I bite my bottom lip, tasting iron. To turn down his help now would be foolish. I don’t trust him. There’s too much being left unsaid to put my faith in his intentions. But he’s declared himself my ally and saved my life. Twice.
Right now, I need more friends than enemies.
My gaze drifts out the tinted window and to the mockingly bright city lights beyond. “If it’ll keep you from wrapping me around my favorite book.”
“I don’t want that, Poppy.”
“You did.”
“Not anymore.”
There’s too much in that single statement to unpack while concussed.
Tugging on the door handle, I rasp, “Mind letting me out of this cage now?”
Brontë exhales through his nose but immediately unlocks the car. “Stay awake for a while. Monitor your symptoms. If you start to feel worse, call me.”
I nod and dash out, warmth quickly bleeding from my bones in the moonless night.
An hour later, I peek through the washroom windows brimming with frost. He’s still there, his ‘Vette rumbling in the lot. The cherry of his cigar blazes red from behind the windshield, gray smog filtering from the car like a living beast. I sit at my desk, pretending to read while cuddling Jezebel.
He doesn’t leave until I blow out my candles.
I watch his car’s taillights fade into the night, mindlessly rubbing the dragon on my arm and shivering like I’ve been left outside for too long, abandoned in the cold. When I fall asleep in bed with Jezebel purring beside me, I dream of Grandpapa Lucian teaching me the origins of our family. Of the Morgensterns helping people rather than harming them. He even takes my hand and leads me back in time to seventeenth-century Salem. Showing me my ancestors as they brewed potions and crafted crystals for the townsfolk.
When I wake up, I wish it hadn’t been a dream at all.
SEMANTIC SATIATION
Brontë
There’s a term for when you’ve read or repeated something so many times it loses its meaning: semantic satiation. A fancy way of saying the brain has grown so tired it temporarily forfeits any attempt at connecting the dots between what it sees and what it knows.
That’s where I am with these goddamn papers.
Sighing a white cloud in the morgue’s chill, I ignore the cadaver lying beside me and sift through Margot’s life now chronologically organized in a binder. Since Emi reported her lack of findings, I’ve been searching for anything she may have missed. As always, though, I land on the very last page with blurry vision and a kink in my neck.
I’ve read over this the most: Margot’s resignation letter. It’s framed with such cookie-cutter prose, it’s perfect—tooperfect.
Which was Margot’s entire personality.
Setting the binder aside, I boot up my office laptop and scour medical records of the city’s victims of crime. Since making the initial deal with Poppy, I’ve been searching every shift. Now that we know the face of her saboteur, I’m looking for anything potentially leading to the cult sweeping through her empire and destroying her future like a god’s almighty hand.
Leviathan may be a faceless entity, but it’s composed of humans. Humans make mistakes. No one is truly flawless.
Poppy once mentioned casualties during her family’s turf war with the Volkovs. Her grandfather had been the king of Salem at the time, which was around the beginning of online recordkeeping.
“Don’t tell anyone,” I warn the old man who died in his recliner with 1970s porn videos playing on his living room TV. “This isn’t exactly legal.”
He remains blessedly unmoving.
Hours slip by. I nod off twice.
Nearing the end of my shift, I close my companion into his locker, clean up, and carry the laptop back to my desk. I have enough time to search a few more cases, so I click into the next in my queue.
The autopsy report is two decades old and describes the death of a man whose body had washed up on the bay shore, his throat slit. I scan through the gruesome photos, pausing with bated breath when I spy the Leviathan brand on his chest.
My eyes narrow at the name. “Soren Bonaparte?”
