But nothing happened. Senka patted his cheek with a thankful smile, which he returned in a boyish grin that made my hormones stand up and sing. Fucking ridiculous, considering I’d satisfied my urges early this morning. I’d never in my life been so ruled by my body over my brain.
But nothing happened. She didn’t hurt him. How?
Because he was already shadow touched?
Warren folded his lanky form into the backseat, I magicked the car to life, and we left the Bureau garage into brilliant morning sunshine.
Senka pressed her face to the glass the moment we passed into the outside world. I couldn’t see her expression, but she made little moues of excitement and pointed at things that interested her so Warren could explain. She remained that way the entire ride, rediscovering the world she’d left behind one hundred years ago.
When we arrived, the Res was a ghost town.
On the short stretch from Old Reservation Road down the dirt road to my mother’s, I usually passed a hub of activity. Men and women worked the fields on either side, growing vegetables on segregated family plots they’d sell to the residents of the Hollow to make a living. Familiar faces gathered on porches and around front doors, lifting hands in welcome to me on my bike—their Chieftess's prodigal daughter.
But today, not a person could be found. The fields lay empty beneath the sunshine. All of the Res houses were locked up tight—shutters closed, doors locked, yards cleared of children’s toys. The lack of movement and color gave me the creeps.
Ma had done exactly what I’d asked of her. Shocking.
I parked in the dust outside my mother’s home. By the time I cut the engine, she stood in the open doorway: tall, lithe, her beautiful face hardened by sun and time. She stood barefoot, wearing cut-off denims that frayed around her muscular thighs, her shoulders bare and her tank top smudged with dirt. If an artist could paint her soul, this would be the finished masterpiece.
Warren helped Senka from the car—and again, didn’t turn into a mummy—and the three of us linked up to meet Mama at the door.
I paused, waiting for my mother’s reaction. Haseya Nez was not the type of woman to bow to another, even the princess of Senka Hollow.
Mama studied Senka, her dark cocoa gaze missing nothing. She took one step forward, over the threshold, and offered both hands to Senka with a hundred-watt smile that nearly glowed from her face. “You are welcome in my home, Princess.”
With Senka well-cared for while my mother cooked us a feast for dinner, I escaped into the desert.
I thought my life had grown complicated enough when I found Rice dead on his bedroom floor. I needed to breathe clean air, be alone, try to figure out where I went from here.
Because fuck—I had no home. The council was falling apart. Lila had lost her damn mind. And Senka was sitting at my mother’s kitchen table with a cup of tea.
I thought I wanted to be alone until Warren joined me.
He folded his body into the dirt beside me, a clove cigarette dangling from his lips. He cupped a hand around it and lit the tip, squinting into the sunlight as he took a long drag.
“Mind if I join you?” He grinned, exhaling a plume of smoke that smelled like sex.
“Looks like you already have.”
He tapped the cigarette over the desert floor. “You okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fair enough.”
Then he didn’t say anything else. He sat beside me, leisurely enjoying his cigarette. We stared into a horizon that shimmered with heat. I couldn’t help but think of my dream the night before and watching the darkness billow in thick clouds over my father’s wall.
The possibility seemed too real.
I liked my solitude. The only person I had ever easily shared my space with had been Rice, which I chalked up to leftover womb closeness. But most everyone else got too close, talked too much, tried too hard, and I needed a break from that.
Warren wasn’t ant of that. I barely even heard the whoosh of his exhalation. The exotic scent of his ridiculously expensive cigarettes wrapped around me. He didn’t push me to talk or catch my eye.
We just… were.
And gods, I wanted him. I needed the release he could give me, and I wanted it now.
I touched his shoulder. He glanced over and smiled.
I leaned in and kissed him.
There was nothing gentle in me, and he responded in kind. I straddled his hips, kissing him so hard it hurt, his fingers digging into my breast.
I reached between us and unbuttoned his blue jeans. He broke the kiss and grabbed my hands.
“We probably shouldn’t do this here.” He laughed. “Snakes. Scorpions. Desert shit.”
I tugged my tank top off and threw it in the dust. The sight of my naked torso made his eyes glaze over. I reveled in the power I held over him.
I reached again for his blue jeans. This time, he didn’t stop me.
22
When I walked in from my desert sojourn with dust all over me and red marks on my neck and chest from Warren giving as good as he got, my mother side-eyed me knowingly.
“Gonna shower,” I said. I touched Senka’s bare shoulder and gave her a smile of greeting.
“Alone?” Mama asked pointedly.
I returned her side-eye. Identical, because I was her daughter, after all. “Don’t start, Mama. I don’t have the patience for your judgment today.”
“Do you care to hear the details of your brother’s funeral?”
I turned around and planted my ass in the chair beside Senka. “Please tell me it’s not tomorrow. My hands are a little full.”
“It is not tomorrow.”
Warren sauntered in, hands casually shoved in his pockets and covered in more dirt than me. He grinned as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “What’s up, ladies?”
My mother eyed him, and then looked at me. “I don’t know about the eyes, but at least he’s charming.”
I sighed. “You can have the shower first,” I told him. “Straight down the hallway.”
After the door shut behind him, my mother spoke. “Due to current events, I am postponing Maurice's funeral. I consulted with the elders this morning, and we have come to the conclusion that now is not an auspicious time in which to bury him.”
“Fair enough,” I agreed.
Senka looked between us, her brow furrowed. I hadn’t figured out how much she could follow verbally, and my mother and I weren’t exactly talking things Senka would know.
“What of the investigation?” Mama asked.
“Not much to tell. He was involved in some shit. The shit got him killed. They’re working on it.”
“I wish you had never left us. If you had stayed, he would have stayed…” She trailed off, as if realizing how callous her words sounded.
“So you think it’s my fault he's dead?” I struggled to maintain my cool, but inside, I was seething.
“No, shich’é’é. I didn’t mean—”
“But you did,” I cut her off, standing so abruptly my chair clattered to the floor. Senka whimpered. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to take a shower. Even if Warren isn’t out yet.”
And I left her, mouth agape, to wash the desert off my skin.
By sunset, my temper had cooled. We gathered around the table over my mother’s feast, Warren wide-eyed and salivating, and Senka visibly intrigued.
My mother and I had perfected ignoring our problems over the years. For me, at least, it was the only way I could exist in the same house with her and not scream every time she spoke.
I didn’t think she was the problem in the equation. But I didn’t think I was either. We simply hadn’t found enough common ground yet to carry a conversation that didn’t end with someone upset.
Warren made pleasant small talk with my mother about her bathroom, while I helped Senka navigate the woolly world of holding a fork. Though she looked worlds better than she had when I pulled her out of the crevasse, she still had mobility iss
ues, as if her fingers had yet to catch up.
“We should ask the Spirits,” Mama suggested, startling me out of spooning potatoes onto Senka’s plate.
I returned the spatula to the glass dish. “Ask the spirits what?”
Mama pointed her fork at Senka. “What is to be done to help the princess and restore the Hollow.”
Senka smiled prettily at Mama, potatoes dribbling from her mouth.
I eyed Warren as I helped Senka clean her chin. “A minute ago, you were talking about Mai's collection of rubber duckies. How did we get here?”
“Your mother talks in circles.” He shrugged, grinning as he tore off a hunk of bread.
“She does that,” I agreed. I looked at Mama. “How are we going to ask the Spirits if the Elders are gone?”
“Many remained.”
I eyeballed her. “Mama.”
“Oh, sure, go ahead and tell Grandmother Doba to leave the Reservation, Maurelle. See how that works out for you.”
My mother didn’t have a penchant for sarcasm, which led me to assume she had tried to get Doba to evacuate. Never let it be said my mother isn’t solid as a rock.
“Who else is still here?”
“Chooli, Tsintah, Niyol, and Yas.”
I rolled my eyes. “None of the elders left.”
“The Reservation is our responsibility, Maurelle. We remain to preserve and protect it.”
“And what would happen if all the elders and the chieftess died?”
“The clan would face a new dawn. It would not be the first time.” She looked to Senka. “Would it, Princess?”
Senka placed a hand over Mama's heart with an understanding smile. “Strong. Inside.”
The dead of night is a saying I’d never given much thought.
Dead because the world is still and silent? Dead because spirits are said to roam the earth between midnight and three a.m.?
Dead because it’s dark as a tomb?
Whatever the reason, a ghost crew gathered at the community bonfire in the dead of night. The waning moon rode high, a face to bear witness to our magick. Fingers of flame licked a desert sky blanketed in stars.
Our circle was small tonight, without my mother’s council or the rest of our clan. But to call the ancestors, all we required were the elders and my mother: the spirits and the soul of our nation.
Between my mother and me, Senka’s pale face shone in the light of the fire. Flickering shadow cast her eyes into unfathomable darkness, as if her face were set with perfect onyx stones.
Stoic Yas, his aged face a canvas of folds and crevices painted by a lifetime beneath the sun, began to beat his drum.
A dozen years ago, I had attended every circle with my mother and the elders in preparation of my duties to the clan. Yas's steady, rhythmic beat opened pathways inside me that had been long closed. Each beat jarred, spiked through me, shoved me in sync with the tribe, until I could no longer sense the difference between Yas's beat and my own heart.
Beside my mother, Doba began to chant. Her raspy song was smoke personified and full of power. If Yas's drum was the heartbeat of our people, Doba's song was our voice. And then the elders began to move, staffs and feet stomping in time to the drum as they circled the fire.
I remembered this feeling: this slow burn to intensity, the magick rising with the tempo, the fire billowing smoke so that the entire scene seemed surreal.
I remained seated beside Senka, but my soul circled and chanted with my elders.
Senka, unsurprisingly, surveyed the scene with obvious fascination. I couldn’t read her half-expression well enough to know how she felt. I doubt Rasha's daughter had ever seen a Res before, much less participated in a ritual to the ancestors. But she was a fae princess, which meant she was no stranger to magick.
Thick smoke undulated around the two of us. Feathery threads wove between us, encircling us, binding us together. Senka watched it all, her black eyes glittering.
The circle ceased all movement so abruptly, Senka gasped in surprise.
A hum arose, seemingly coming from everywhere and nowhere. My mother and the elders chorused into the sky. Blank eyes, white as clouds, looked into a world I had never understood.
I’d witnessed the sight and sound of the spirits more times than I could count. But the unnatural chill of touching the beyond never eased.
The hum turned to voices; voices that didn’t belong to my elders.
The spirits spoke.
“To find the answers you seek, you must travel beneath.”
23
To find the answers you seek, you must travel beneath.
The chant continued into my dreams that night and remained with me as I awoke in the early dawn light, sandwiched on my tiny bed between Warren and Senka.
Sunlight cascaded over Senka’s smooth face. She’d begged to stay with me, and I had wanted Warren’s arms around me to banish the fear I felt over the spirits' insistent declaration. So I ended up between them. The arrangement had comforted me, and I slept through the night.
Senka had slept soundly for the first time since rising, and her body hadn’t lost its warmth. Maybe the real Senka—the girl she had been a hundred years ago, before she became a vessel for and against the darkness—was returning.
To find the answers you seek, you must travel beneath.
The answer rang loud and clear. To save the Hollow, I had to accompany Senka to the grave.
If I went with her into the tomb, would she go with me? Or the better question: Could I really sacrifice myself for the Hollow? For Senka?
I didn’t need a medicine man to tell me the answer was unequivocally yes. Senka had become more than just a concept or man-made deity. She was flesh and blood, so full of darkness but so innocent and sweet. I empathized with her lot, being forced into the ground by her mother to save her people from the greatest enemy we’d ever known. If my mother had her way, I’d be forced into the role of protector and problem solver for our tribe when she left this plane of existence.
I didn’t want to die anymore than I wanted to be chieftess. But at least if I died beside Senka, my death would mean something. I’d spent years chasing the shadow touched to protect the Hollow. Dying for it seemed the next logical step.
Warren’s arm tightened around my waist. His breath tickled my neck as he said softly, “I don’t like the look on your face.”
“What look?”
“Determination.”
“It’s my usual look. You should get used to it.”
His hand moved from my waist to my chin, and he gently turned my head until our eyes met. “You’ve made a decision I’m not going to like.”
My heart pounded beneath the intensity of his gaze. “I make a lot of decisions people don’t like. Always for a good reason.”
“You can’t.”
“I can. And I will. Senka can’t do it alone.”
“You have no obligation to this city,” Warren snapped.
I stared at him in surprise. Gone was his smirk and good humor, replaced by fear and his own version of determination.
“I owe my life to this Hollow,” I told him. “I owe my life to Senka for getting us this far. We all do.”
Warren’s jaw tightened. “What about me?”
My heartbeat, already out of control, played a staccato that was almost painful. “What about you?”
He kissed me—desperate and thorough, and as PG as he could keep it, considering Senka slept behind me.
“What about us?” He whispered against my lips. His voice sounded as breathless as I felt: turned upside down and inside out.
I fought through emotions I couldn’t face. Not now, at the end when I’d chosen death. “I like you, Warren. If things…”
Gods, how cliché. If things were different. Why give him hope that things could be? Things couldn’t be different. It was too late for that. Senka was here. I was the one she chose.
For once in my life, I was destined for something I wanted to do.
“This was fun,” I finally said. I knew the moment the words passed by lips that they were so much the wrong ones.
Warren’s face hardened. His solid warmth disappeared, and he miraged out of existence, falling into his wormhole of time travel to escape me and my inability to be the woman he wanted.
On my other side, a soft, warm hand slipped into mine in solidarity.
After Mama fed us, Senka and I returned to Headquarters.
I tried not to think of driving the Charger into the city as driving a hearse to my own funeral. Senka seemed to understand the turmoil inside me, and she remained silent, giving me all the time in the world to convince myself I had chosen the right path.
I hadn’t told my mother. I thought maybe she understood when I kissed her goodbye—not something I usually did. The woman had just lost one child, and if I did this, she would lose another. Unfair, but necessary. If I died, Mai could live.
I parked at Headquarters and braced for the fight with Lila. She would rail and argue against us returning to the Hollow where Senka could hurt someone, and then she’d argue some more when I told her my plan. She could be hot-headed and egotistical, but she was also my friend.
We took the elevator. Senka didn’t bat an eye this time, and I didn’t give it a second thought. We were turning into pros.
Lila’s floor was silent and dim. Only a handful of office doors hung open, fluorescent lights illuminating hunched-back worker bees. Lila's tight-knit team generally raised a lot of noise and laughed like hyenas on workdays. It appeared half of them hadn't come to work, and the half that had were to shell-shocked to care.
The receptionist stood warily as we approached, and backed away, her gaze on Senka.
“She’s not here,” the girl told me, though her suspicious eyes remained glued to Senka.
“Where is she?” I asked. Lila wasn’t a morning person, so for her to sleep in or skip a few hours in the morning wasn’t out of the ordinary.
The Shadows and Sorcery Collection Page 13
