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Turning, she took in the bags under his eyes and pale skin from lack of sleep and nourishment. He’d been staying with an ill child night after night, and yet they had made him go out to check the bodies anyway.

It angered her he was in such a state, but she had only herself to blame for not being the healer Ifreann needed.

How her cousin was able to tell a sickness had killed them or something else, she had no idea. They had not been killed on the steps of the gate, but far earlier if their horrid state of decomposition could attest to anything. It always made it far too difficult to determine their death, yet Jace always managed to be right.

Bryn didn’t mind Jace’s help since she wouldn’t find herself in a “fit” in front of him like she had when working as a healer. A person who had already passed on didn’t trigger her episodes.

Her first fit came at the young age of four, when she saw her uncle’s death. Jace’s father was a trader, and when she told her father that her uncle would die at the hands of rovers, he’d laughed it off as the musings of a young, creative mind.

When they had brought her uncle’s bullet-riddled body home, her father’s eyes had met her own, his full of fear and panic. Grabbing everything they owned, he moved them south, telling her that she was not to speak about what she saw. That her seizure had done some sort of damage to her developing brain and that he would find a way to fix it.

She was the sole reason her father had taken her from her birth home. Bryn figured that deep down he knew medicine wouldn’t fix his defective daughter. Perhaps religion could, and where was there a more religious place than Ifreann? A perfect place to exorcise demons.

Yet nothing had been fixed or cured by moving to Ifreann.

Now she was a failed healer with no aptitude for healing and a history full of unknowns, finding her calling working with the dead instead of the living.

It was, unfortunately, something that made her even more of a pariah since death was a taboo subject in the town. To speak of it, to even think of it, was to bring it upon your household. That was why they burned the dead since to have a cemetery was to invite death.

Bryn found peace in death because the dead never called her a witch, said a word against her, or whispered loud enough that it was obvious she was meant to hear. She felt comfortable among them as she prepared them to cross over into wherever one went when they died.

Something that in a town full of religious zealots made her little better than the imaginary demons that they prayed for protection from.

Witches.

Women born with magic and mayhem in their blood. Able to bring wrath and death down on the small town with their innate abilities.

While she held no true power, she knew where she fell on the town’s spectrum of good and evil.

Had her father’s closest friend not been Mr. Rafferty, the governor of their small town, she was sure she’d be dead by now. Keeping to the streets at night, letting people forget about her, was all that kept his job safe since too much interaction with her could doom him as well.

If only she could leave these walls, but she knew she wouldn’t. She couldn’t leave her cousin or her close friends since they were the only allies she had in life.

They were as much her family as Jace, but still, they didn’t know her secrets. No, all her secrets died with her father.

“Why are you here? This is my part of the job,” Bryn asked as she moved again to remain downwind of the smell as the wind changed directions. Even though the walls surrounding the town kept out most of the high winds and sand, it wasn’t foolproof. “He is past your expertise unless you are able to raise the dead. You did your job in making sure they weren’t diseased, now go get some rest.”

“I have not been summoned to any bedsides, so why not help?” Jace asked as he moved to assist in lifting one of the heavier male bodies from the ground and onto a board, grunting at the weight.

Snorting, Bryn turned to her cousin, his cheeks pink more from the lie he just told than the elements and exertion.

“Your mother is on a tear throughout the clinic, isn’t she?”

Sighing, he put his hands on his hips as he hung his head.

“It’s horrible. As if sin is some airborne disease, and she needs to rid the town of it. I was just stopping in to put away my bag; the moment she saw me, she lit sage and started praying... loudly. Obviously, the sin is all over my clothes and bag.” Lifting his head, he rolled his eyes as he reached for the cloth on the cart and used it to wipe his hands, blood and dirt staining it.

She tried to swallow the bile, making sure her own gloves were secured.

The sight of blood made her sick to her stomach, which was yet another mark against her as a potential healer. If a body came in from the desert having been feasted upon by scavengers, it was all she could do not to pass out working the pyres.

Her fear of blood was ammunition for her aunt to taunt her with, as if her aunt truly needed anything to assist in her cruelty.

After her father had died, leaving her at her aunt’s mercy, Aunt Mallory’s disinterest in Bryn had turned to loathing. Bryn learned quickly to make herself scarce as a form of self-preservation.

It was yet another of Bryn’s secrets that even Jace knew nothing about.

His mother was abusive emotionally and physically, and yet the woman was seen as one of the most pious in the community for her undying faith and loyalty when she was pure evil behind closed doors.