin felt like she’d kicked her in the stomach.
“The rest of the world will see someone else. It’s the only way we can get away with this.”
“We will never get away with this. This is insane. We have the Grove coming back. This is going to get us all killed. We don’t have a spell, we don’t have a coven, and we don’t have any idea what we’re doing.”
“Just leave the details to me. You just need to get your cousin to agree to this.”
“She’s not ready,” Tristin told her. “She’ll never agree to this. Not only that, she will rat us out to Isa and we will all get in trouble.”
“Then we’ll just have to give her some incentive.”
“What does that mean?”
She shrugged, “I’ll think of something.”
“Nobody will ever agree to this.”
“I have some of the things I need in place. You just need to make sure Mace keeps Ember under control.”
Tristin side eyed the girl, “Mace? Didn’t realize you two were on a first name basis.”
“We are now. He works for my father.”
“What?”
“You think you know what a jerk my dad is but you haven’t even scratched the surface. He’s not the person people think he is but I’ll worry about him when I have my brother back.”
“You’re crazy,” Tristin said.
“Maybe,” she smiled, “but if we get my brother back, does it matter?”
63
KAI
Mace eyed him warily. It wasn’t like Kai was eager for this conversation either. He’d allowed himself to ignore the problem for the last seven days because, honestly, he just didn’t have it in him. As long as Mace and Ember were where he could see them, where was the harm? But now they were making out? He definitely couldn’t handle that right now.
“It’s been a week. When are you going to tell Ember you work for Allister?”
Mace scrubbed his hand across his face, “It’s not that simple.”
“Why? Because you’re developing a thing for her?”
“No. Because she needs me right now.”
“She’s been fine.”
“No, she hasn’t.”
“She’s not blowing things up…well, as much. She hasn’t knocked any pictures off the wall or boiled her own blood, relatively speaking, isn’t that better?”
Mace sighed. “No, it’s not.” He stared at Kai for a long moment, as if gauging something. “She hasn’t learned control; her magic has just found a way to…divert her excess energy.”
Kai looked at him, “Huh?”
Mace sat down on the dining room chair, elbows on his knees as he rubbed the heels of his pal
ms across his eyes. Not for the first time, Kai noticed Mace looked terrible. He had black circles smudged under his eyes, his cheeks sunken in. He looked tired.
“Your cousin is channeling her magic through me. She’s tethered our magic together.”
Isn’t that why they had allowed him to stay in the first place? Kai must be missing something because Mace looked freaked out. Considering Mace was immortal and hundreds of years old, Kai could only assume it was bad, very, very bad.
“So what does that mean?”
“It means instead of Ember learning control of her magic-to call it at will-she is just on full juice all the time and diverting it to me so as not to cause any mishaps like blowing up birds or raising an army of revenant zombies.”
Kai let that information sink in. “Is this a side effect of the binding spell wearing off? I would have thought by now that the magic would have, I don’t know, righted itself?”
“Right, we never did get to that part of our story, did we?” Mace said, almost to himself.
Kai’s pulse quickened, “What part?”
Mace waved him off. “The point is our connection is having some rather unfortunate side effects.”
Kai smirked, “Like you ramming your tongue down her throat in the formal dining room?”
Mace gave him an epic eye roll. “Like she has bound our magic together, both literally and figuratively.”
Kai waited for him to continue but he didn’t. He just stood there staring at him expectantly like he was waiting for him to comprehend how catastrophic this news was. Finally, Kai said, “Seriously, I’m trying to get why you are so spooked but you’re going to have to spell it out for me.”
“Your cousin has me on a supernatural choke chain. I can’t go more than a few hundred feet without her magic yanking me backwards; painfully, horribly, grotesquely backwards.”
Kai’s lips twitched. He couldn’t help it. Mace had been terrorizing people for two hundred years only to be magically neutered by a seventeen-year-old girl.
“Laugh if you like, mate, but I can’t leave. If I can’t leave, I can’t feed. No feeding for me equals very bad things for everybody around me.”
Kai narrowed his eyes, smile fading. “Yet you look just slightly better than you did this morning.”
Mace’s eyes slid away from him, checking a spot on the floor.
“Is that what I walked in on? Were you feeding off her? What the hell, dude?”
“She offered,” Mace grumbled. “Besides, it wasn’t her I was feeding on.”
Kai looked around the room, hairs rising at the back of his neck. There was nobody else there. He was so tired of feeling as if he didn’t get it. He would like everybody to stop being so enigmatic. “How so?”
“Look, she’s not what you think she is.” Mace dropped his voice, “She’s channeling a ton of very ancient magic and that magic has decided that I need to be…close.”
Kai arched a brow at him, “You looked pretty close to me and it sure didn’t look forced.”
“It’s complicated.”
Kai snorted. “I bet,” he said, giving Mace an eye roll of his own before his brain registered something. “Wait. What do you mean Ember is channeling ancient magic?”
“Your cousin is somehow tapped into whatever frequency the dead seem to broadcast on in this town.”
“Huh?”
“She’s all soul’s radio,” Mace growled in frustration. “She’s playing all the souls of the eighties, nineties and today.”
Kai’s brain hurt. “Can reanimators do that?”
“No,” Mace huffed, “but necromancer’s can.”
“Necromancers?”
Mace faced him, “Tell me it hasn’t occurred to you?”
Kai flushed. It hadn’t occurred to him. Even with everything he’d talked about with Tate, it never occurred to him. He was an idiot.
“Does Ember know?” Kai asked.
“No, but Allister does.”
“You told Allister? Seriously?”
Mace scrubbed his hand along the back of his neck. “Allister already knew. He’s had plans for Ember this whole time.”
“The whole time? Did he know she’d come here?”
Mace shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not really part of his inner circle. I was hired to watch and report…and to retrieve that package.”
“Right, the package,” Kai said, digging his thumbs into his eyes with a sigh. “What was in that package anyway?”
“The blade of Osiris,” Mace said. “It’s a transference device.”
“Transference?” Kai chewed that over. “Well, it obviously doesn’t transfer anything good. How does it work?”
Mace winced. “When you plunge the dagger into the victim, the handle pierces the flesh of the user. It will transfer the power from the victim to the killer.”
“Killer.” Kai took a deep breath, trying not to panic. He wasn’t losing any more people. “So it kills the person whose power you want to take?”
“Yeah, it’s a nasty little bit of blood magic. It’s not for the faint of heart.”
“And he plans on using that on my cousin.” Kai’s anger flared and he let himself entertain the idea of punching Mace in the throat. “And you were going to help him do it?”
“No.” Mace said, before reconsidering. “Well, yes. Kind of. I didn’t know he planned to kill her when this started. I mean, I suspected it was his intention but I didn’t really care because it didn’t pertain to me.”
Kai gaped at him. Seriously, was this his defense? Hope he didn’t end up going in front of a jury. “Oh, save the judgment, Reaper. I’m the bad guy. It kind of goes with the territory. Besides, I wasn’t exactly privy to his plans until I saw the knife.”
“So what did you do with the knife?”
“It’s in a safe place.” Mace answered.
“Forgive me if I don’t believe you.”
“Having that knife could put all of you in danger.”
“Dude, we are already in danger. The Grove will be back and I don’t believe for a second they will wait until we turn eighteen. If we haven’t gotten our crap together we are all going to die…just like Quinn.” His name stuck in his throat and he swallowed convulsively, trying to calm the sudden storm of feelings his name evoked.
“Listen, mate. I understand what you are saying but this is more than just Ember. Allister isn’t a good guy and if he gets ahold of that blade and Ember’s magic he will be more powerful than anything out there.”
“Won’t the Grove step in at that point?”
“Do you think they’d believe us? Allister has been their lapdog for a very long time,” Mace reasoned. “Besides, think of the damage he could do in the meantime.”
Kai didn’t want to think about that. “Ember deserves to know the truth. She deserves to know you’ve been lying to her.”
“You don’t know what you are asking. This is all going to go sideways very quickly.”
Kai shook his head, determined. “No. You are going to tell her. You have until the bonfire. Then I’m telling her myself.”
Mace looked at him with tired eyes, shrugging his shoulders. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
64
EMBER
She couldn’t believe he’d kissed her. She couldn’t believe she kissed him back. She ran her thumb across her lower lip. She thought about it all night. She thought about it in the shower that morning, when she brushed her teeth, while she stuffed her legs into her shorts and dragged her t-shirt over her still damp body.
All she did was think about him. She knew it was crazy to think of him as anything but a monster. He’d told her he killed people for sport. But she’d killed people too. Maybe killing people was more than the average five year old was capable of grasping but it didn’t make them any less dead. Who was she to
judge?
Mace clearly didn’t agree. He was acting weird, not bad weird, but nervous weird. He wasn’t talking to her; looked away any time she smiled at him. He didn’t try to leave when she entered a room just stood there awkwardly. Any time she turned around, he was just there, hovering in her periphery, watching.
It was making everybody nervous. Tristin said it was because the wolves could smell people’s emotions and it made them edgy. Ember didn’t want to make any more trouble for anybody but that didn’t seem to matter. It felt like the entire house took turns staring at her. It was unsettling. She wanted to believe it was just the tension between her and Mace but she couldn’t help but wonder if maybe it had to do with Quinn.
She flopped back on her bed, bolting upright again as a demonic screech emanated from beneath her and a mangy grey ball of fur flew out from underneath her pillows. “Chester,” Ember growled, trying to bring her pulse back down to normal.
She hated that cat.
Tristin stuck her head in the doorway. “Isa says breakfast is ready.”
Ember nodded once, not making eye contact. It didn’t matter, she disappeared as fast as she’d arrived. Ember still found it hard to look at her. Tristin was hurting and it was her fault. Everything was her fault.
She tucked her feet into her flip-flops and snagged her backpack. If she ate fast enough she could sketch on the back porch for a bit before school. Ember filled her plate with eggs, bacon, fruit, two pancakes and two pieces of sausage. She just wasn’t hungry today.
“Wren’s already at the restaurant, I’m late. Tristin don’t you dare be late for your shift.” Isa tossed over her shoulder as she bolted out the door with a careless wave. At the counter, Kai fed Rhys a piece of bacon, dangling the food above his head. He laughed when the wolf bit down on his finger. Tristin rolled her eyes at the two, shoving between them to grab her food.
Tristin’s appetite appeared to be returning. She ate everything on her plate at dinner and was piling all kinds of food onto her plate now. She’d never seen Tristin eat anything but vegetables and protein. She wasn’t sure she even knew what carbs were. Neoma sat on the ground feeding bacon to Chester and Romero, her feet filthy as if she’d already been outside in the dirt.
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