The North Tabor neighborhood was filled with the kinds of houses I’d want to have for Faith and me—two stories, porches big enough for swings and plants, backyards ripe for vegetable gardens. The streets were lined with more maples and ginkgo trees that had shed their leaves, transforming sidewalks into carpets of red and gold. The neighborhood was quiet and dotted with great spots for pancakes and burgers. One day. If we lived through what was coming and made it clean out the other side, one day. Also, I’d need to win the lottery. It could happen.
I parked in front of Jess’s house, rain pouring down as I climbed the front steps. The yard was a tall, steep slope filled with lavender and rosemary that had been allowed to grow into the space allocated for the steps. The stalks brushed against my legs, releasing calming and medicinal fragrances, and telling me something important about Jess’s aunt. As beautiful as they were, lavender and rosemary were magically protective plants, serving to cleanse anyone who passed through the yard and to frighten away anyone who approached with ill intent.
The house itself was a double-decker painted buttercream yellow with white trim. Twinkling lights hung in both of the picture windows, framing a view into the living room on the right and the dining room on the left. I didn’t see anyone inside, but I caught a glimpse of a glow emanating from the room behind the living area.
The wide, high-railed wooden porch held two oversized wicker chairs in cheerful red with white cushions and a matching wicker table in between. A huge tuxedoed tomcat with muddy paws sat on the rail, following my every move until I stepped onto the thirsty mat in front of the door, at which point he leapt down onto the white porch boards and slinked away, leaving a trail of fat footprints in his wake.
I rang the bell. Footfalls sounded on the hardwood floor inside, drawing nearer to the door, which swung open on hinges that creaked haunted-house style.
The woman who stood at the threshold looked me up and down, and I did the same to her.
She could’ve been anyone. Any human anyone. But her halo held the night sky, like Jess’s—and flashed blue fire so brightly that for a moment I could hardly see her. Then the light dimmed and I got a good look at the woman—the Watcher—who wanted to see me dead and take my child.
Chapter 4
SHE LOOKED HARMLESS. Emphasis on looked.
Jess’s aunt had dark brown skin and brown eyes that shaded from kind to suspicious in a heartbeat. She wore her hair in a bun, clear gloss on her lips, and silver-framed glasses on her nose. She had on a green sweatshirt with red velvet trim at the collar, cuffs, and hem. Darth Vader’s mask featured on the front, with words underneath that said I find your lack of holiday cheer disturbing. She’d completed her outfit with a pair of faded jeans that were worn at the knees. Her feet were bare.
“You got a pair on you, coming here,” she said.
She filled the doorway, blocking not only my path, but my view into the yellow house. Her voice reminded me of my own abuela, who’d smoked most of her life, but quit on her sixtieth birthday. Jess’s aunt looked only to be about fifty.
A tantalizing scent wafted from behind her, sparking a memory so strong that it made my knees weak: chiles and chicken and tomatillos. I’d smelled lots of Tex-Mex in my time, but there was something about the particular combination of ingredients that triggered my senses. Something personal to me.
“I believe in sizing up my enemies,” I said.
“My niece said something to you,” the aunt said. “Don’t act like she didn’t. No other reason you’d be here. Yesterday, you had no idea we existed. Otherwise, you’d have dropped by sooner. Am I right?”
I nodded.
“You only wanted a look at me, or did you have something else in mind?” she asked.
“Door number two.”
“You want to come in, then?”
“You’d have a monster like me in?” I asked.
“Not unless you agree to the ground rules. I give you guest rights, and you promise not to engage in any violence.”
Offering me guest rights meant taking responsibility for whatever happened to me. If harm came to me, then it would be as if harm came to my hostess. In times gone by, whoever caused the harm would be punished as if they’d raised a hand to the mistress of the house. In this case, any wrong done to me would be visited on her as well.
“Seems fair.”
“No lies, neither. Not from you and not from me.”
I nodded.
She frowned. “I’m Addie.”
“Night.”
“I know your name. Wipe your feet and take off your shoes in the foyer.” She turned on her heel and walked back from where she’d come—the room with the light shining from it.
As I stepped inside, I realized what that room was: the kitchen. The spicy scent that poured from it enveloped me in the long arms of my distant past. Before I knew it, my mouth began to water. Not conducive to strong negotiations, but I couldn’t deny the hunger that grew in my belly, and it was hunger for more than food. It was hunger for the lost pieces of myself.
I shook off that feeling. I could indulge it later. After I left the house of my would-be murderer.
I kicked off my sneakers and left them by the door beside the collection of fuzzy house slippers, rain boots, and hikers neatly placed in a three-story shoe rack. I pushed my hood back and unzipped the hoodie, surveying the living room.
Two cocoa-colored suede couches framed the space, a long, scarred, oak coffee table between them. A chocolate-brown sisal rug cradled the furniture. There was a fireplace behind glass doors, with gas flames dancing inside. Its warmth filled the room. On the mantel, pictures of Jess, some of the girl alone and a couple with her aunt. A dark TV screen was bolted to the wall above them.
On my left, a round, distressed-wood dining table had been painted black and circled with black stools instead of chairs. In the center of the table, a shiny silver bowl barely contained an avalanche of bright orange clementines. There wasn’t an ounce of dust on any of it, but neither did it appear to be well-loved. That table was for company.
Addie called from the kitchen. “You coming?”
I padded across the hardwood in my sock feet, getting a feel for the place. Unlike with people, most places didn’t have halos of their own, emphasis on the word most. The lavender and rosemary—or some spell—shielded the halo from my sight outside, but now that I was through the door, I could see the same blue fire that Addie gave off covering the walls and floor and ceiling. It was thicker near openings to the outside world—the fireplace, the windows, the doors. In places, it coiled out toward me as I passed, tendrils of blue flame brushing my cheeks and shoulders, taking my temperature, assessing my character.
I stepped into the kitchen, the wood floors shifting to tile. The room held a collection of stainless steel appliances and a garden window over the sink with a riot of starter herbs in tiny clay pots. There was a worn oak breakfast table in the corner by the back door, with a tray in the center that cradled salt and pepper shakers, a caddy of silverware, and a stack of white paper napkins. The floor near it was as well-traveled as the table was well-used. This was the center of the home, right here.
A large soup pot filled with the mouthwatering, memory-triggering substance simmered on the stovetop. Addie stood in front of it, ladling the contents into first one soup bowl and then another.
“Hope you’re hungry,” she said, handing me a bowl and a spoon.
“It’s too early for lunch.” I stared at what she’d handed me. It wasn’t at all complicated for having caused such a sensory triggering inside of me. It was posole. It smelled exactly the way my abuela’s had smelled. She liked to make it when the fall days finally brought cool enough air to make her want to pull on a sweater.
“I know,” Addie said. “But it’s never too early for memories. I felt compelled to buy these ingredients yesterday and I had no idea why, but I’ve learned when instinct tells me something that clearly, I ought to just go ahead and do what it sa
ys. So if you’re wondering, you caught me by surprise, but only a little. I figured someone would be coming. Didn’t know it’d be you.”
I followed her to the table and sat my bowl and myself down. Steam rose from the posole. “You cook for all the people you want to kill?”
“It’s a kind of divination,” she said.
I got the impression that if I were someone else, she would’ve made up some excuse instead of telling me what she was after. But since I already knew her endgame, she felt no need to lie to me about that.
“What will it tell you?” I asked.
“Who your people are.”
I understood from the way she said the words that by people she meant family. “I don’t have family of blood, only of choice.”
“You wouldn’t be the first,” she said, and dug into her bowl.
“I didn’t summon the Angel of Death,” I said.
She grabbed a napkin from the stack. “You don’t have to summon him for him to come for you.”
“There’s nothing special about me. I may have been the monster you think I am at one point, but I’ve reformed. I’ve got nothing to offer him.”
“Except the blood on your hands,” she said.
“Which makes me no more special than any other killer.”
She cocked her head. “You really don’t know why the Angel would be coming for you, do you?”
“No,” I said.
I dipped my spoon into the posole and tasted. The flavor exploded in my mouth—the heat from the chiles, the brightness of the tomatillos, the comforting richness of the chicken, which had been roasted first, and the chewiness of the hominy. There was white rice in there, too, and the broth was homemade from the roasted chicken carcass. I didn’t have to have seen Addie cook it to know that. The recipe she’d used and wherever she’d gotten it—whatever entity had given her the marching orders?—was the same one my abuela used.
I glanced at Addie to find her staring at me expectantly. “It’s delicious.”
She narrowed her eyes, and I saw she wasn’t staring at me but around me, looking for the information about my people, or something else. Either she didn’t like what she saw or—
“I don’t understand,” she said.
I raised a brow.
“There’s nothing there.”
“I told you I don’t have family of blood.”
“You have blood family who loved you, though. At least one, somewhere, some time.”
I shook my head.
“There is literally no one who watches over you from beyond the grave, and no hint that anyone wishes to. That, I’ve never seen,” she said.
“So?”
“So it’s a wonder that you’re still alive. And it’s no wonder you became what you are.”
I set down my spoon. “Are we finished psychologizing me?”
“We can talk about something else if you like,” she said. “How about Faith?”
I didn’t like the sound of that name rolling from Addie’s mouth. “I hear you want to take her away from me.”
“You’re not qualified to watch over her,” Addie said. “We are.”
“Explain.”
“She’s far more than just a little girl. She’s a conduit to the divine.”
“A conduit?”
“She can talk to the divine. Speak to the divine. Do you know how rare that is? There’s no one else who can do that—no one else we’re aware of, at any rate. She can’t be allowed to use that power in inappropriate and dangerous ways. She must be controlled.”
“Controlled?” An interesting choice of words. “She’s a teenager. There’s no such thing as ruling her. It’s impossible. She’ll make mistakes—she’s made plenty already, just like the rest of us. She knows right from wrong. She’s a good kid. But she’s nobody’s servant.”
“I don’t mean for her to be a servant,” Addie said. “I mean for her to be a tool.”
Anger bubbled in my gut, simmering on a slow boil. I’d taken her from a prison imposed on her by people who supposedly loved her. I’d be damned if I’d allow her ever to be treated that way again.
I leaned back in my chair. “What do you plan to use her for?”
“To talk to God,” Addie said.
Addie was a Watcher, which by definition meant she was descended from beings God did not approve of. “What would you want to do that for?”
“To declare our loyalty and ask for instructions,” she said.
“For what?”
“For the coming war.”
“You mean the apocalypse.”
She nodded. “We’re claiming Faith for our side. Now that she’s within our reach, we can do that. Before, things weren’t so clear cut. They were…murkier. She was a danger.”
A danger who couldn’t be allowed to use her power in inappropriate ways. Hazardous ways. The only way to ensure that someone didn’t use their power was to take it away. There was only one way to separate someone with magic from their power: kill them.
I had a sudden intuition, the kind born out of instinct. No matter how much I wanted to be ruled by some other, more rational, civilized part of my mind these days, I couldn’t ignore that kind of thing. That kind of knowing was always true.
“You went after her before,” I said.
“We did what we thought was right and necessary,” Addie said.
The slow boil in my gut became a fury. Since when was killing a child right or necessary? “When? How did you do it?”
“It was before you knew her.”
Before meant that Faith had been with her parents, who treated her in the same way mine had. The intelligence that I’d gathered on Faith before entering her family’s home on the fateful night of our meeting had revealed no attempts to kidnap her and no attempts on her life up to that point.
“You still haven’t answered the how,” I said.
“You know how.”
The Order of the Blood Moon had its own agenda—not that I’d been able to puzzle it out—and sometimes it took contracts when those contracts matched its aims. I never knew, going out on a job, whether the job originated internally or whether it’d been bought and paid for. I had my orders, and I followed them.
Some jobs stood out in my mind, and some faded into the blur of years and blood. The night I’d met Faith had been branded into my memory.
I could still smell the roses that had grown into hedges in front of her family’s cookie-cutter, brick suburban home, thick and sultry in the humid air. The windows were dark. The wind gusted, rattling the trees of the live oak in the center of the front yard, the leaves whispering to one another. A storm was on the way, dark clouds jamming the horizon, lightning flashing far away, thunder rolling low and throaty. I caught the scent of rain, breathing it in deep, like a blessing. A hush consumed the whole neighborhood. How else could it be at 3:00 a.m.?
Even in the middle of the night, the air held on to a good portion of the day’s heat. It seeped from the concrete, from the hard-baked earth. A black SUV crouched in the driveway like a guard dog that’d forgotten its duty and fallen asleep, its dark, tinted eyes tightly closed. If I needed to, I could use the SUV as a getaway vehicle. I shouldn’t need to, though. Everything was going down as planned.
I went around the side of the house, opening the wooden gate with no trouble. They didn’t bother locking the thing. The neighborhood was safe and if someone had wanted to get into the yard badly enough, they’d just hop the fence anyway. Sound reasoning.
A tall sycamore shaded the grass and the concrete patio, the grill and the water hose coiled like a serpent at its feet. Unlike the gate, the back door was locked, but if someone wanted to enter badly enough, they’d just pick the lock anyway. Silent as a mouse.
The door opened into a den. There was no art on the paneled pine walls except a velvet painting of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. An oversized sofa cut across the center of the room. A big-screen TV hugged the wall, a low bookcase beneath it serving as stora
ge for game consoles and controllers. A stack of boxed board games sat in the corner.
Outside, the lightning flashed closer, thunder rumbling. The patter of rain on the roof and windows filled the room. Soon the gentleness of the water falling from the sky would give way to fury. The clouds had been too dark for anything less.
I waited. No use moving while the storm settled in. Better to wait a few minutes in case it caused my prey to wake, to give them the time to fall back to dreaming peacefully. That would make my job much easier on me—and them. I drew the gun strapped to my leg and screwed on the silencer. The gun was my backup weapon. I hated to use it, but it’d saved my life more than once. The weight of it grew heavier and more solemn with every minute I waited to move.
When I did finally weave a path through the kitchen with its black cat clock over the stove ticking away like a heartbeat and its breadcrumb-littered countertops and rag rug–covered linoleum floors, I heard the house sigh around me. Or perhaps I only felt it: my first inkling that something here wasn’t as it seemed.
I headed down the adjacent hall, the floor carpeted now in plush beige, the walls lined with family photos—or, rather, photos of Faith’s parents, and none of Faith herself. I passed a bathroom with a glowing purple butterfly night-light and a set of louvered doors that denoted a closet or a laundry room before coming to a stop in the open doorway of the master bedroom, where Faith’s parents slept in king-sized comfort, their chests rising and falling in the slow, deep rhythm of people oblivious to the predator in their midst. Their halos were muted gold.
There was something else about them, though. Something I couldn’t put my finger on. A quality to the color, maybe, that disturbed me on a primal level. I studied the scene.
Night Awakens: The Awakened Magic Saga (Soul Forge Book 1) Page 5