“Don’t,” she adds, “think about trying again.”
The pressure eases only slightly.
And before I can drag in a proper breath, shadows gather at her feet. Blackness climbs her legs and devours the hem of her clothes. The last thing to go is her face.
She looks at me, still folded into Talon’s arms, still fighting for air like I’m drowning on dry land, and her expression does that soft, gentle thing again.
“Don’t go near the trapped souls either,” she whispers. “Wouldn’t want to make any more wraiths, now would we?”
And then she’s gone.
For a long, long moment, none of us move.
Then, from the basement, Mark screams my name again.
“SKYE!”
And all I want—God, all I want—is to lie down and never stand back up again.
I don’t have that luxury, though.
“Can someone tell me how the fuck Talon’s ex knows about the wraiths?” I rasp.
Nobody can answer me, even if they try.
There are many ways to kill a human. Most of them I learned before I even finished middle school.
I never imagined my mother would die by one of the worst.
The police report said “mixed blunt-force trauma” and “extensive blood loss.” Two neat little phrases that look routine on paper and feel like a demolition charge going off in your chest when you read them about someone you love. The report left out the bruises on her wrists from being dragged. The defensive wounds on her palms. The fingernails snapped off and embedded in the killer’s skin. It left out the fractures, too, though those told me something the report never could: the angles said she kept getting back up. Over and over, she kept getting back up.
I wouldn’t have expected anything less. She ran from abusive parents, put herself through nursing school, got pregnant by a man who disappeared, and raised me alone. Tired every single day, she still sat with me and taught me everything she knew from her years on the ward and from the doctors she workedalongside. Medicine, patience, how bodies fail and how they fight.
She was fierce down to her bones.
So now I’m standing at the door of the apartment across the hall from where she died, eye pressed to the peephole, watching the people who are supposed to find her killer.
Two officers are arguing about which direction to photograph the hallway from. The younger one holds the camera upside down for several seconds before his partner notices. Their gloves stopped being useful ten minutes ago. They’ve been touching their belts, their phones, their own faces. A third one kneels near the wall where my mother’s blood dried into a dark smear, hours before anyone thought to show up. He presses his thumb straight into it. Leans in close. Blocks the light.
“Looks old,” he mutters, and writes something down.
If this were a surgical team, they’d lose their licenses. I’d file the report myself.
“Quite a ruckus out there, isn’t it?” the woman says from behind me.
She lives here. This is her apartment. “To think something so cruel was happening right next door.”
I don’t answer.
Through the peephole, a detective tries to piece the scene together. My hands itch to open the door and walk him through it, but I force myself to stay still.
“How about I brew you some tea, young man?” she asks. “It must be tiring, standing at the door like this.”
I close my eyes. Just for a moment.
I made my purpose here very clear to her. But she let me in before the police arrived for round two of yesterday’s disaster, told them I was a nephew visiting during a difficult time. Her difficult time. Because there was a murder on her floor, and apparently proximity is enough to claim a piece of it.
I owe her. More relevantly, she could walk into that hallway right now and tell the officers exactly what I’ve been doing. So I play nice.
