Page 52

Elliot Crane

Good morning, Mr. Crane.

I laughed, looking up to see Elliot leaning in the doorway, a smile on his face that I wasn’t entirely certain how to read, but that I hoped I would see again every day.

“Seriously?” I asked him.

He walked across Noah’s kitchen, then bent and took my face in his hands, kissing me thoroughly. “I am going to say that to you every day for the rest of your life,” he said softly.

I swallowed around the lump in my throat, blinking away emotional tears. “I’m okay with that,” I told him.

Seth Crane .

It was weird. I’d been Seth Mays for so long that I wasn’t really sure what to do with the fact that I was going to change my name everywhere—it was already on the marriage certificate, and I’d started the process of switching over things like credit cards, trying to figure out what I needed to change social security cards and get a new driver’s license—there are a lot of places where you use your name.

Work, doctor’s office, credit cards, vehicle registration… So many places.

It was totally worth it.

“Come on,” he said, his expression growing serious. “We need to get going.”

I wasn’t any happier about it than he was. Definitely less happy, in fact.

We were driving back out to the house—Hart was meeting us there, and he was bringing Ward with him. I hadn’t wanted to ask him why, but I had a pretty good guess.

If the Community had killed my mother and the Augusta County cops had been willing to cover it up and blame someone else, then there was a not-insubstantial chance that there were other victims who had been killed, either intentionally—like Momma—or unintentionally, as I suspected Rachael had been—adults and children allowed to die from Arcana, injuries, or other illnesses that prayers hadn’t been able to heal.

I was afraid of what he was going to find out. In part because I just wanted to go home, and the more Hart and Ward found, the more likely I was going to stay tangled up in whatever legal ramifications would result from it. Especially if Ward found out something about Momma. Or Rachael.

I climbed carefully into the familiar passenger seat of Elliot’s Tundra—we’d taken Henry to the airport yesterday so that he could fly back to Wisconsin—and sat back, trying to calm my already-racing heart.

It didn’t matter that a quarter of the Community had been arrested, that the FBI had essentially ordered surveillance on the rest, and that my parents were dead—going back still made my palms sweat and my stomach churn.

Elliot reached over and took one of my hands. “You okay, baby?”

I drew in a long breath, then let it out again. “No, but I will be.”

He pulled my fingers to his lips and kissed them before letting me go. “We’re almost done here,” he said softly.

I snorted—I couldn’t help it. “Until Ward finds another dozen murder victims,” I muttered.

“Goddamn it,” I grumbled from where I was sitting on a rotting log at the edge of the clearing where Momma and Rachael were buried. The flower wreaths were wilted, and Elliot had gathered them up and put them in the back of the truck for disposal.

My reaction was in response to the shimmering forms of three ghosts—Lady Sylvia Randolph was the first, with the other two being my mother and sister. I liked Lady R well enough, creepy as she was, but I had no desire whatsoever to speak to either Rachael or Momma.

I heard Elliot draw in a breath, as though about to say something. I looked up, then nearly fell off my log. “Shit!”

“Fuck!” Elliot gasped out at the same time.

Rachael had appeared right in front of me, her empty, translucent eyes boring into me.

“She’s curious about you,” came the eerie voice of Lady R.

I swallowed, my mouth and throat completely dry. I tried breathing through my nose, trying to get my heart rate back under control.

“Why is he angry?” my dead sister asked.

“Ask him yourself, girl,” the dead Victorian woman replied. “He’s got ears.”

I did have ears, but if it hadn’t been for Ward, who was still over by the graves, it wouldn’t have mattered because I wouldn’t have been able to either see or hear the dead women.

Rachael kept staring at me, but she did as Lady R suggested. “Why are you angry?”

I had a whole list. Because my father was an abusive, homicidal asshole.

Because my mother hadn’t even tried to save any of her children.

Because there was a whole Community dedicated to abuse and deprivation.

Because I’d been denied a childhood with people who loved me.

Because they’d tried to take Elliot from me.

Because they’d thrown Noah in jail. Because they’d killed Momma.

“Why aren’t you?” I asked her.

It felt like the air went cold, dry, and weirdly dark. “I am.”

I shuddered, and Elliot took a step away from Rachael. “Jesus fuck,” he whispered.

“The fuck is going on over here?” Hart demanded, his eyes narrowed at my sister’s ghost. She turned toward him, then bared teeth that were way too sharp for a human mouth, dead or alive. Hart’s skin shimmered gold, and I sat back, alarmed. “Oh, no you fucking don’t, missy,” the elf hissed.

“That’s enough, girl,” Lady R snapped, wrapping an insubstantial hand around her arm as Ward rolled his way over the lumpy ground, grimacing as he wrestled his way across a root. “These are not your enemies.”

Rachael turned her empty eyes back on me. “You look like him,” she said, but she seemed to deflate, heat and humidity returning to the air.

I clenched my teeth, jaw aching. I didn’t want to be reminded that I looked like my father. Rachael didn’t. Like Noah, she looked like Momma. Small features, slender bones. Unlike Noah, she had dark hair. I couldn’t tell what color her eyes had been.

“I’m not him,” I told her.

“No,” she agreed. “He tried to kill you.” She continued to study me, although I couldn’t figure out what she was trying to find. “He failed.”

I wasn’t sure where she was going with this.

“He killed me,” she said, then. “They all did.”

“The fuck do you mean they all did ?” Hart wanted to know, and I jumped a little, having forgotten he was there in the handful of seconds since he’d last spoken.

Rachael turned her empty eyes on him. “The Elders,” she replied. “Father. Jeremiah Porter. Elijah Greub. Obediah Stewart. Amos Martens. Lazarus Ziemer.”

“ How did they kill you?” Hart asked, his voice tight.

She turned to stare at him. “They ate me.”

Nausea rolled through me.

“Fuck,” Elliot hissed.

Rachael turned to stare at him. “You curse a lot,” the ghost observed.

Lady R snorted. I hadn’t known ghosts could snort. But I understood why. She’d spent enough time around Hart that Elliot’s occasional fucks were nothing in comparison to what Hart came up with.

Elliot stared at her.

“Cursing is a sin,” she told him.

“I don’t believe in sin,” Elliot informed her, his voice even, although his body was tense.

She cocked her head to the side, still staring. “What do you believe in?”

“Okay, not that I object to philosophical discussions in principle,” Hart drawled. “But this is a murder investigation, so I’d really rather cut the crap and get to the details.”

Rachael turned her attention to him, bearing her teeth.

“I don’t think she likes you, Val,” Elliot observed.

Her gaze swung back to him. “You’re like them,” she said. “But not like them.”

Elliot regarded her. “I’m a shifter, yes,” he said softly. “But I’m not a wolf.”

She stared again. “Why?”

Elliot frowned. “Why what?” he asked.

She looked over at me, then back to him. “Why don’t you believe in sin?”

He shrugged. “It’s a construct invented by men who maintain power through control,” he replied. “I’m not interested in letting them have it.”

“Can we get back to the murder, please?” Hart interrupted, sounding irritated. “What, exactly, do you mean, that they ate you?”

I turned away, feeling sick. I didn’t want to think about my father eating my sister.

She just stared at him.

“I think it’s pretty fucking self-explanatory,” Elliot said, stepping behind me and putting his hands on my shoulders.

I swallowed, hard. “It will be evident on her bones,” I rasped out.

I felt Hart’s eyes on me. And Rachael’s.

“That means I need to exhume the body,” he said, and his voice was gentle.

I nodded. “Do what you need to.”

I don’t recommend ever attending an exhumation. Especially not one for anyone you ever cared about. I hadn’t ever met my sister, so, for me, it was sort of like attending the exhumation of a stranger.

A stranger who was standing right there, impossibly, unnaturally still.

Ward had released my mother, who apparently hadn’t wanted to speak to me, since Ward had sent Lady R over to find out if I wanted him to make her stay to talk to me. I’d taken the possibly-childish route of figuring that if she didn’t want to talk to me, I didn’t want to talk to her, either.

Elliot had given me a look that either wanted to know what was wrong with me or possibly he meant to communicate complex sympathy—I wasn’t sure, and, either way, I felt kind of like shit about it. Even dead, my own mother didn’t want anything to do with me.

Maybe she was angry that we were digging up Rachael and that I’d been the one to sign the consent forms. Noah hadn’t wanted anything to do with any of this—he and Lulu had stayed in Richmond, and when I’d called him, he’d told me to do whatever I thought was right.

So I had.

I guess Momma disagreed.

I had no idea what Rachael thought, although I guess if she’d objected, then she might have done something other than stand there and stare.

I winced as the coffin, its plain boards rotting, cracked, although it—thank God—held together enough that Rachael’s body stayed within.

“Fuck,” Hart hissed as the crane moved very, very slowly to deposit the coffin in the back of a trailer. I couldn’t see over the plywood sides, but the sound of splitting wood and a few soft thumps suggested it hadn’t held together very well. Hart grimaced and turned away.