“Okay, yeah,” Faraday said, louche against the table.
“Smells like cough medicine,” Sebastian said.
“Drink your soda,” Veronica replied. “The adults are talking.”
As I sipped, I remembered being seven, and Aunt Veronica telling me about the Aztecs’ blood rituals, the mass sacrifices that were necessary tokeep the sun moving across the sky. The beating hearts that fed the gods of light.
The Aztec name for cochineal dye:the blood of the prickly pear.
“Does it taste like you thought it would, Jessica?” Veronica asked.
“Like letting an arrow fly,” I said, “when you know it’s going to hit.”
I wondered which way she’d voted.
9
Drinking never affected me much. What alcohol suppresses in ordinaries—inhibitions, anxiety—my mors curae had already excised.
But in the gyre of Peter’s wake, drinking the blood of the prickly pear, gravity’s hold on me began to loosen. I’d learned to move on this parquet floor—ballet, fencing, Muay Thai. My footsteps were lighter here; my viewpoint seemed to rise above the crowd.
I saw my cousins, aunts, and uncles looking twice at me, as if expecting to see Peter on my coattails. His shade lingered, his absence part of my presence.
The last Jessica, at last.
“Christ, I thoughtmyfamily was big,” Faraday was saying. “I don’t evenknowthis many people.”
“This isn’t all of us,” Sebastian said. “Someone’s always hiding.”
There were perhaps two hundred blooded Mortons in the world, but never all in one place. No one but Grandmother Elizabeth knew the exact number.
“Everyone seems so cheerful,” Faraday said. “Happy to be together, even if it’s a funeral.”
I knew what she was sensing: the collective animal that forms whenever my family assembles. Bonds of tradition, forged of spilled blood and stopped hearts. The loyalty that remained after the death of care.
“I knew you’d feel it,” Sebastian said to Faraday. “We don’t invite just anyone. You belong with us.”
A delicate pink fanned her cheeks as she looked away. She wasn’t used to this much attention from Sebastian. On the train, he’d helped me prime her for this visit.
But the spark in his eye wasn’t just about Faraday. In any large gathering, my cousin’s primal instincts switch on—network, dazzle, seduce. A moment later he’d spun away to charm a group of jet-lagged Seths in funeral white.
“I need another drink,” Faraday said, and headed to the bar.
I felt a gentle touch on my shoulder.
“Garrett,” I said. “We missed you at dinner last night.”
“Came in this morning, with a guest.” He gestured at a woman standing alone. She wore a dark gray asymmetrical dress, a sculpted storm cloud in a black sky.
“One of your artists?” I asked.
“Rather obvious, isn’t it?”
Garrett ran a gallery in the city, one of the family’s money laundries. He wedded the art world to the occult mathematics we studied in Forensic Accounting.
“You two should talk,” he said.
“Because?”
