Page 95 of Midnight Auto Parts

“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. Ishouldhave 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.

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