Dire (Reaper's Redemption Book 2)

by Thea Atkinson

  "Sweet Moses," he said, looking in.

  No one waited after that. Gramp and Sarah jockeyed for position close enough to look inside. I pushed them both out of the way.

  The strong smell of both Rosemary and sulfur wafted to my nostrils as I peered over the edge and into the belly of it. No one seemed interested in plucking the contents from the depths of the jar, but it didn't look too malicious to me. A bit of cheesecloth wrapped around something dried up. Whatever it was, it was nestled in some sort of nest. It took both hands hovering over the jar with my fingers weaving into the tangle of debris to pull the thing from the core and into the light.

  Gramp backed away from me and I almost thought I saw him genuflect over his heart. Sarah had gone pale and stood there with her arms wrapped around her midriff. Callum, on the other hand, grabbed the thing from me and put it on the counter as though it was a hot potato. It looked decidedly brown once laid on the counter.

  "What is it?" he said.

  "It's a heart," Gramp said.

  "Gross," I said and glowered at the thing, hating that Sarah had been right. "How can you tell what it is wrapped up in that thing?"

  He nodded at the jar. "Is there anything else in there?"

  I tilted the jar toward me, peering into the dark belly. "Maybe," I said, twisting it more toward the light. "Oh, wait," I said. "There is something." I reached in with one hand this time, plucking whatever it was in between two fingers and extracting it. Whatever it was, it was also wrapped in cheesecloth but was lashed with something that looked like the same material as had been wrapped around the jar.

  "Liver," he said.

  "How can you know that?" I said and looked at Sarah. The fact that she waggled her head at me and bit down on her lip told me he was right.

  "I told you," she said, backing away. "I told you what it was. You didn't want to believe me." She started to pace and eventually ended up back in the dining room, plopping down at the table in front of her empty plate.

  Callum held his hands up. "Calm down, everyone," he said. "We don't even know what these are. You're just guessing."

  I thought of the dreams I'd been having. The last ones had been so vivid and visceral that my my skin flushed from the memory. I had the feeling that if the jar was responsible for anything, it was my sleepless nights.

  "Maybe they're not even the parts to a spell," I said, turning away so Callum couldn't see my face flaming. "And maybe if they are, then they're just some sort of love potion or something. We have no idea."

  "You're awfully stuck on love spells, Ayla," Sarah said, but it wasn't an unkind tease, more a thought process and I tried not to look guilty under scrutiny. "I've never seen a love spell like that before."

  I peered over at Gramp. "Well," I said to him. "You're the druid. What do you think it is?"

  He shook his head. "It's not the same thing I put in that malice bag," he said. "If that's what you're thinking, but I know those tissues." He pointed to the nest. "That's hair." He pointed to the fat blob of brown sitting on the counter. "That's a heart. Bird or cat, I don't know, but that's what it is."

  "Everything doesn't have to look like a threat," I said. "Just because there's some sort of internal organs inside of a pottery jug buried in the backyard with some weird symbol on the bottom of it and lashed all about with cat gut, doesn't mean someone is trying to resurrect something evil and attack us."

  There. I sounded convincing.

  "You say that but..." Callum said.

  I turned away from them all, putting my fingers to my temples. All of this talk of spells coupled with so many nights of sleeplessness, and just finding that thing in the back yard in the first place and discovering it was filled with viscera made my temper short. I didn't want to think anything nefarious was going on. I wanted to think it was a pet burial and no more. Maybe, at worst, a love spell. Surely, if anyone else found that thing, they would put it down to a strange discovery and nothing more.

  "Seriously," I said to no one in particular. "What could this unknown person be trying to raise? I mean what would it be? Turkey gizzards and a cat heart? That would be some strange sort of zombie mash up."

  "No one would be trying to raise a zombie anyway," Sarah said, waving her hand. "They're useless things."

  I glared at her. "Not helping."

  She sighed and threw up her hands.

  "Okay, then," she said. "Let's say we're overreacting. We still have a weird looking pot unearthed from ground that should have been noticed long ago by your garden-loving hippie grand dad." She peered at him. "No offense intended," she added meekly and he shrugged.

  "Compliment accepted," he said.

  She stared down at her hands for a long moment and then got up to go over to the fridge. She came back carrying a large plate of chocolate cake and a jug of milk. She placed both on the dining room table and sliced into the cake, pulling herself out a big chunk. She bit into it without picking up a fork.

  "Put it back outside," she said, around a mouthful of chocolate. "It's making me nauseous."

  Callum snorted and she gave him a look that would cut through ice.

  "Agreed," Gramp said and popped all of the little packages back inside. He placed the lid down on it with a small tinkling sound and carried the thing out in both hands to the back step. I could see him through the open porch door placing it down onto the stoop.

  "Whatever it was put there for," Sarah said, sticking a finger into the frosting and staring at it. "It's useless now, but that doesn't mean I'm not gonna go digging through your backyard to see what else is out there." She gave me a long look as though she was waiting for me to challenge her.

  "Fine," I said.

  "I'll help," Callum said.

  She licked her finger then cut him a piece of cake and passed it to him. He took it from her hands and jammed a corner of it into his mouth.

  "We'll all help," I said with a sigh. "But I'm telling you I'm not spending my entire weekend out there. Couple of hours tops." I sounded sullen, and I knew it, but I couldn't imagine Gramp's yard being riddled with jugs of viscera no matter what she said. Besides, I was exhausted. Just thinking about wielding a shovel made my shoulders ache. I couldn't remember feeling so tired and out of sorts, and although it was unusual, I imagined it had everything to do with the stresses of fitting into my new life. It wasn't every day a girl discovered she was a reaper or that her new foster sister was a necromancer.

  For a second, Sarah looked at me, and there was a moment when those eyes of her looked familiar. Not because I'd looked into them so many times over the years, but because I had seen them again recently somewhere. If I wanted to, I was certain I could overlay another face onto hers, but it was much like trying to put language to a dream. Every time I got anywhere near close enough to the answer, it drifted away again.

  It wasn't until she flipped her braid over her shoulder, I realized it had grown over the three weeks she had been with us. The blonde roots of hers were showing much more plainly against the contrast of the dyed black she had put into it. As she bent her head to cut a piece of cake, I noticed how very fair her hair was, and I realized finally what had seemed so familiar.

  "Oh my god, Sarah," I said. "He looked like you." As excited as I was to make the connection, I felt a peculiar sense of foreboding.

  Her eyes darted to mine. "What are you talking about?"

  I pushed my chair back, jumping to my feet. I swung my gaze from her to Callum.

  "Tell me he didn't look like her," I said to him.

  Both Sarah and Gramp both sat there looking confused under Callum's silent study of her face. He nodded slowly.

  "I think you're right," he said. "It's not a dead match, but there are strong similarities."

  "What are you talking about?" Sarah demanded. She dropped her cake on her plate and pushed it away.

  It was tough to have to admit what had happened to me that morning, difficult to push down the residual feeling of guilt as I thought about the thudding
of my scooter into soft flesh, of the prone form of a man lying on the pavement. But the resemblance was uncanny, and to explain, I had to confess it.

  "I hit someone with my scooter this morning" I said because there was no real good way to ease into it.

  The raucous response from both Gramp and Sarah was more than I'd expected and that said a lot.

  "He's okay," I said, knowing that after the awful episode, all that mattered, no matter how much I tried to tell myself otherwise, was that he was indeed okay. I knew feeling that sense of gutted horror every time I thought about it was a small price to pay for that man's health.

  "He's not dead or anything, just maybe a bruise or two. He stepped in front of me," I said, placing my hand on top of his blue veined one. "He as much admitted it. Wasn't looking. It was an accident."

  I swung my gaze from one person to the other at the table. "He looked a lot like you, Sarah. He had your eyes. The same color hair. That delicate look you have."

  She sucked the back of her teeth as though I'd insulted her.

  "I'm not delicate." She chewed the bottom of her lip.

  I almost didn't dare to ask, because she would undoubtedly feel even less safe, but the resemblance was so stark, I had to.

  "Do you think it could be a distant relative?"

  She looked at me for a long moment, obviously formulating her answer carefully. And I had the feeling she was working out for herself whether it could be a family member having traced her location. When she spoke, it seemed to be only after careful consideration and the relief in her tone was all the palpable because of it.

  "I'm the only one in my family with blonde hair and blue eyes." She tugged at the dyed black tresses and pulled them forward so she could inspect the ends. "Everyone else is dark and swarthy. I was teased about it a lot. I don't have any brothers or sisters and my nearest cousins don't have any magic."

  That she was admitting anything about her family at all was testament to how nervous she had been since we had found the earthen jug. The only time she had spoken about her family was in the halfway house, when she had told me stories that made my skin crawl. Back then, I had thought she'd been just spinning yarns to explain to me why she didn't want to go home. Why she wanted to run away. I figured she would have told me anything to scare me. But when she had actually run away and everyone had lost track of her, I had begun to believe that perhaps where she had come from was worse than she had said. It wasn't until I had found her in the crypt next to the Gothic cathedral here in town, I truly believed any of her stories.

  "I'm sure we're just being paranoid," I said. "Just because we found a piece of pottery doesn't mean it has some menacing meaning or even that you're no longer safe."

  "And I'm sure the guy is just coincidence," Callum offered.

  She shook her head. "Maybe you're right," she said, but her face and her body language weren't in concert with her words. She looked stiff and uncomfortable.

  I wasn't so sure things were mere coincidence either, not now that I'd made the connection. I followed her into the kitchen and waited until she was running water into the sink before I even dared formulate the question I wanted to ask. I let her bustle around a bit, gathering things like she was gathering thoughts. It wasn't a pleasant thing to consider, but I had the feeling she was hiding something, and I was sure it had to do with the fellow who looked like her.

  "Do you think you accidentally raised that necromancer your family wants resurrected?" I asked her, clutching my plate with tight fingers, afraid of her answer. "Is that why you're so fidgety? Is that who that guy was?"

  She swung to face me and her face was bald with panic. It was in that moment that I thought there was more going on behind her eyes than she was letting us see.

  "Accidentally?" she said. "Raising the dead isn't something you do accidentally."

  "I just meant that maybe it was possible that you did something to get his attention. Woke his spirit or something."

  "First of all," she said, counting down her fingers. "The necromancer you're worried about is a woman. Second of all," she said, lifting her second finger. "My family can try to raise her all they want without me, but they don't have the power. Third: if they do find the power, they'll have a devil of a time trying to raise her. "

  She seemed vehement enough to believe what she was saying, but I knew her better than that.

  I squinted at her, thinking there was something else. Whatever she was hiding from me was right there on the tip of her tongue. "What did you do??"

  Her hands went to her hips even as I watched her chest trembling with suppressed anxiety.

  "When we left the crypt that day," she said, wincing as she spoke as though she expected me to scold her. "I took one of her rib bones. She's not complete. And I aim to see that she never can be."

  "You stole from a church?" I said. "You stole a bone from a person's dead body?"

  Something about imagining her plucking a rib bone from muscle skeleton made my stomach queasy.

  "Technically, the dead body was nothing but bones anyway," she said. "It's not like I desecrated a corpse, or something. Archaeologists do that sort of thing all the time."

  She turned away from me and dropped a plate into the sink. She turned on the tap and ran water, steaming, over the surface. Gravy spilled out over the edge. She needed a moment. I knew that. Everything that had happened in the crypt had to be more than even a necromancer could manage. I lay three fingers on her forearm.

  "What did you do with the rib?" I asked her.

  "Buried it," she said, turning away from me and pulling open a drawer. She extracted a drying cloth and snapped it open.

  "So no one can find it, right?" I said. "It can't be used against us to raise some demon nun? We're all good?" I couldn't say why I felt so sure the answers to all of those questions was not the ones she would give.

  "There are certain rules about necromancy," she said. "You need bones, blood, and an awful lot of power."

  I laughed at that, even though I didn't really find anything funny.

  "Fancy them trying to get blood from a skeleton," I said.

  She turned that blue eyed gaze to mine.

  "It doesn't have to be the necromancer's blood," she said. "Just blood from the same line with the same power. And since I'm from the line..."

  It slowly dawned on me what she was saying. "You mean they –"

  "That's right. They wanted to sacrifice me in order to raise her."

  CHAPTER 6

  I stared at her, aghast, not sure what to say for a long moment. I watched as she flipped the drying cloth over her arm and picked up a plate from the sink. I was aware that she hadn't even washed the thing and yet there she was drying it. Whatever it was Gramp and Callum were doing in the other room, the small action of her drying a dirty plate seemed far more dramatic.

  I silently took the plate from her hands and placed it back in the sink and when I did, she dropped the drying cloth to the floor and clutched the counter with both hands. She leaned in, and I thought I saw her shoulders shake.

  I wasn't sure what to do. I wasn't good at comforting people. I put my hand between her shoulder blades, at least offering contact even if I didn't know what to do with it.

  "It takes a lot of power to raise a necromancer like that, who's been dead for a hundred years. Even a skilled sorcerer will have trouble." Her voice sounded very distant but I didn't dare interrupt.

  "I'm nowhere near skilled enough," she said. "When they discovered the hardest part was getting the magic right, they decided to use the power I did have... just not the way I thought." She let go a harsh laugh. "I have the right blood. All they needed was an intact skeleton of another necromancer. I knew they'd find one eventually. It took me four years to find the skeleton."

  "The crypt," I guessed, remembering the bone she had taken as we'd left the tunnels after the doppelgänger episode.

  She nodded. "Apparently, the old girl was a nun."

  "No wonder you ra
n away."

  I felt her muscles go tense beneath my hand and she looked at me sideways.

  Her mascara had run and I realized she was crying. I had never seen her cry. Not in all the time we had been together in the halfway house. Not even in the crypt when that murderous doppelgänger was trying to kill her and steal her energy. It worried me.

  "I won't let anything happen to you," I said. "Gramp won't. Callum won't."

  Her shoulders sagged. I had the feeling she wanted to hug me but didn't know how to ask for it. Both of us were so damaged by those years we'd been thrown together as foster sisters that all we understood how to help each other with was fighting. I stepped closer. It took at least four heartbeats, but she finally opened her arms and we found ourselves tangled together, arms run tight around each other. Neither one of us spoke.

  "We got this," I said and she nodded into my shoulder. "We've got your back."

  "Of course we do," Callum said from the doorway. He was leaning against the door jamb with one ankle crossed over the other. He had pulled his jacket back on and looked as though he was getting ready to leave.

  I noticed Sarah scrambled to wipe the mascara from her cheeks as she pulled away. He pretended not to notice and instead jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  "I'm going to go now," he said. "Early shift at the station."

  She nodded and I guessed she was struggling to trust her voice. I rubbed her arm.

  "It's the weekend," I said. "I can be out there digging by 8 AM."

  She brightened at the prospect of some action even if it was physical labor. "I'll make cocoa."

  When I went to bed that night, falling onto the top of the covers without so much as bothering to get in, I was beyond exhausted.

  I wasn't long asleep when the dreams came. Like before, they were vivid and I felt as though Callum was right there with me. His lips roamed my throat and found my collarbone, lingering over the pulse. I was too hot. My skin seared where he touched it. I started to peel my tank top up over my head and it caught on my earring.