Page 6 of Death Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

My fingers tightened on the door handle.

I kept expecting to feel the necromancy now that I was awake and moving. To sense the shape of it, the direction of the pull.

Still nothing.

That blankness scared me more than the zombie. Magic didn’t just vanish. It was always there. In the air. In the bones of the ground. In the breath between words.

Someone was hiding it.

Faith whipped onto Raven Street, and there it was. Magnetic Boutique, painted too bright for this hour, its big windows dark. Even closed, the place looked like Lucinda had picked it out herself and then doubled down on the smug.

Faith parked half on the curb.

“Come on,” she said, already moving.

We sprinted to the door. Faith produced a key card as if she’d been born with it and swiped it through the reader installed beside the frame. The lock clicked.

Inside, the air smelled like perfume and money. Soft pink walls. Perfect racks. A small shoe section with sparkly heels that had no business existing in a town currently sprouting zombies.

Faith didn’t slow down. She cut straight to the right side of the counter where three changing room doors sat in a neat row.

“One and two are normal,” she said, grabbing the handle of door number three. “Three is the magic gut punch.”

“You’re really selling it,” I muttered.

She shot me a look. “Do you want to puke in Nancy’s boutique or mine?”

“Neither.”

“Then move.”

She yanked open the door to changing room three.

The space looked ordinary for half a second. A small bench. A mirror. A hook on the wall.

Then I stepped in and the world tilted.

Portal travel always felt like being pulled through a keyhole by your ribs. I could wield magic, so it didn’t fight me the way it fought mundanes. Still, my stomach did a slow, unhappy roll as space folded.

Faith swore under her breath. She looked unaffected, but I’d seen her after portal trips before. Her body might handle weapons as if they were extensions of her arms, but magic made her temper shorter than usual.

We stumbled out into the chambers.

The scent hit first as we stepped inside.

Night-blooming jasmine.

It didn’t match the panic in my veins. It didn’t match the thought of bodies walking in the street. It smelled like a summer evening pretending the world wasn’t falling apart.

The interior was all marble and columns, the ceiling soaring four stories above us. Torches lined the sides, casting flickering light down a wide aisle leading to a dais.

A long slab of wood that looked like someone had cut a tree trunk in half and decided it was now furniture for gods. Live edge, gorgeous in a way that made me irrationally angry.

Because of course the council had taste.

One entire wall was a screen, the magic board lit up in angry pulses. Flares marked the map of Ravenholde as if the town had broken out in hives.

They were already there.