I didn’t move for a long time. Scarlette didn’t crack a joke. Moab didn’t tell me to shake it off.
And then shit got crazy.
Toolie
Celeste uncorked a little vial and shook out a line of powder along the crown of the grave. Her nails were painted gold, chipped and flaking. “Give me your hand, Sully,” she said.
I did. She pressed her thumb to my palm and, without warning, jabbed the skin with a sewing needle. I hissed, but she just grinned and squeezed, coaxing a fat bead of blood into the bowl.
Scarlette scoffed. “Is the show really necessary?”
Celeste ignored her. “Power always needs blood, sugar. This isn’t Hollywood. This is how things are made and unmade.”
Moab stepped closer, boots squelching in the mud. He nodded once at me, the unspoken go-ahead we’d used a thousand times before. I felt the blood drain from my cheeks, but I didn’t move.
Celeste set the bowl in the center of the circle and lit three candles, sticking them in the earth so their flames made a wobbly triangle. She sprinkled bone dust over the wicks, and thesmoke curled blue, sharp, and sweet. She started to hum, low and hollow, words I half-recognized from somewhere else. Not Latin, not English. Old, wet, and hungry.
“Scarlette,” Celeste said, eyes still on the flames. “Get in here.”
Scarlette hesitated just long enough to make a point, then stepped into the triangle. She knelt opposite me, keeping the grave between us, her back straight and face stony. Celeste joined her at the third point, and for a moment the three of us knelt in silence, lit only by candlelight and the greasy glow from a distant lamplight.
Moab shifted position, always with an eye on the street, but never letting the circle out of his sight.
I focused on the stone under my hand, the letters, the cold. I remembered the first breath after waking—how the world tasted sharp and wrong, how my own body felt like a suit I hadn’t broken in.
Celeste’s hum rose into words, tumbling over each other like river stones. My jaw clenched at the first syllable—Gaelic, for sure, but older than any I’d heard. She passed the beads through her fingers, click click click, never missing a beat, her eyes closed and lashes slick with rain.
I felt something then. Not a chill, not exactly, but a tightening, like all the air in the graveyard was being sucked into the dirt. My skin tingled. My teeth ached. I pressed harder on the headstone, and the shamrock tattoo flared hot enough to make me gasp. “Catherine?” I said.
Scarlette’s eyes flicked up, and for a second, I saw fear under her mask. “Toolie?” she whispered.
I didn’t answer. My voice was gone, ripped out by the wind or by whatever Celeste had conjured. The grave marker pulsed under my palm, a throb in time with my own heart, or maybe with the memory of the old one.
The circle of candles burned lower, the wax melting into the earth. Celeste reached into her pouch and scattered more bone, then snapped her fingers so the flames jumped and danced. Her chant sharpened, lost the river flow, and became a pounding, a battle march.
A crow landed on a branch above us and made a sound like a door slamming in the next room.
Celeste’s eyes snapped open, wide and black. “Name her, Sully,” she said, voice doubled and echoing.
I swallowed, felt blood in my mouth. “Catherine Dunn,” I managed. “Bring her back.”
The wind died. Even the city’s noise shriveled, as if the whole world was waiting for the answer.
Celeste whispered a last word and blew out the candles.
For a second, there was nothing. Just mud, cold, and the taste of burnt sage.
Then the earth under the grave shifted, not enough to see, but enough to feel in your bones. Scarlette hissed and jerked back, falling on her ass in the mud. Moab barked out a curse and made for the circle, but Celeste caught his sleeve and held him off.
I couldn’t move. My hand was glued to the headstone. The shamrock on my arm glowed, veins branching from it in sick green lines. My heart was a trip hammer.
And in the space where Catherine should have been, I heard her voice, clear as glass, say my name.
The candles reignited, all at once. The air tasted like copper and violets. I smelled river water and wet hair and the salt of tears.
Celeste leaned in close, face streaked with sweat and rain and something else. “She’s coming,” she said.
Celeste’s chant climbed, her voice splitting in two, then three. For a second, I heard the words in stereo, like there were othervoices layered in. Then it all snapped to a pitch so high my ears rang.
