Page 76 of A Bond in Flames

“Cry?” he said, his voice so rough, it lifted goose bumps all over me. “No…” He looked back at the shop again. “No,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“Fuck.” He started back toward the shop, and I grabbed his arm.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t make females cry. I don’t scare them, and I don’t… sexually harass them.” He actually looked nauseous.

“Going back there now will only make it worse. She wants you gone, and you need to respect that.”

He stopped, looking confused and shaken. “Fuck,” he said again and let me tug him back the way we were going.

He didn’t say much after that, and he was distracted when he gave me a hug before he left for his shift at the Hell Fire, the hellhounds’ bar. I watched him leave and then headed for home and our cemetery.

It was early afternoon by the time I got there. Sometimes I found it easier to call on spirits at our cemetery. It was a place of great power, and without any real information to go on, I needed all the help I could get.

The cemetery was quiet when I arrived, no Aunt Daisy or Arthur here today, thankfully. Daisy was probably in the kitchen getting ready for tonight. She went all out when she had us all under one roof. Closing the wide iron gates behind me, I ran my fingers over headstones, saying their names as I walked by, telling my loved ones, my ancestors, how much I missed and loved them, finally stopping beside my grandmother’s grave.

“Hey, Gran,” I said and sat on the ground. Daisy and Art had planted chamomile all over the grounds. It had spread everywhere, which was what they’d wanted. When Art cut the grass now, it smelled amazing.

“I need your help to find some people,” I whispered as I slipped my bag over my head and set it beside me. Hemy scurried out and trotted to the herb garden to nibble on the basil. “I know you’re resting, and I hate to disturb you, but I’m not sure I can do this alone. You see, Gran, I need to make a decision, one that should be simple, but now… now it’s not.” Death said he loved me, and I wasn’t sure what I felt, but I felt… something. Something unexplainable. It was wide and deep and so incredibly strong, but also it felt… distant. I didn’t understand it, and I needed to understand it.

Opening my bag, I pulled out the thimble, the book, and the small pot of dried paint I’d taken from my bedroom back in Limbo and placed them in front of me. I’d never met any of these females, besides Aster. I didn’t know their names. I didn’t know anything about them. All I had that told me anything of who they were, were my visions and these items. Worn and well-used items they’d taken the time to bring with them when they’d made their own journey to Limbo, however that came about. Items that had been left behind, survived when they hadn’t.

Females Death had cared for, possibly loved.

And as much as I didn’t want to consider it, there was this unsettling feeling inside me. Death was prone to bouts of rage and jealousy, of unreasonable and controlling behavior. The cloak was darkness, and sometimes, it pulled him into the shadows.

He said if I left him, he’d let the cloak take him, that he’d let the shadows and the darkness take hold. Death had remained covered, preferring the shadows, when I first went to Limbo, and I’d believed him capable of anything. I didn’t know how easy it was for him to slip back into that place, but if he had when he was with his consorts, if he’d let his anger take hold, perhaps he’d done something, something terrible, when he was lost to the shadows. Something that had pushed them to do what they had, to hurt themselves.

Even thinking it made me feel sick with guilt, but I had to be sure.

Taking a tiny piece of snakeroot from my bag, I placed it in a small square of soft leather. Then I added one verbena leaf, three drops of agarwood oil, and two of juniper oil and placed it on the ground. Then I took a ball of string from my bag and cut a length off. Making a slice in my palm, I let my blood pool, then smeared it on the string before gathering up the leather square into a small pouch and tying it closed with the blood-soaked string.

Rubbing the pouch between my hands, I mixed everything together, warming it until its fragrance reached me and the oil soaked the leather through. I swiped the oily pouch over the items I’d taken from my room in Limbo, and then I squeezed my sliced palm and dripped some blood on Gran’s grave as an offering before dropping more blood in a circle around everything.

Slipping off my shoes, I pressed my feet into the soft chamomile lawn that had grown over Gran’s grave, digging my toes in, pulling power straight from the source. I let the magic that still flowed through Gran’s bones reach out to me and latched on to it.

I gasped as it filled me, twisting around my own magic and lifting it higher and higher. Closing my eyes, I let the spell wrap around me, let the words come, let them form and build to call on Death’s consorts, to ask them to show me the way, until they finally spilled from my lips. “Thank you, Mother, for the gifts you have given me, for the love you have bestowed upon me. I call on you, my sisters, sisters who came before, who loved and laughed and hoped for a life of peace and warmth, my sisters who were taken too soon. I call on you to come forward, to show me who you were and how you were taken. I ask for your help, dear sisters, to guide me, to lead me to the right path.” I squeezed my hand tighter, and warm blood trickled over my hand and into the small circle. “Show me, sisters.”

The world spun around me—but there were no souls to be found, only a suffocating darkness, a void, and it was cold and incredibly lonely.

Tears slid down my face. I felt so much, so much pain and fear as if it were my own.

A sob burst from me as I searched, but they weren’t there. It was as if they were nothing.

As if they had ceased to exist.

CHAPTER24

Zinnia

The table wasladen with food; Daisy and Else had outdone themselves. Everyone I loved was in the same place, sitting around the table laughing and talking, and I tried to let it fill me so I could shake the awful empty feeling inside me, but what happened at the cemetery lingered, clinging to me like a cold hand around the back of my neck, not letting go.

I rubbed my arms and smiled when Vi gave Hemy another wide grin. He was besotted with her, performing for my tiny cousin, running down my arm and up Willow’s, then peeking at Violet through Willow’s hair. He did it again, and Violet giggled uncontrollably. Hemy spun around, triumphant.

“You little show-off,” I said and scratched his head when he ran back to me.

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