Page 152 of When the Sky Breaks

Seventy-Four

Neal

“Your grandpa will look out for you,” Sorcha said softly, “I promise. He’ll come talk to you every day. And you already know your grandmas. They’re busy taking care of you for me. And I’ll only be gone a few days. I promise. I’ll be back with more stories. I’ll always be back.”

She’d spent the last seven hours sitting at Lucy’s grave, talking the whole time, telling her she loved her over and over again. We were due to leave for the mainland later that night. Not for long, but Sorcha still wasn’t taking the separation well.

Ansel had operatives scattered across the globe dismantling the cults, but Sorcha asked to handle the compound in Edinburgh herself. I’d immediately agreed. I wanted to strangle those bastards for hurting her—personally. Disbanding the cult was an added bonus.

It was nearing dusk now as I leaned on the churchyard fence. We needed to get back, get ready, say goodbye to Da. Sorcha bent and kissed the grass, tucked the tiny, wood-carved mule I’d had gotten for her all the way back in Houston down into the earth, and got back to her feet.

“I’m gonna miss her,” she murmured as I met her at the grave, twining my arms around her waist and kissing her hair.

“Me too, love,” I agreed. “Every moment. I have something for you that might take the edge off?”

“You do?” she asked, pulling away enough to turn and face me.

“Close your eyes,” I said. “Hands out for me.”

She complied and I pressed the locket with Lucy’s footprint into her palms. “Open.”

“Hers?” Sorcha asked, voice barely audible.

“Hers,” I said. “She didn’t have any hair to keep. So, Da made this for you instead.”

“So I don’t have to leave her here entirely,” Sorcha murmured.

“Not even to go home to sleep.”

Edinburgh was a shock after the quiet of Islay. We stood outside the whitewashed stone house with Cavan and half a dozen Outer Court guards lingering on a hair trigger across the street, attempting and failing to look nonchalant.

“You’re positive about this, lass?” Ansel asked.

Sorcha nodded. “We know, from a primary source, that most of these people aren’t true believers. They’re stuck. They made a bad choice and got in over their heads. Doesn’t mean they deserve to die.”

“They did tie you up and leave you unconscious in a closet,” I put in. “Or am I the only one who remembers that.”

“So let’s punish the ones who are actually responsible,” Sorcha replied.

Ansel knocked on the door, and moments later an older woman answered it. After a split second, her eyes went wide with recognition.

“Mr. Collard, they’s come back!” She shrieked, bolting from the door.

Ansel shrugged, then followed her inside, pushing the door open to reveal a very different scene than the one we’d witnessed just a few months earlier. The walls were no longer pristine, the house no longer eerily silent. No, there was blood and grime streaked on the walls now, chattering and ranting echoing down the sparsely furnished corridors. My fingers ghosted over the grip of my pistol. The aura of magic in the house was strong now too, accompanying the smell of rot and sick-sweet opium, and the cultists—so well behaved and demure the last time we’d been here—sat and lounged haphazardly on the stairs, the floor, anywhere, babbling like drunks.

“Too much magic for too long,” Ansel muttered. “Addiction sets in, and the pretty little morality charade disintegrates.”

“We need to find Collard,” Sorcha said, then stopped short, eyes snapping to the ground at our feet. A corpse lay sprawled on the grime-crusted wood floor, not new but not rotting yet, a young woman—a decade Sorcha’s junior at least.

“That’s the girl with the cancer?” Ansel asked, nudging the body with his boot. Sorcha nodded wordlessly. The ring of raw, bruised flesh around the dead girl’s throat made clear it had not been a peaceful end.

“We’ll have someone say a Mass for her when we get home,” I murmured into Sorcha’s hair, kissing her head, but she clearly wasn’t listening. No, for the first time since our ill-fated training session in Washington, Sorcha pulled her gun.

She fired a round into the floorboards at our feet. The rapport echoed through the enclosed space. The babbling cultists halted.

“Where the hell is George Collard?” Sorcha snapped.

Moments later, a door off the hallway opened and the cult leader emerged. There were dark circles beneath his eyes, blood under his nails. His cheeks were sunken and he’d gained two or three stone at least.