Clara circled a finger in front of her eye. “The pupil and iris had grown. His whites were smaller. Trust me, I knew his eyes. I loved his eyes.” Her voice choked and a hiccup escaped.
It was ridiculously endearing. I forgave her a little on the basis that she truly did care for Rice.
But... shit. “I need to make a phone call,” I told her, lifting my Com. “Thank you for telling me.”
She nodded and didn’t walk away.
I looked at her pointedly. “What?”
She blushed. “He loved you, you know. You were the center of his universe. I know he cared for me, but you... I would never have been able to compete against you. Rice’s sun rose and set in your orbit.”
With that, she gave me a hug — so quickly I had no time to react — and hurried back inside Collier & Sons, LLC.
Rice’s sun rose and set in your orbit.
Do. Not. Cry.
I hit the line for dispatch and asked to be connected to the morgue.
The morgue was housed one level above Senka’s tomb on the opposite end of the block that housed Headquarters. The huge building played home base to the entirety of Senka law enforcement, including SEA and SEB, as well as the Council and the offices of the Reins.
Getting an appointment to visit the morgue was like trying to make a deal with the devil. Only the coroner could conduct a visit, and if he wasn’t in, he could be called—but that didn’t mean he would come. Not even for me.
My luck held up, because the coroner was in.
Dr. Webster met me in the lobby with a grim handshake. “Long time, no see, Nez. Sorry it’s under these circumstances.”
“Yeah. Thanks for seeing me, Doc.”
He led me to the elevators, and I grimaced. Second time in as many days, people were dragging me outside my comfort zone.
The doc must have noticed the look on my face, because he laughed. “Ah, still not a fan of elevators, I see.”
“Not when there are perfectly good stairs to use.”
Dr. Webster laughed as we entered the elevator. He scanned his Com on the sensor and chose the level for the morgue. The elevator began to sink.
I let the silence stretch between us. Dr. Webster rocked genially from his heels to his toes, humming an unfamiliar tune.
Unable to hold the question in any longer, I asked, “Is he shadow touched?”
Dr. Webster rubbed his graying goatee. The look was new since I had worked under him. I liked the contrast against his brown skin. The coroner didn’t grow old so much as he aged like a fine wine.
“It’s hard to say after death,” he replied. “Acura’s darkness begins to drain back out into the world, and the symptoms fade. The sclera fades to the normal white.”
“Don’t give me the technical, comforting bullshit, Doc. Do you think my brother was shadow touched when he died?”
As if to punctuate my question, the elevator doors slid briskly open.
“Your candor has always been refreshing, Nez.” Dr. Webster led me out into the sterile white hallway. “I miss having you on my team. This intern right now... she’s a nightmare. Can’t even see blood without going pale.”
“You’re evading the question.”
“No, I’m giving us time to reach your brother’s body.” He touched his Com to another sensor, and we entered his exam room.
The hammering in my chest intensified when I saw the morgue drawers lining the back wall. I’d spent six months in this room on my rotation for SEB training many years ago. I adored Dr. Webster—his efficient movements and his brilliant mind. He’d earned my respect. I found it exhilarating to be back here, but terrifying to see my brother's body.
Rice waited for me in Drawer #3. Six years ago, I’d watched bodies go in and out of that drawer and never once thought of them as a person. Human, fae, whatever — all of them empty husks. Not people at all.
Dr. Webster tugged the sheet down past Rice’s face, but thankfully not far enough for me to see the wound on his neck.
They were people, those bodies. I could appreciate that now, staring down at the man I’d loved most in the world. The man who reminded me so much of our father, and now was likely smoking a pipe with him in the afterlife.
Dr. Webster gently pressed on Rice’s lids, opening a single eye. I’d forgotten how gentle he was with his patients, as if their empty bodies could still feel his examinations. “It appears to be a possibility.”
I gazed down. Rice’s iris bled much further into his sclera than it should. The coroner could evade giving me a straight answer. He could try to explain it away to make me feel better, but the truth stood.
My brother had died shadow touched.
9
I drove without a destination in mind.
My mother had warned me. Senka Hollow is poison, she said, so many times, so often as I grew up. Her mantra had become a common part of my life; when she said it last night, my rebuff had been automatic.
But now... what if Senka Hollow was poison? What if Senka had failed? Maybe the earthquake had been her demise, the end of her influence over the Hollow. If that were true, Acura’s darkness would sweep over us all in time.
Demise insinuated death, though. And the guards were sure they saw movement inside the tomb. Which was crazy. Some part of me understood that Senka had been a living, breathing fae princess once upon a time, but in her role as our sleeping protector, she’d become more myth. A revered goddess: unreachable, insubstantial.
I steered the Ducati to Old Reservation Road on impulse. I thought about disappearing into my mother’s house and sleeping the rest of the day away. I could hide in the room I’d shared with Rice for eighteen years and remember how the two of us tripped over each other in such a tiny space. When we moved to the apartment, it had been strange, learning to sleep in different rooms. The absence of his breathing in the night had unnerved me. For eighteen years, he was only feet away in a matching bed. I could hear his every sigh, his every movement. It became my nighttime lullaby.
Now he’d never move or sigh or breathe again.
Yards from the turn off to the Res, I changed my mind. I didn’t want to hide where I was safe and constantly reminded of my brother. I wanted to get away. When I was younger, if I wanted to escape the stifling disappointment of my mother and her ideals of duty, I’d go to the mesa.
On the surface, the ruins of the cave dwellings were deserted at mid-day. I didn’t go inside; chances were good that sleeping shadow-toucheds filled the cavernous rooms. But the outside was quiet and uninhabited beneath a warm desert sun.
I locked my bike and glamoured it to match the brilliant reds of the dirt behind it, so if anyone inside were to wake, they wouldn’t get any bright ideas about taking it.
Then I scaled the mesa.
The air always seemed cooler and clearer on the smooth plain high above the desert floor. Nothing could compare to the incredible view, either: endless desert all around and a distant, shimmering view of the city rising from the horizon.
I sprawled on the ground and gazed up into the sky. So much boiled inside me. Rice, who died shadow touched after being sent on a ridiculously stupid mission for the Insurgentia. Senka’s opened grave. The Rein and Reina of Senka Hollow engaging in daily recreational domestic violence. Senka is poison. You must return one day anyway, Maurelle. You will be the next chieftess of this clan.
I pressed my fists to my eyes until spots appeared on the inside of my eyelids. Pain was grounding, after all. A sure way to get your mind off everything else.
Then I slept, my dreams thankfully, wonderfully blank.
Heady clove-scented smoke awakened me.
For a moment, I thought I had imagined it. I blinked into a still-bright sky and waited to see if it had been a figment of my imagination, the way I’d dreamt of it the night before.
Nope. An elegant plume of smoke drifted on the breeze above me. I watched the swirls dance until they were gone, and then I shifted to look behind me.
An up
side-down version of Warren-the-time-traveler grinned at me. “You snore.”
“I do not. Ass.” I sat up and shook away the vestiges of my nap. “What are you doing here?”
“It would appear I’m following you,” Warren responded on an exhalation of smoke. He waved his dark brown cigarette in the air. “I assure you, I’m not. I come here sometimes. Clears my mind.”
For the first time, I studied him in the sunlight. He wore his mahogany hair spiked into a peak at his hairline, and his black eyes were eerily large in his angular face. He reclined lazily on one elbow, legs out straight and ankles crossed.
And yeah. He was still fucking hot.
He took another puff of his cigarette, eyeing me silently.
I relaxed. Okay, yes, he was shadow touched. But he didn’t feel dangerous or out-of-control, the way marks did. There was a wildness to the shadow touched once the darkness began to settle in that he didn’t have. He didn’t make my spidey-sense tingle.
“When did you become shadow touched?” I asked.
He tilted his chin and huffed out a puff of smoke. “At conception.”
I rolled my eyes. “Try again.”
Warren shrugged. “Believe me or don’t.”
“There’s nothing to believe. The shadow touched can’t conceive.”
He grinned. The movement made him look feral. “Who says?”
“Science.”
“Science is nothing but magick in disguise, and magick is variable.” Warren extinguished his cigarette on the ground and tucked the stub in his pocket.
I lifted an eyebrow.
He leaned back on both elbows with a movement meant to be a shrug. “I don’t litter in sacred places. We already have that problem with the assholes downstairs.”
“How do you get those cigarettes? Aren’t they expensive?”
“I have my resources. Aren’t you going to thank me for saving your life?”
“I don’t know that you even did.” I stomped the heel of my boot on the ground. “The mesa is still standing.”
“The longhouse is not. Whole cavern collapsed.”
“Oh.” I thought of the quiet, sacred space, and all the days I spent there with Tohyah as a girl. In those days before the Rim began to expand and the shadow touched began to move in. Seemed like so many doors had closed in the past two days.
I processed this and moved on. “When you disappeared, you told me I had a long night ahead of me. What did you mean by that?”
He assessed me with those black eyes as if he could really see me. Not just the dusty jeans and tank — the same I’d worn last night when I met him — but all of me. The parts inside that fit together, little gears that whirled and twisted and comprised of my heart, my lungs, my emotions, my needs.
“I’m sorry about your brother.” It wasn’t an answer, but it was. He had known what was coming.
A lump lodged in my throat. I would not cry in front of this guy. “Could you go back? Take me back there and let me save him?”
Warren’s brow drew together. He looked at me with something akin to sadness, which was not an emotion I generally associated with the shadow touched. “No. I can only go where I’ve been before.”
“You haven’t been to the city?”
“No. I have to be there. At that moment. With him. Like how I was with you last night.”
“How did you know to be there?”
“I knew.”
The silence hung, hot and dry. After several moments that should have been awkward but felt almost comforting, Warren stood and stretched. His muscles drew taught beneath his plain black t-shirt, and a patch of tanned skin flashed above his low-hanging blue jeans. I thought of Tohyah, shirtless that morning on the Res, and not nearly so incredibly good-looking as this strange, black-eyed man who was shadow touched but... not.
“Glad we ran into each other,” Warren said. He flipped a cigarette from his never-ending pack and lit up. “I’ve got somewhere to be.”
I stared up at him. He was leaving me with more questions than I’d had a chance to ask. Instead of letting them out, I stood and offered him a hand to shake. “Thanks. For being there. For saving me.”
Warren shrugged, tucked the cigarette between his kissable lips, and clasped my hand. Power moved beneath his skin, so strong my knees buckled. “It wasn’t your time yet.”
Beneath the afternoon sunlight, I watched what I’d been unable to see clearly in the shadows the night before. Warren shimmered, a mirage in the desert, and disappeared.
Like any good mirage, I wondered if he’d really been there at all.
10
Lila sat behind her giant desk, her dainty cat-eye spectacles perched on her nose as she made notes on a legal pad. I’d always liked that about her: that old-fashioned aspect, where she eschewed her fancy computer in favor of dead trees. Unlike Shana, who ignored technology because she disliked being beholden to the fae, Lila did it because she came from a world before. When even the fae used paper and pencils for the sheer joy of creation. I may have never known that world personally, but it had existed, like a living legend of my race.
I plopped down across from her and put my boots on her desk, sinking into the comfort of her plush armchair. “Senka?”
Lila didn’t look up from her ledger. “Nothing further. I’ve got three guards on the crevice.”
“Everett?”
She sighed and finally looked up, shoving her glasses into her mass of honey-blonde hair. Lila’s blue eyes always had a kind of hardness to them; I doubted a fae could live as long as the Reina without developing the hard coating it took to survive in a hostile world like Senka Hollow. Though the hardness was still there, it was accompanied by a weariness I’d never seen before. “I don’t know where he slept last night.”
I grimaced. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s been a long time coming. He’s... different.” She rubbed her hands vigorously over her face. A vicious bruise spread over the knuckles of her right hand, presumably from when she’d broken his nose yesterday. “I don’t know why I’ve held on so long.”
“Because he’s your husband, and you’re both rulers of this Hollow.”
“He doesn’t have to be my husband to be my comrade.” She sighed. “I just wonder if that’s even what he wants anymore. He takes no notice of current events. Casts no votes when the council convenes. It’s like he isn’t even there, even when he is.”
“Do you think it’s a survival thing?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you kick a turtle, it’s going to retreat into its shell.”
Lila chuckled. Even though I hadn’t said it to be funny, I liked that I’d made her smile. “Ah. Because I punched him, he retreats when I’m around.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he’s just not the same person anymore. How old are you guys?”
“Older than I’d like to be.” She shoved back from the desk and walked to the cabinet that housed her wet bar. “Would you like anything?”
“No. I’m meeting Shana for dinner in about twenty minutes.”
Lila dropped three ice cubes in a tumbler and covered them with an amber liquid from a fancy crystal decanter. “Recreation or work?”
“Both. She’s got some info for me to help with the investigation.”
“How you holding up?” Lila turned to lean on the bar, cupping her glass in one hand as she regarded me.
“I’m okay.”
“You’re not. But I know you feel it necessary to pretend, which is why I don’t coddle you.”
I grinned. “I like when you don’t coddle me.”
“You get enough of that from your infuriating mother.” Lila rolled her eyes. “The Navajo council sent me a cease and desist last week, did I tell you?”
I knew my mother was an irritation to my life with her constant need to redirect my energies to ventures better suited to her goals. But she was just as much an irritation to Lila, who had to volley declarations from the tribe at least once or twic
e a month.
“A cease and desist on what?”
“We had a dry summer. Our main source of water has evaporated to a trickle. We used diviners to find an old well and dug into the groundwater.”
“Let me guess. On Native land.”
Lila groaned and returned to her desk, sinking wearily into the chair. “I’ve got people dying from Acura’s darkness, likely because our princess is dead, too—”
“Fuck, don’t say that.”
“—and if we don’t maintain the water supply, we’re going to have people dying from thirst. So, of course, I have to do what’s best for the Hollow. I always do what’s best for the Hollow. If that means calling imminent domain on Native land...” She trailed off.
“The spirits don’t believe in imminent domain.” I shrugged.
Lila bared her teeth. “Can you at least talk to her? Explain to the spirits how there are twenty thousand people in this Hollow who rely on me to make sure they have access to the basic necessities of life?”
“Sure I will. But you’re asking for my mother to place logic over her people, and I can already tell you how that’s gonna end.”
“When Rasha gave us Senka, things were so simple,” Lila murmured. “We were all one people. We were all bound together by our survival of the Undoing. But ever since, it’s as if the Undoing has continued on an organic level. Inside us all.”
I didn’t have a response, because I knew she was right.
I arrived at the bar at five-after, since it was impossible for me to be anywhere early or on time. Through a haze of smoke and the din of excited diners plus an old jukebox blasting the Rolling Stones, Shana waved me over to a corner table.
She already had a dark bottle of beer condensing on the scuffed, sticky table, and a basket of fried potatoes with the hot-honey sauce I liked.
I nicked a potato as I sat, fully soaking it in the sauce before I popped it in my mouth. “Long wait?”
“It’s always a long wait with you.” Shana sipped her beer. “I didn’t know what you were in the mood for, liquid-wise, so I haven’t ordered anything.”
The Shadows and Sorcery Collection Page 6
