Walking Dead

CHAPTER 11

Billy had the grace to look apologetic when I caught up to him. I muttered dire imprecations and we called it good without actually discussing anything, which was how I preferred to resolve temper tantrums.

Archibald Redding lived in Ballard, not particularly convenient to his job, but if he’d lived there more than a few years, it was probably right on the money for what I imagined a security guard’s salary to be. There was no answer when we knocked on his door, but the building manager, a sturdy woman in her fifties, let us in without a warrant when Billy explained the situation.

The two-bedroom apartment was the epitome of a Felix bachelor’s pad: tidy to the point of looking almost un-lived in. His bed was neatly made, his clothes were hung up or folded, and the bathroom sported a carefully rolled toothpaste tube and inexpensive aftershave with an inoffensive smell. A lone, clean pot in the kitchen sink and an old-fashioned teakettle on the stove suggested Redding’s cooking skills were rudimentary, not that I had any room to point fingers. The building manager trailed along behind us, setting imagined wrongs to right as we went through the rooms. “He’s a nice man. Always pays rent on time. Always stops to ask how you’re doing. Oh, but that’s what they always say, isn’t it?” She put her hands over her mouth, eyes large. “‘He was such a nice man.’ And then you find body parts in the freezer.”

Billy and I exchanged glances and I went back to pop the freezer open. It didn’t even have TV dinners, much less body parts: there were carefully labeled packages of fish and chicken breasts, and bags of frozen vegetables. “He must have another freezer,” I said, trying to sound cheerful and reassuring. Somehow it came out macabre, and the poor building manager made a sound of dismay. Billy gave me a look that I probably deserved, then escorted the woman toward the front door, plying her with questions: how long had Redding lived there? Did he have friends we could talk to? Had she known his family?

The opportunity for gossip snapped her right out of her worries. “Oh, no. They died a long time ago. Archie’s been living here twenty years, longer than I’ve been managing, and it’s always been just him. Seems like a real tragedy, such a nice man living on his own, but he says true love never dies, and tells stories about his little girls. We have a Tuesday-afternoon bingo game he joins us at, so I’d say all of us are friends. I can get you a list of all the names, if you like.”

“That’d be great. We’ll be right there.” Billy smiled and the woman went hurrying off too quickly to see how his expression faded. I saw it, though, and sighed as I leaned on the frame of Archie Redding’s front door.

“I guess it’s romantic, but it’s also kind of sad. That kind of attitude, I mean. I mean, the way Gary talks about his wife, I think she really was his true love, but he’s talking about dating again. It seems like that’s good. Being hung up on a life that ended twenty years ago…” I shook my head, then frowned at the sudden uncomfortable idea that I could easily be describing myself.

“Gary’s dating?” Amusement danced around the edges of Billy’s mouth, his own concerns dying for a moment. “How you feel about that, Joanie? I thought the old guy was your territory.”

I summoned up every ounce of maturity at my disposal. “Pblthbth.”

Billy laughed. “Glad we got that straightened out. What I don’t get is how anybody can live in one place for two decades and not leave more mark on the space than this.” He gestured back at the apartment and I turned to consider it.

“Maybe he’s just waiting to die. To be back with his family. It’s morbid, but why bother collecting a lot of stuff if that’s all you’re waiting on?”

“But no reminders of his family? No photos, no mementos? The closets were empty. There are no finger paintings or wedding pictures. It’s like he’s a monk.”

I shrugged. “Photographs fade. Maybe it’s worse to see them turning orange and sepia than to rely on the memories. I don’t know. We’ll ask the bingo…team. What do you call a bunch of bingo players, anyway?”

“Does there have to be a collective name for them?” We closed Redding’s door and followed the building manager downstairs.

Tidy; kind; charming; sweet; not an enemy in the world: the handful of bingo players—mostly women—we were able to contact quickly all used the same words to describe Archie Redding. The other men in the group were variously out of town for the weekend, already in bed or hospitalized: Billy and I exchanged glances, decided to put off further questions until morning and retreated to the station, less defeated than simply tired.

The proverbial “They” say the first forty-eight hours are the most important in a murder case. As it happens, They’re right, but we hadn’t heard back from the coroner as to how long Chan’d been dead, and I was convinced we were running out of time faster than the clock read since his body’d been found. The ghosts had awakened almost eighteen hours earlier, and all I had was a suspect whose aura made him look innocent.

On the off chance that our ghosts had died the same way he did, I spent over an hour searching for bludgeoning deaths around Halloween. There were a few, but none unsolved. Billy finally got a call from the coroner reporting that Chan had died from a blunt blow to the head, probably between eleven and midnight the night before. I said, “No shit,” and he spread his hands, shrugging. They were doing their best, and so were we.

His phone rang again and I muttered, “Don’t tell me, they’re calling back to say it might’ve been a sudden cessation of breathing that caused his death, too.” Forensics hadn’t turned up anything like a murder weapon, or even drops of blood outside the huge smear around the display area. Our killer had been tidy. Just like the missing Archie Redding. I wrote down his name and put a question mark beside it, then shook myself and tried to pay attention to Billy’s report.

They had picked up faint streaks on the white floor, parallel and leading, more or less without breaking, to the museum’s front doors. Analysis suggested they were from hard black rubber, like that which heeled the security guards’ shoes, but for all I knew, they also could’ve been from dragging a dolly with reluctant wheels through the museum. I wasn’t sure how they told the difference between one hard black rubber and another, especially on a floor that had hundreds of people tracking things over it on a daily basis. Jason’s shoes had no wear along the backs of the heels, but that was inconclusive: a third party might have dragged Redding out and left the scuffs behind. I just didn’t know why a hypothetical third party would kill one guard but take the other.

An unpleasant gurgle squished through my stomach. I was assuming Redding’d been alive when he’d been dragged out, if that was indeed the case. He might simply have been less of a mess, and easier to clean up after. The only way I could think to test the cauldron was to throw a dead body inside and see what happened. A security guard killed in the course of stealing it would be handier than murdering somebody else to find out if the magic worked.

I put my face in my hands, exerting enough pressure against my eyelids to hold my contacts in place while I rolled my eyes beneath them. Tears sprang up and leaked through my lashes, warning me the contacts had been in too long and my eyes were far too dry, but I didn’t have spare glasses at the station. That wouldn’t be a bad investment, for days like this that went on forever. I rubbed tears away and parted my fingers to look at Redding’s name on the paper.

He could have looped the security tapes; he had access. And he was missing rather than proven dead. What I couldn’t see was any kind of motivation. If his family had just recently died, their bodies still on hand, then maybe I could see a certain kind of madness hoping to raise them from the dead. But the accident had been more than twenty years ago, and I was pretty sure that even with modern burial techniques there wouldn’t be much left to their bodies besides a few sticky smears, hardly enough to resurrect.

Which brought me back to the innocently auraed Sandburg. “Billy, is there some kind of—there’s got to be. Some kind of black market in magical artifacts?” I looked up to see him put his phone against his shoulder. I’d forgotten he was on it.

“You busy tonight?”

“It is tonight. What time is it, like seven?” I glanced at my watch and my stomach rumbled. “If I say I’m not busy, do I get one of Melinda’s home-cooked meals?”

“No. You get to meet a medium.”

“I’d rather have dinner, but yeah, I can—wait, what time?”

“She likes ten o’clock.”

“Really? I’ve always been partial to a quarter past anything.” I curled my upper lip in what I hoped was an approximation of she likes ten o’clock? what the hell is that supposed to mean? but shrugged. “Yeah, I can do that. I’ve got a fencing lesson at eight, but it’ll be long over by then.” It might be long over by five past eight. I didn’t know what I was going to say to Phoebe, which reminded me that I hadn’t called Thor. My life was getting hard to keep track of.

“Arright.” Billy got off the phone and reached for his coat. “I’m going to go home and kiss my wife before I stay out all night ghost hunting. I’ll meet you back here at nine-thirty. Take a break and get some real food, Walker.”

Granted a dispensation to stop working, I turned off my computer screen and leaned back in my chair. “Yeah. I will.”

I didn’t.

The morally superior thing to do would have been to follow up my own question about black-market magic. I, though, had never even pretended to be morally superior, and cut out of the office a few steps behind Billy.

Doherty was sitting in a green 1998 Mazda Miata a few spaces down from Petite when I left the precinct building. He reminded me of Laurie Corvallis, one of the local news station’s reporters, who’d stalked me earlier in the year, sure she could get a story out of me. She’d been wrong, not because there was no story, but because she didn’t have the eyes to see it. Much as she’d annoyed me, I’d almost felt sorry for her.

I didn’t feel sorry for Doherty. I was tempted to take Petite out for a high-speed spin and lose him, but it was still raining. Besides, his entire purpose in existing, as far as I was concerned, was to prove I was a liar, a fraud artist and an unsafe driver. No way would I give him the satisfaction of being proven right. I patted Petite’s dashboard as I climbed in, promising, “Another time, baby,” and drove over to Thor’s apartment. I figured I could earn good-girlfriend points by ordering Chinese and sacking out with him for part of an hour, even if I hadn’t called like I said I would.

His monster truck wasn’t in the parking lot, and the lights were out in his window. I pulled over to dig out my phone and laboriously punch in his number. My general loathing for cell phones had instilled in me an utter refusal to learn how to use them properly, although I was beginning to break down: this one asked every time if I wanted to save the number, and I knew one of these days I’d give in and do it. Not today, though. I peered up at Thor’s apartment as his phone’s voice mail invited me to leave a message. “Are you out having fun without me? I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier. There was a murder, and…” And that was all he really needed to know to forgive me. “I’ll probably be busy with it tomorrow, but if you want to have lunch, call me, okay? It’s supposed to be my day off, so I can probably sneak out for an hour to eat with you. Okay. I’ll talk to you later.”

I hung up and looked in my rearview mirror. Doherty’s Miata was idling half a block behind me. They were decent little cars, Miatas. They were certainly the right size for somebody of Doherty’s build. I wondered if Petite reflected my build accurately, and was sure The Truck reflected Thor’s. Amused by the idea, I drove home, changed into clothes that could both pass on a fencing strip and be wearable in public, and ate a Pop-Tart on my way out the door to the gym. I got there early, but went in anyway, pleased with the idea of leaving Doherty sitting in his car in the rain.

My next conscious thought was that my ankle hurt. I peeled my eyes open to find Phoebe standing beside the bleachers I’d sacked out on, her foot drawn back to kick my ankle again. “Oh, you’re awake. I guess that means you’re not having another out-of-body experience.”

“I dunno. You didn’t try kicking me last time.” I sat up and mooshed a hand over my face. “You showed up.”

“So did you.” Phoebe folded her arms. “Prove it.”

“What, that I’m here?” I kicked her in the ankle, feeling as satisfied as a seven-year-old with the tactic. “Good enough?”

“Ow! Prove you’re a shaman.” She thrust her jaw out, glaring at me defiantly.

I sighed. “Got any hangnails?” She probably didn’t. Phoebe kept her hands in beautiful condition, whereas I did well to remember to cut, not bite, my nails. “Chronic pain? Recent injury? Bad teeth?” She shook her head with each question, until I rolled my eyes. “I’m a shaman, Phoebe. Basically what I do is heal. I need to have something to heal before I can prove it.”

She got a glint in her eye and headed for her fencing bag. I jumped up and ran after her, catching her shoulder. “Don’t be an idiot. Hurting yourself to prove me wrong is stupid. What if I can’t heal you?”

“Then you’re full of shit.” She pulled away and I let her go, not having much of an argument against that. “You’re full of shit anyway,” she said grumpily. “What kind of crap is that? Shamanism? You weren’t insane yesterday.”

“Yeah, I was. You just didn’t know it.” I went back to the bleachers and sat down, elbows on my knees and head dropped. “Look, I get it. I’m like one of those nice ladies in a long skirt with wildflowers in her floofy hair who prattles about magic and Mother Earth and spiritual guides and who are tolerated because they seem harmless enough in their obviously crazy way. Except I don’t own any skirts and my hair’s only floofy right when I get up. And that’s more like a mohawk.”

Phoebe stared at me. I suspected I wasn’t helping myself. “Believe me, I was more comfortable being normal. I don’t talk about it because I don’t want people to look at me the way you’re doing. I’m sorry I can’t prove it. All I can say is for me it’s real, and I’ll try to keep it out of your hair if you still want to give me fencing lessons.”

She echoed, “‘For you it’s real.” Jo, real is real. You don’t get a different real than I do.”

“Of course I do.” I blinked, genuinely surprised. “You’re five-four, I’m five-eleven and a half. We experience different realities based on that, never mind something as off the wall as shamanism. We have a lot of converging points in our realities, but you live in a reality where you need a stepladder to change a smoke alarm, and I live in one where the top shelf in the kitchen is a reasonable place to keep things I use regularly. From one perspective, me being a shaman isn’t any weirder than you trying out for the Olympic fencing team.”

“It’s a lot weirder.”

“Yeah?” I arched my eyebrows. “How many Olympic-class athletes do most people know?”

“How many shamans do most people know?”

“That’s my point.” I shrugged. “They’re both extraordinary. I’ll grant you that the difference is, if you tell people you tried out for the Olympic team, they’re likely to say, ‘Really? Cool,’ and if I tell people I’m a shaman, they’ll probably say, ‘Oh, reaaalllyyy…’ and be uncomfortable.”

“Well, what’m I supposed to do?”

I let out a breath of semi-laughter. “I’d ignore it.” I had ignored it, but that hadn’t worked out so well for me. Phoebe, however, wasn’t stuck living between my ears. “Write it off as ‘oh my God, Joanne’s lost her mind,’ and don’t worry about it any more than you’d worry about a friend who collected snow globes or something else you had no interest in. The nice thing about me is I’m not likely to regale you with stories about shamanism, whereas some of those collector types can’t talk about anything else.” I thought it was a very convincing argument. In fact, I sort of wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before. Presumably I’d been too hung up with self-loathing and rejection. I bet this approach was much healthier.

Phoebe looked at me a long time, like if she scowled hard enough or long enough, she might worm her way inside my mind and get a better understanding of what’d gone wrong. Finally, though, she shook her head and said, “Yeah, okay, whatever,” and picked up her gear bag. “Are we going to fence, or what?”

I met Billy back at the precinct building, damp with sweat but in a better humor. He said, “I guess it went okay with Pheeb,” and tossed me the keys to an unmarked police cruiser. I wanted to take Petite, but with the cost of gas what it was, driving a police vehicle on police business just made the receipts easier. At least I got to drive. Not that I could remember Billy ever doing the driving since we’d been partnered.

In police academy, they’d impressed on us that there were two kinds of good drivers. One was the kind who followed all the rules, drove the speed limit, never double-parked and always wore their seat belts. I was usually that kind of driver.

But I’d also cut my driver’s teeth on hairpin Appalachian roads with plunging cliffs on one side and sheer rock face on the other. I could jackass Petite around a forty-five-degree turn at speeds way above the limit without losing momentum, and I’d spent my share of time feeling like Wile E. Coyote, dangling in the air over a dark green valley when me and another driver’d met coming opposite directions on a road barely wide enough for one. Dancing a police car through road cones and driving with blown-out tires was nothing.

Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I missed North Carolina and Qualla Boundary. I said, “Huh,” out loud, and Billy looked askance at me. “Nothing. Just an alarming display of internal emotional stability.”

He said, “Good,” dryly. “Sonata gets upset around unstable people, and I’d like her to be able to get these ghosts off me.”

“Sonata? Like the musical piece? Did she name herself? Oh, God. She’s a new-age hippie freak, isn’t she?”

“I swear to God, Joanne, if you can’t behave yourself I’m leaving you in the car.”

Me and Doherty in the driveway, together but separate, leaped to mind. I shut my mouth and drove us to Sonata’s house, up on Capitol Hill. It was one of those gorgeous old Victorians that requires either inheritance or obscene wealth to buy. Being a medium seemed ideal for “just happening” to come into such an inheritance.

The woman who opened the ornately windowed front door was, in fact, a long-haired hippie freak, one in her mid-sixties who’d probably never left the Woodstock era. She wore moccasins, gypsy skirts with beaded belts, and an inordinate number of rings on her thin fingers.

She also wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with a smiley face that had a splash of blood marring its cheerful yellow circle. It wasn’t exactly a hippie vibe. I tried to rearrange my prejudices as she put her fists on her hips and inspected us.

Inspected me, more accurately. Billy obviously already had the all-clear, and I was just as obviously lacking. After a good long examination, she said, “Are you sure this is the one you were talking about, William? She’s got skepticism written all over her.”

I glanced at my hands to check, but they were, thankfully, unmarred by ink. Stranger things had happened. Billy, ruefully, said, “I’m sure. It’s good to see you, Sonny.” He kissed her cheek and she smiled, then offered me a hand.

“All right, come on in, unbeliever. I’m Sonata.”

“I’m Joanne.” I thought “Joanne” had a nicer ring than “unbeliever,” but I wasn’t sure Sonata would call me by it. She nodded and ushered us in.

Victorians were the ultimate houses for séances. Sonny’s was brighter and more airily decorated than I expected, but it still had a sense of somber grandiosity. I hoped she’d bring us to a dark room with the requisite enormous wooden table, and was looking forward to searching it for knockers and strings, but we went into a well-lit, comfortable living room where a young man was drinking a glass of wine.

Disappointment must’ve shown on my face, because Sonata looked amused. “Dark corners and spooky rooms are for charlatans, Joanne. This is Patrick. He’d be my partner in crime, the one dripping cold water down gullible séance attendees’ spines while I asked if they felt the icy touch of the grave, if you’re trying to keep track of how I’d run my scam. Pat, this is Joanne Walker, and you know William.”

“Sure. Nice to meet you, Joanne.” Patrick was a little older than me and had the unaffected good looks of a California surfer boy. My opinion of what constituted a medium shifted rapidly. Not only did Sonata wear inappropriate T-shirts, but she apparently had a hot young thing to keep her company. Maybe growing up to be a hippie freak wouldn’t be so bad.

The hippie freak gave me another amused smile. “I’ll be turning the lights down. Spirits are more comfortable in dim lighting. But if what William says is true, you won’t need light to see if what I do is real or not.”

My ears got hot. “I don’t know. Billy’s aura doesn’t change when he talks to ghosts, and I can’t normally see them myself.” I didn’t like that I could see these ones. It suggested the cauldron—if that was the root cause—had some kind of back door into my own magic, and I had no idea how to face or even find it. “For all I know, the Sight won’t show me anything with you.”

Sonny tilted her head, interest piqued. “I have to go into a trance to speak with the spirits. That may be different enough to trigger your ability to detect magic.” She turned a knob on the wall as she spoke, and the lights dimmed.

I yawned. Unless absolute catastrophe struck, I was going home and going to bed after this. Billy looked as if he was having similar thoughts. Sonata sat down cross-legged on a cushion, hands palms upward on her thighs, thumb and middle fingertips curved in loose circles to touch. Patrick knelt just behind her, close enough to touch, and bowed his head like a guardian angel.

The Sight winked on, lending a surreal depth to the room and making Sonata flare with yellow and red as bright as the face on her T-shirt. I wondered if she knew her aura tended toward those colors, or if it was a sort of cheery coincidence. Patrick, in comparison, glowed serene white, a bastion of calm. Sonata closed her eyes, slowing her breathing.

I turned the Sight on Billy, checking his aura and his general sense of well-being. His gray ghost cloak moved away as I watched, gathering itself in the middle of the room and quivering. For incorporeal spirits, it sure looked like they were jittery with excitement. A few tendrils still led back to Billy, as if the ghosts were anchored there, but it was clearly Sonata they were interested in now. All except one: it hung back, staying with him, and when I turned my gaze away, it teased me with the faintest shape of a child, pigtailed and open faced. She disappeared again when I looked back, and I rubbed my eyes, wondering if I was losing my mind.

Sonata said, “Restless spirits,” in a vibrating deep tone completely unlike the voice she’d spoken in earlier. The ghosts snapped to attention, and so did the hairs on my arms. Even Billy jumped a bit, but Patrick remained calm and utterly steady. Presumably he’d heard the voice before, and had been expecting it. “You are welcome in my home from this moment until I bid you leave. If you would speak with us, you will agree that my voice and the words restless spirits, begone will send you from this place. Strike a hard surface thrice, if we’re agreed.”

I thought only poltergeists had the corner on making noise and pushing things over. The cyclone of ghosts spun around, then darted to the room’s hearth. I heard nothing, and shot a glance at Billy, who shrugged one shoulder. Sonata, though, opened her eyes and focused on the gathering of ghosts with a satisfied nod. “We’re agreed.” Then dismay contorted her face and she breathed, “Oh.”

Billy and I both tensed, trying to anticipate disaster. Sonata sat silent, looking at the blur of ghosts with sorrow deepening the lines in her face. I wished, briefly, that I could see what she did, and was equally glad I couldn’t.

“They’re children,” she finally said. “So many of them are children. A girl in a pinafore, two boys in diapers, an older boy who threatens me with a slingshot, and one who’s just on the childhood side of being a woman. She has the most rage in her, and anchors the others.” Sonata put out a hand, an inviting gesture, and the cloud of ghosts swirled around it. She rocked back, letting go a soft sigh, and spoke again in a voice much lighter than her own: “My name is Matilda Whitehead. I will not go back into the dark.”

I nearly bit my tongue in half as Sonata’s colors bleached, then tinged an off-shade of green. Another face faded into existence over Sonata’s, outlined in lime and making her hard to look at. I cut off a combination of a yell and a question with a strangled noise, and Billy gave me a quick look that both appreciated and approved of my rare silence. He slid to the floor so he could kneel in front of Matilda/Sonata. “There’s light waiting for you, Matilda. Are you called Matilda?”

“My brothers call me Tilly, but it isn’t a proper grown-up lady’s name. I like Matilda.”

Billy cast a brief smile at the floor, then straightened his expression before meeting Sonata’s gaze again. “Matilda, then. When were you born, Matilda?”

“In the year 1887.” A shadow passed over Sonata’s face. “That was a very long time ago, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Billy said quietly. “Yes, it was. The others who are with you, do you know when they were born?”

Sonata turned her head to look toward the cloud of ghosts. “The twins are too little to say. Anne-Marie was born in the year 1846.” Consternation creased her forehead. “Ricky says he was born in 1943, but I remember nothing but the darkness after the year 1900. There are others.” Her gaze sharpened and she brought it back to Billy. “There are others with us here, but I care for the twins and Ricky and Anne-Marie. The others are not like us.”

The others. Billy’d collected ghost riders of his own before he’d taken on the ones trapped in my garden. I slid a glance at him, not wanting to speak, but he understood Matilda as well as I did. “How are they different?”

“They’re older.” I got the sense she meant they’d died older, rather than having died earlier in terms of calendar dates. “They died in the wrong way. In the wrong times. They are not like us.” Everything the girl said was delivered in a cool, precise tone, as though she disdained or mocked us. I hoped it was just a century of being dead, and that she hadn’t been quite so horrible when she’d lived.

“Died the wrong way?” Billy asked diffidently. I’d seen him use the approach with his own children when they didn’t want to confess to something they’d done wrong. Affected disinterest on Billy’s part made admission on theirs less scary.

“They were not sacrificed.” She said it with such disinterest I suddenly felt the rage behind her words. The little girl had been dead for decades. What Billy was really talking to was a fury so potent it had refused to cross over.

“Can you tell me what the sacrifice was?”

Sonata put her arms out, and a long thin line of red split each of her forearms. Then she stood, and another bloody line scoured her from throat to groin, and then again, splitting the muscles of her thighs. Magic roared to life inside me, sending me forward a few jerky inches before I realized the blood was tinged with ethereal green, and that beneath Matilda’s ectoplasmic presence, Sonata’s body was unharmed. She said, “Five cuts, such a pretty star,” and bent forward at the waist, arms spread out to the sides. Blood dripped from her arms and torso, pooling beneath her. Then she lifted one leg, then the other, so she hung in mid-air as though she’d been lifted there on a glass plate, and blood poured from all five wounds, splashing to the floor.

To my eternal gratitude, Billy, and Patrick, who’d stood when Sonata did, looked as astounded as I felt. We all three just stared at the woman hanging in the air, none of us able to get beyond the blatantly abused laws of physics.

The blood had actually started to slow before Billy finally cranked his jaw up and said, “Thank you for showing me, Matilda. You could sit down again, if that would be more comfortable.”

To everyone’s relief, she did. The injuries and the blood faded away, leaving the cool-faced child to meet Billy’s eyes again. He, cautiously, said, “A star has five points,” and I understood what he meant: the cuts she’d shown us made four starlike points, but the fifth obvious one would be the throat, not the torso.

Matilda shrugged. “The throat is too quick. The star bleeds slow to make the potion potent.” She sing-songed the words, as if they were a nursery rhyme long since committed to memory.

Billy nodded as though she hadn’t said something horrifying. “And the others died in the wrong times, too,” he reminded her. I couldn’t have maintained the casual calm tone he used, and was two parts impressed and one part shocked that he could.

“Fifty, one hundred, fifty, one hundred.” Matilda flicked her fingers dismissively, sounding suddenly bored. “There is something the woman who offered me her body should know.”

Magic thumped inside me like a heartbeat, warning. I hadn’t spoken in a while, and my throat was dry as I asked, “What?”

Matilda’s eyes came to me, and her mouth turned to a predator’s smile. “I said I would give it back. I lied.”