Chapter Text
The dead were usually easier than the living.
Cersei Sinclair had learned this before she was old enough to drink, and twelve years in the funeral trade had done nothing to change her mind. The dead didn't complain about the temperature, and they didn't lie. They didn't ask whether she had a boyfriend, tell her she would look prettier if she smiled, or stare at her hair as though red had only recently been invented. Most importantly, they didn't ask her to tell them their future.
Mrs. Evelyn Mercer had been dead for eleven hours and was proving to be an exception.
Cersei stood beside the preparation table with one hip against the stainless-steel cabinet, studying the tiny woman beneath the white sheet.
“No.”
Silence.
Rain battered the narrow windows high in the wall. The October storm had been bullying the Massachusetts coast since sundown, throwing handfuls of leaves against the glass and making the old building groan in places no contractor had ever successfully explained.
She returned to her work. “No,” she repeated.
Evelyn remained serenely dead.
“Your daughter is coming tomorrow. You can bother her.”
The fluorescent tube above the sink gave a faint buzz. She reached for the woman's left hand. Cold fingers settled into her warmer ones, and the room vanished.
Sunlight. A yellow kitchen. Someone laughing.
She smelled cinnamon and coffee so strongly that for one disorienting second she could taste both. A younger Evelyn stood on a chair in stocking feet, reaching toward the top of an old cupboard.
Mom, you're going to break your neck.
More laughter. A blue tin—small, round, and decorated with painted daisies. Evelyn pushed it behind a stack of Christmas plates.
The memory changed. Hospital light. A hand trembling beneath translucent skin.
Sarah.
The name wasn't spoken; She felt it.
Sarah.
Then—Tell her.
The cold tile and fluorescent buzz of the preparation room rushed back to claim her. She sucked air through her nose, her left hand still wrapped around Evelyn's.
“Dammit.”
She released her. The clock above the door ticked with maddening innocence: 10:43.
Ned would be furious.
She pulled off one glove and rubbed the heel of her palm against her forehead. “You had plenty of time to tell her yourself. Eighty-six years, Evelyn.”
The corpse offered no defense.
She tilted her head back and exhaled a heavy breath. “Unbelievable.”
She finished what remained of her work, talking occasionally because silence after a vision tended to make the residue worse. Images could cling. Smells were particularly stubborn. Once she'd spent three hours smelling a dead man's favorite brand of pipe tobacco and had gone home with such a vicious headache she'd slept on the bathroom floor. Tonight it was cinnamon. There were worse things.
She cleaned the instruments, disposed of her gloves, and switched off the brightest bank of lights. Evelyn rested peacefully beneath the softer illumination. That mattered to her. It shouldn't have—not professionally. Evelyn Mercer wasn't in there anymore. She knew the biological realities better than most people ever would and had never needed to invent prettier names for them.
Dead was dead. Except occasionally, the dead disagreed.
She pulled the sheet higher. “Blue tin. Christmas plates. Top cupboard.”
There. Message delivered to the universe.
Tomorrow she would find some plausible way to steer Sarah Mercer toward her mother's kitchen without announcing that the deceased had spent part of her evening pestering the mortician. It wouldn't be the strangest lie she had ever told.
She gathered her hair from beneath her collar. A copper-red mass tumbled nearly to her waist, catching beneath the strap of her bag.
“Son of a—” She wrestled herself free. Graceful.
The funeral home's back corridor was empty. Only the emergency lights remained, casting pale rectangles along the polished floor. She locked the preparation room and checked the service entrance before heading toward her office.
A mirror hung beside the coat hooks. She almost passed it. Almost. Then habit won.
Green eyes stared back at her. Both of them. Good.
She leaned closer and inspected the contact covering her left iris. Still centered. Nobody had noticed today. Nobody ever noticed.
She preferred it that way.
Her phone vibrated: three messages, one missed call, and a notification from the security camera at home.
She opened that one first. A black shape occupied virtually the entire image, two enormous emerald eyes staring directly into the camera.
“Oh, for fuck's sake.”
The next photograph showed a paw. The third was mostly fur. Ned had discovered the camera again.
She typed into the speaker controls. “Ned.”
At home, several miles away, one black ear appeared on-screen.
“Get off the bookshelf.”
The ear disappeared, and so did the cat. She waited. A ceramic thump sounded through the microphone.
“Ned.” Silence. “You break that vase, I'm selling you to Satan.”
A soft mrrrp came through her phone.
She smiled despite herself. “Yeah, yeah. I'm coming.”
She slipped the phone into her coat. Thunder rolled somewhere over the Atlantic, and then the telephone on her desk rang.
Her momentum hitched. Not her cell—the mortuary line. At nearly eleven at night, that meant only a handful of things, and none of them were particularly cheerful. She considered letting the night service take it.
The phone rang again and something cold crept across the back of her neck. Not fear—something else.
She slowly turned toward the desk. On the third ring, her left fingers tingled.
“Oh, don't you dare.”
Fourth ring. The lights flickered once, twice. She stared at the telephone as the sensation traveled from her fingertips into her palm. Magic. Not hers.
As the phone rang a fifth time, she picked it up. “Bellamy and Son's Mortuary.”
For several seconds, there was only static. Then a man spoke. “Ms. Sinclair?”
Her attention sharpened. “Yes.”
“We have a transfer coming to you.”
She reached for a pen. “From where?”
He told her, and she wrote it down. The tingling in her hand became a burn, and her pen froze mid-stroke. Outside, lightning split the sky so close that every window flashed white.
"Name?”
A pause followed. “Unknown.”
She reviewed what she'd written and her entire body tensed. The ink had bled across the paper. Not outward—upward. A thin black line crawled against gravity, winding around the pen beneath her fingers.
She dropped it. It struck the desk, and the ink ground to a halt.
“Ms. Sinclair?”
She stared at it with perplexed eyes. “I heard you.”
“They should reach you within the hour.”
She peered down the dark corridor leading back to the preparation rooms. Every instinct she possessed told her to refuse. Her left hand expressed something worse: Run.
She swallowed. “I'll be here.”
The line went dead. For a moment, she didn't move. Then her phone vibrated again with another security notification.
She opened the video feed. Ned sat in the middle of her living room. He wasn't looking into the camera anymore; he was staring at the front door.
His emerald eyes had turned gold.
She enlarged the security image. Ned's pupils had narrowed to black slits inside the gold. Not amber, not hazel catching the lamplight. Gold. She knew the difference.
“Great.”
The cat continued his unblinking stare at the front door. Cersei tapped the microphone icon. “Ned.” One ear turned toward the sound of her voice, but his attention otherwise remained fixed. “What is it?” As if he might answer.
That was the problem with Ned: sometimes he did. Not in words, not exactly. She had never heard a voice come out of her cat that didn't involve a meow, a chirp, or the appalling yowl he produced when denied chicken. But there were moments when something arrived in her mind so distinctly that calling it intuition felt dishonest. The first had been his name.
She shut down that memory before it could fully form. Not tonight.
Her thumb hovered over the screen. Ned suddenly turned his head, looking directly into the camera, and a pressure rooted behind her left eye.
She winced. “Oh, come on.”
The contact lens had begun to irritate her. She blinked several times and resisted rubbing it; the last thing she needed was to dislodge the damned thing while she was still at work.
Another rumble of thunder rolled over the building. Ned disappeared from the camera feed, and Cersei lowered the phone.
She should call Arthur. That was the sensible thing to do. Arthur Bellamy lived fifteen minutes away—thirty in weather like this. He wouldn't appreciate being dragged out of bed because an unidentified decedent was arriving close to midnight, but Arthur had been a funeral director for thirty-seven years. There were very few situations involving death that he hadn't encountered.
Unfortunately, the ink crawled up my pen and my cat's eyes turned gold probably wasn't among them.
She picked up the pen from the floor. The black streak had dried along the barrel, but when she rubbed it with her thumb, it felt like ordinary ink. Of course it was.
“Asshole.” Whether she meant the pen, the universe, or whatever had decided to interfere with her quiet evening remained undecided. She tossed it into the wastebasket.
The desk phone rang. She nearly swore again before answering. “Bellamy and Sons.”
“Cersei?”
Arthur. She sank into the chair. “Please tell me you aren't standing outside.”
“I am seventy-two years old and wearing flannel trousers," Arthur replied, the faint clink of glass and a television playing in his background. "I'm not standing anywhere I don't have to.”
“Good.”
“Good evening to you, too.” Arthur's nightly Scotch had apparently survived the emergency.
“Did county call you?” she asked.
“They did. I gave them your number because you're the one on call.”
“How generous.”
“I've always been generous.”
“You gave me a twenty-five-dollar Christmas bonus last year.”
“And a bottle of bourbon.”
“You drank half of it before you gave it to me.”
“I was checking the quality.”
She leaned back. Arthur had an answer for everything—usually a bad one. “Unknown male,” she said.
“So they told me.”
“Do we know anything else?”
“Not much. Found near the water. No identification on him. County's backed up, and there are some jurisdictional questions they're sorting through. We're holding him temporarily.”
She glanced back at the dark hallway. “Cause?”
“Undetermined.”
“That's reassuring.”
“You work with dead people, Sinclair. They're rarely in perfect health.”
“Thank you, Arthur. Twelve years and you've finally explained my profession to me.”
“You're welcome.”
Her clinical detachment fractured for a fraction of a second, leaving a dry smile at the corner of her lips.
Arthur continued, “Transport should be there shortly. Log him in, secure his effects if there are any, refrigeration only. Don't start anything.”
“I know.”
“I know you know.” There was a subtle difference in his voice now.
She sat forward, her amusement instantly evaporating. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Arthur.”
A pause stretched over the line. “County fellow sounded odd.”
“How?”
“Odd.”
“That is a spectacularly useless description.”
“He kept asking whether you'd be there,” Arthur said quietly.
She went completely still. “Me?”
“By name.”
The pressure behind her left eye intensified. Her eyes focused on the crumpled note beside the telephone. Unknown. “Why would he know my name?”
“I asked.”
“And?”
“He said someone told him.”
“Who?”
“Didn't say.”
Rain rattled with sudden fury against the windows. She reached for the note, careful not to touch the strange streak of dried ink. “What's the county man's name?”
“Dawes. Michael, I think.”
“Did you know him?”
“No.”
“Have we worked with him before?”
“Not that I remember.”
Arthur fell quiet, and she knew that silence. He was thinking. People tended to underestimate Arthur because of the cardigans, the thinning white hair, and the reading glasses perpetually sliding down his nose. They shouldn't. Very little escaped him.
“Cersei,” he said.
“Mm?”
“If something feels wrong, lock up and leave.”
Her eyes narrowed. That wasn't an Arthur Bellamy thing to say. He was practical to the point of irritation. A burst pipe was a burst pipe. A strange noise was old plumbing. The unexplained draft in the north viewing room was caused by a window frame he'd been promising to replace since the Obama administration.
“You're the one who told me to stay,” she reminded him.
“I told you to receive a transfer.”
“And now?”
“Now I'm telling you there's no dead body in that building worth being stupid over.”
She looked toward the hallway again. “You've become very dramatic in your old age.”
“I'm serious.”
“I know.”
“Call me when they're gone.”
“Arthur—”
“Call me.”
“All right.”
“And Cersei?”
“Yes?”
“Don't do that thing you do.”
Her fingers fell flat against the desktop. “What thing?”
“You know what thing.”
“I genuinely don't.”
“Yes, you do.”
She waited, but Arthur didn't elaborate. Neither did she. “Goodnight, Arthur.”
“Call me.”
He hung up. She remained with the receiver against her ear for another second before slowly replacing it.
Arthur didn't know. Not really. He had never seen her cast a spell, never watched her turn a card or grind herbs beneath a mortar, and he certainly didn't know what lived behind the green contact covering her left eye. But twelve years was a long time to work beside someone. People noticed things. They simply didn't always give those things names.
She stood. The funeral home felt different now. It wasn't anything she could point to—the building itself had not changed. The grandfather clock continued its ponderous ticking in the front hall, rainwater whispered through the gutters, and somewhere below, the refrigeration unit cycled on with its familiar mechanical hum. Still, something had shifted.
She took her coat off. Apparently, she wasn't going home.
“Sorry, Ned.” Her phone remained silent. That bothered her more than another security alert would have.
She left the office and headed toward the service corridor. Bellamy and Sons had occupied the same brick building since 1923. Arthur's grandfather had bought it from a physician who'd apparently decided medicine wasn't for him after accidentally setting fire to his own surgery. Arthur kept a framed newspaper clipping about the incident in his office because he found other people's professional disasters comforting.
The public rooms had been renovated several times. Soft wallpaper. Upholstered chairs. Quiet lamps. Tasteful paintings of Massachusetts coastlines chosen specifically because no one could possibly have a strong emotional reaction to them. The back of the building was another matter. Tile, steel, and concrete—practicality didn't need wallpaper. She preferred it.
She stopped at the sink and washed her hands again, although they were already clean. The pressure behind her eye had eased. Good.
Maybe the moving ink had been exhaustion. Maybe Ned's eyes had caught the light strangely. Maybe Arthur's mysterious county employee was simply an awkward man who had been given her name because she was on call. There were reasonable explanations for almost everything. Cersei had spent most of her life collecting them.
They made excellent camouflage.
Headlights swept across the high windows. She checked the clock—11:17. “That was fast.”
The vehicle reversed toward the service entrance. She waited until she heard the knock before opening the door, and a gust of wind drove rain across the threshold.
“Jesus.”
The man outside ducked his head beneath the awning. “Cersei Sinclair?”
There it was again—her full name. “Depends on who's asking.”
He looked to be in his fifties, soaked through the shoulders despite a waterproof jacket. Rain dripped from the end of his nose. Behind him, another man was already opening the rear doors of the transport van.
“Michael Dawes.”
She checked the badge clipped at his waist. “You called.”
“I did.”
“You could have mentioned the monsoon.”
“Wasn't this bad when we left,” Dawes countered.
Lightning illuminated the parking lot. She stepped aside. “Bring him in.”
The second man wheeled the stretcher toward the door. The remains were enclosed in a black transport pouch—nothing unusual about that, and nothing frightening. She had received thousands of dead bodies: some peaceful, some badly damaged, and some so young she'd had to excuse herself afterward and sit alone for ten minutes before she trusted herself to speak to the family.
Death had ceased to shock her years ago. It had never become ordinary. There was a difference.
The wheels crossed the threshold, and her left hand went completely numb. She jerked it against her side.
Dawes looked at her. “You okay?”
“Static.”
“In your hand?”
“I'm talented,” she muttered.
He gave her a strange look, but she ignored him. As the stretcher rolled farther into the building, the numbness became pins and needles, then an intense heat. By the time the second man pushed the stretcher beneath the corridor lights, her palm felt as though she'd pressed it flat against a hot stove.
She curled her fingers into a fist. Not mine. The thought came instinctively. Whatever was happening, it wasn't her magic. At least, it hadn't started with her.
“Where was he found?” she asked as Dawes removed his wet jacket.
“Rocky stretch of shoreline north of here. Couple walking their dog saw something down below.”
“In this weather?”
“Earlier this evening.”
“Any trauma?”
“Nothing obvious.”
“Drowning?”
“Maybe.”
She looked closely at the pouch. A drowning victim usually carried evidence of water long before the zipper opened—wet material, sand, salt, and the particular practical inconveniences of retrieving a body from the sea. The pouch looked entirely dry.
“Who pronounced?”
Dawes answered with the name of a physician she knew well by reputation.
“Time?”
He checked his paperwork. “Seven forty-two.”
Almost four hours ago. Her burning palm pulsed, and she flexed it against the heat.
Across the room, the second man had gone oddly quiet. He stood at the foot of the stretcher, refusing to look at the body bag. She noticed instantly. “You have a name?”
His eyes lifted. “Tom.”
“Last name.”
“Brennan.”
“You all right, Tom Brennan?”
“Fine.”
He wasn't. His face had the stark, bloodless quality of someone trying very hard not to admit that he wanted to be somewhere else. She had seen it on new hires, but Tom didn't look new.
“How long have you been doing transfers?”
“Eight years.”
Definitely not new.
Her attention turned to Dawes, who suddenly busied himself with the paperwork. Interesting. She held out her right hand. “Give me the chain-of-custody forms.”
Dawes passed them over, and she read every line: Unknown Caucasian male. Estimated age somewhere between forty and fifty-five. Six feet three. Dark hair. No identification. No wallet. No phone.
Personal effects:
- One silver ring.
- One leather cord.
- One coin.
She reread the last item. “Coin?”
“That's what it looks like.”
“What kind?”
“No idea.”
“Where is it?”
Dawes indicated a sealed evidence pouch. She could see the contents through the plastic: a dark disk, approximately the size of a half dollar, resting inside. It wasn't American currency—possibly not currency at all. Something had been stamped into its surface: a circle, lines, a symbol she couldn't quite make out beneath the harsh fluorescent glare.
Her left palm burned hotter. She deliberately moved the evidence bag farther away down the counter.
Immediate relief. There you are.
She stared at the strange coin. Dawes noticed. “You recognize it?”
“No.” That was true. She didn't recognize it. Her body did. “Where was it found?”
“On him.”
“Pocket?”
Another hesitation from Dawes. “No.”
Her brows furrowed. “Where?”
Dawes cleared his throat. “In his mouth.”
Silence weighed heavily over the corridor. She looked back at the little black disk. “That would've been useful information on the phone.”
“We didn't know if it mattered.”
“It matters to me.”
“Why?”
“Because I don't particularly enjoy surprises involving dead men's mouths.”
Tom Brennan made a sound that might have been a laugh if he'd had more enthusiasm for living. Dawes didn't.
She set the evidence pouch completely aside. “Anything else?”
“No.”
“Then let's get him transferred.”
The men moved the stretcher into position. She helped because standing back while other people worked had never suited her, though she intentionally used her right hand whenever possible. Her left remained close to her body, the burning now lessened into a persistent, throbbing ache.
The zipper on the pouch caught briefly and Tom swore beneath his breath. She reached with her dominant hand—then stopped herself. “Here,” she said, using her right hand to guide the track.
The zipper released, escaping a rush of cold air. Then the man's face appeared, and she forgot the storm.
There was nothing grotesque about him, which somehow made it worse. He had dark hair, wet enough at the roots to suggest he really had been near the water, strong features, and several days of beard. His skin carried the waxen pallor she knew better than her own reflection. She looked for the ordinary signs and verified them: he was dead. No question, no mistake. Dead.
And yet every nerve along her left arm screamed otherwise.
She stepped closer. His eyelids were closed. There was a faint discoloration near his temple, but nothing immediately suggestive of a catastrophic injury. She leaned toward him, inhaling. Salt. She could smell the ocean, but underneath it—smoke.
She stopped all breathing through her nose. It wasn't cigarette smoke. Wood. Something resinous, like burned herbs, perhaps. She knew that smell. Not precisely, but enough.
“Where exactly did you say you found him?” she asked.
Dawes shifted behind her. “Near the water.”
“You already said that.” When he offered no answer, she turned to face him fully. “Where?”
Tom looked at Dawes. Dawes gave him a warning look so quick most people would have missed it, but she caught it.
“Oh, we're doing this now?” she asked.
“Doing what?”
“The part where two men bring an unidentified body into my workplace in the middle of the night and decide I don't need to know something.”
“There's nothing—”
“Don't,” she snapped, folding her arms. “I'm tired, my cat is plotting property damage, and I was supposed to be home forty minutes ago. Whatever dramatic little secret you're protecting, I promise I'm not in the mood to appreciate it.”
Tom's eyes lowered, and Dawes rubbed a heavy hand over his jaw. “He wasn't exactly on the shoreline,” Dawes admitted.
“Where was he?”
“In a cave.”
She waited. “And?”
Dawes didn't answer, but Tom did. “There were things on the walls.”
Dawes shot him a sharp glare, but she ignored him, turning her focus entirely to Tom. “What things?”
“Writing. Symbols. I don't know.”
The skin between her shoulder blades prickled. “What kind of symbols?”
“Couldn't tell you.”
“Photographs?”
“County has them.”
“Show me.”
Dawes intervened. “You don't need those to hold the body.”
Her attention drew back to him. “No. I suppose I don't.” She smiled pleasantly, a look Dawes visibly distrusted. “Then we're finished.”
She signed the form, handed the clipboard back, and stepped away from the stretcher. “Goodnight.”
Neither man moved.
“Was there something else?” she asked.
Tom's eyes flicked toward the dead man. “Did they tell you about his hand?”
Dawes swore softly. Her eyes remained locked on Tom. “No.”
Tom pointed. “Left one.”
Of course it was.
She moved around the table. The dead man's left arm lay beside his body, partially obscured by the pouch. She pulled the material back with her right hand; his fingers were tightly closed into a fist.
“Rigor?”
“No,” Tom said.
She examined the arm without touching it. “Then what?”
“Open it.”
Dawes snapped, “Brennan.”
“What?” Tom demanded. “She's going to see it anyway.”
She looked between them. “See what?”
Nobody answered. Fine.
She reached for the man's hand. Right hand. Use the right. Her fingertips made contact with his knuckles, and when nothing happened, she released a breath she hadn't realized she'd been rationing.
She worked carefully at the fingers. They yielded. One. Two. Three.
The fist opened, and a mark sat directly in the center of his palm. She leaned closer. It wasn't ink. It was burned.
A symbol had been branded into the flesh: a circle intersected by three narrow lines, with another shape nested at its center.
Her stomach dropped. She had seen it before. Not in a book, not at the shop, not anywhere she could name—but she knew it. A memory stirred somewhere far below conscious thought: a woman's voice. Never— Gone.
She frowned. “What the hell?”
Her left hand moved. She didn't tell it to. One moment it rested against her hip; the next, her fingertips touched the dead man's branded palm.
The world split open. There was no gentle transition, no cinnamon kitchen, no borrowed memory settling around her. She fell.
Wind tore through her hair. Black water waited impossibly far below, and someone screamed her name in a voice she didn't recognize. Then stone struck beneath her feet. A room—no, a corridor. Candles burned along walls carved with symbols. Hundreds of them. Thousands. She tried to move and couldn't.
The vision ripped sideways. A forest. Snow. Blood scattered across white ground. Gone.
A man's hand pressed against hers. Not the corpse—warm, alive. Power surged through the contact, so shocking that she cried out. Blue. That was her first coherent thought. His eyes were blue. No—sapphire. Brilliant, impossible sapphire threaded with tiny points of light. He was tall, with dark hair and broad shoulders, possessing a face she had never seen and yet somehow experienced with the horrible intimacy of recognition. He was speaking, but she couldn't hear him. His mouth formed something. A name? Hers?
She fought toward him. The vision changed. His eyes illuminated and so did the marks that covered his bare flesh. Not merely tattoos; symbols swept over his chest and shoulders, crossed his arms, and disappeared around his ribs. More climbed his throat. Some were geometric, while others resembled writing in alphabets she didn't know. They moved. One slid beneath his skin. Another flared silver. A single eye in the center of his chest blinked as it watched her.
The man grabbed her shoulders, his eyes blazing. This time she heard him: “Cersei.”
Her blood went cold. He knew her. “Who are you?”
He couldn't hear her, or wouldn't answer. “Who are you?”
The corridor returned. Someone was running. A door slammed. Ned screamed—not a cat's cry, but a terrible human sound wrapped inside an animal voice.
“Ned!”
Gold eyes flashed in darkness, then the sapphire-eyed man appeared again, closer this time. Blood ran from his nose. “Don't let me—”
The vision fractured. “Don't let you what?”
His hands closed around hers, and every mark across his body ignited. She screamed, and something answered. Not the blue-eyed stranger, not Ned, not the dead man—something massive moved beneath the black water.
Then she saw herself. That had never happened before.
She stood barefoot in the sea. Her red hair streamed around her despite the total absence of wind. Her right eye was green, but her left—violet. No contact lens. No hiding. The iris burned with its own light.
Blood ran from her left palm into the ocean. Where each drop struck, the water recoiled. The man with sapphire eyes stood directly behind her, his arms wrapped around her waist, his face buried against her hair. She couldn't tell whether he was holding her, or holding her back.
She stared at herself. The other version of her smiled—not cruelly, but sadly.
And whispered: “You found me.”
The vision exploded. She stormed backward into stainless steel, a tray crashing to the floor as someone shouted. Her knees buckled. She caught the edge of the counter with her right hand and barely kept herself upright.
Air. She needed air, but her lungs wouldn't cooperate.
Dawes moved toward her. “Ms. Sinclair?”
The room tilted. She squeezed her eyes shut until the floor decided where it belonged. “Don't touch me.”
Nobody did. Good.
She breathed once. Again. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead: rain, refrigeration unit, Tom Brennan swearing quietly. Normal sounds. Ordinary things.
She opened her eyes. The corpse lay exactly where he had been. She checked his hand—the brand remained. Her own left palm was red, but there was no wound, no blood. Nothing.
“Are you all right?” Tom asked.
She straightened. Every instinct demanded that she run to the sink and scrub her hand until she took the skin off. She didn't. She had two strangers watching.
“I stood up too quickly.”
Dawes stared at her. “You were already standing.”
She confronted him with an even stare. “Then imagine how embarrassing this is for me.”
Neither man laughed. Tough room.
She reached for the counter and deliberately began setting upright the things she'd knocked over. Her hands were steady—that surprised her. Inside, absolutely nothing was. Sapphire eyes. Tattoos moving beneath skin. Her name in a stranger's mouth. Ned screaming. And herself standing in black water. You found me.
No. Absolutely not. She wasn't doing this here.
She picked up the fallen tray. “Anything else?”
Dawes looked at her as though he had several questions, but he apparently decided he didn't want the answers. “No.”
“Then I'll secure him.”
Tom moved first; he wanted out, and she couldn't blame him. They zipped the pouch again, and she watched the black material cover the dead man's face. For one absurd second, she wanted to stop them. Why? She didn't know him. She didn't want to know him. She especially didn't want anything to do with the sapphire-eyed stranger inside whatever nightmare had just crawled through her head.
The zipper closed, and Dawes gathered his paperwork. “We'll contact Bellamy in the morning.”
“Wonderful.”
“If anything changes—”
“He's dead," she cut in. "I'm hoping for limited developments.”
Tom actually laughed this time. Dawes didn't.
She walked them to the service entrance. As the storm swallowed them, she locked the door: deadbolt, chain, and then another heavy lock Arthur had installed after a burglary six years earlier. She rested her forehead against the cool metal for one second—that was all she allowed herself—then she pushed away.
Her phone was in her pocket. She took it out. No messages, no alerts. She opened the camera app, and her living room appeared. It was empty.
“Ned?” Nothing.
She changed cameras: kitchen, empty; hallway, empty; bedroom, nothing. A different kind of fear began working its way through her chest.
“Ned,” she called, activating the speaker. “Ned, come here.”
No cat appeared. She checked the timestamps and realized the last recorded movement had occurred eleven minutes ago—exactly when she'd touched the body.
Her thumb hovered. “No.”
She replayed the clip. Ned sat facing the front door, his eyes a brilliant, piercing gold. The timestamp advanced: 11:26:13. 11:26:14. 11:26:15. At 11:26:16, Ned's head snapped toward something outside the camera's view. His back arched, every hair standing completely upright, and the feed began to distort.
She heard herself gasp—not through the phone, but a captured recording of her own breath from miles away at the funeral home. The camera had picked it up inside her living room. It was completely impossible.
Ned opened his mouth, but static swallowed whatever sound came out, and the image went entirely black.
She stared at the dead screen. “No, no, no.”
She hit the live feed. Connection lost. She tried again. Connection lost.
“Ned.”
She was already moving. Her coat hung in the office; she grabbed her keys and her bag. She could secure the unidentified man and call Arthur from the car. Whatever the hell was happening here could wait until morning.
Her cat couldn't.
She reached the preparation-room doorway. A sound came from behind her—soft, wet, a dragging breath. Every muscle in her body locked.
No.
She knew that sound. She knew exactly what lungs did after death. She knew air could escape, she knew bodies made noises that terrified families and embarrassed inexperienced trainees, she knew muscles contracted, and she knew mouths opened. She knew the dead were capable of producing a startling variety of perfectly natural phenomena. She knew all of it.
This was different.
Another breath rattled behind her. She turned.
The black pouch moved—not much, just a slight rise beneath the material, and then stillness. Her keys dug painfully into her palm.
“Don't.” She had no idea who she was talking to.
The pouch remained motionless. She approached: three steps, two, one. She stood right beside the stretcher. Nothing.
“I'm going home,” she muttered to the quiet room. Silence. “You've already ruined my evening.” Nothing. “My cat is missing.”
The zipper trembled.
She backed away. “No.”
Something struck the inside of the bag. Once. Hard.
Her power erupted before she could stop it. Every light in Bellamy and Sons went out, and absolute darkness devoured the room. A crash sounded somewhere far down the corridor.
She threw out her left hand, and light burst above her palm. It wasn't flame—it was something colder, a bright white with a faint violet center. It illuminated the room just enough.
The transport pouch was open, though she hadn't touched the zipper. The dead man's head was turned directly toward her, his eyes wide open. They were clouded, empty, and entirely dead. She couldn't move.
His mouth opened, but no sound emerged. Then his arm snapped upward, and his hand closed like a vice around her right wrist.
She screamed. The grip was impossibly strong.
“Let go!” She tried to wrench her arm free, but his fingers only tightened.
The white-violet light above her left palm flared wildly, throwing huge, jagged shadows across the walls. The corpse pulled her closer. She struck at his hand with everything she had, but nothing worked.
“Let me go!”
His mouth worked, a dry rasp dragging from somewhere inside a body that had no business making one. “Wright.”
His fingers opened. The emergency lights flickered on, and she stumbled backward as the dead man's arm dropped lifelessly against the table. His eyes closed. Nothing moved. For several seconds, she could hear only the rain and her own frantic breathing.
“Right?” When there was no answer, she rubbed the red finger marks already forming around her wrist. “Right what?”
The corpse remained inconsiderately unhelpful. She stared at him, her attention shifting down to the branded symbol in his palm. Right. Or—Rite?
That made considerably more sense. A cave covered in symbols, a strange disk hidden inside his mouth, a mark burned into his flesh. A rite. “What rite?” Nothing. “Could you possibly have managed two words?”
Apparently not. She backed toward the door, unwilling to turn away from him quite yet. “Fine. Be cryptic.”
Dead people usually were. She took another step backward, and her phone rang.
She nearly dropped it. The screen showed an incoming call from home—her landline. Nobody used her landline, and nobody was home except Ned. The phone continued ringing, and slowly, she answered, but she didn't speak. For several heartbeats, neither did whoever was on the other end.
Then came a soft sound: Prrrrrrr.
Her mouth fell open. “Ned?”
A cheerful chirp responded.
“You little bastard,” she breathed, her knees nearly giving way from sheer relief. “Ned, how did you—”
A man's voice spoke behind the purring. It was faint—so faint she almost mistook it for wireless interference. She pressed the phone harder against her ear. “Hello?”
Static. Then the voice came again, though she couldn't make out the words.
“Who's there?”
Ned's purring ceased. Her skin prickled as the line crackled one last time, and a man's voice, deep and unfamiliar, whispered: “Cersei.”
The call disconnected.
Cersei broke three traffic laws on the way home—possibly four. She wasn't counting.
The rain had turned the windshield into a constantly moving sheet of black and silver, forcing the wipers to their highest setting. Water pooled along the edges of the road. Bare branches whipped above her headlights, and every few miles, the Atlantic announced itself somewhere beyond the trees with a low, distant roar. Normally she loved storms, but tonight it felt as though this one had followed her.
She tightened both hands around the steering wheel. Her left wrist hurt. Four pale impressions had already darkened into bruises since she'd left Bellamy and Sons. She'd photographed them before walking out the door because twelve years around the dead had taught her that memory was unreliable and evidence wasn't. The photograph looked ridiculous: four finger marks, no explanation.
Arthur had called while she'd been locking up. She had lied to him—not well, and Arthur hadn't believed her. Also not surprising. She'd told him the transfer was complete, the body was secured, the power had flickered once during the storm, and everything was fine.
Technically, three of those statements were true. She had omitted the part where a dead man sat up, grabbed her, and tried to tell her something about a rite. She had also omitted the impossible telephone call from her house.
There were limits to what one should tell a seventy-two-year-old man in flannel trousers after midnight.
Lightning spread behind the clouds, and she flinched. The blue-eyed stranger appeared in her mind again—not by choice. His face remained maddeningly clear.
Usually, visions deteriorated quickly after they released her. Details dissolved first: faces became difficult to reconstruct, and voices lost their precise pitch. Within an hour, a vivid experience could become something closer to remembering a dream. Not him. She remembered everything: the dark hair, the shape of his mouth, those extraordinary eyes. And his height—God, he was tall.
And then there were the marks.
She frowned at the road. She'd seen magical tattoos before. Her shop attracted every variety of occult enthusiast imaginable, from serious practitioners to nineteen-year-olds who bought their first tarot deck on Tuesday and declared themselves hereditary high priestesses by Friday. Sigils tattooed onto skin were hardly revolutionary.
But the man's marks were different. They hadn't decorated his body; they had belonged to it. She distinctly remembered one moving. Actually moving. And an eye blinking from the dead center of his chest.
Her hands tightened around the steering wheel. “Nope.” Saying it aloud helped—a little. “You're not thinking about him.”
Her brain betrayed her and supplied his face.
“Fan-fucking-tastic."
The car climbed the narrow road toward home. She had other things to worry about: like Ned, her landline calling her, her cat apparently being on the other end, and someone—or something—speaking her name. A perfectly normal evening.
She turned onto a road that became progressively less convincing as civilization with every quarter mile. She preferred it that way. Salem had its charms, but privacy wasn't always one of them. Her shop benefited from foot traffic; her home emphatically did not. The house stood several miles away from the busiest streets, where old roads curled through woods that had resisted development mostly through stubborn geography and inconvenient property lines. Her nearest neighbor couldn't see her windows, and she couldn't see theirs. That arrangement had preserved excellent relations between them.
She rounded the final bend, and her headlights found the house. She exhaled for what felt like the first time since leaving work.
There it was: small by Victorian standards, though considerably larger than one woman and a cat required. Two stories beneath a steep slate roof, a narrow turret tucked against one corner, a deep porch, tall windows, and dark clapboard that became nearly black when wet. A stained-glass panel above the front door caught her headlights, throwing back a fractured jewel of red, blue, and green.
The house had been built in 1889. She knew this because the date was carved into a beam in the cellar. She also knew that three families had lived there before her, two children had been born in the upstairs bedroom, one man had died beside the parlor fireplace, and somebody named Margaret had spent approximately thirty years hiding small objects inside the walls.
Margaret had never explained herself, so Cersei had stopped asking.
The porch light was on. She hadn't left it on. Her foot eased from the accelerator. “Ned?”
The house obviously didn't answer. She pulled into the gravel drive and killed the engine.
For a moment, she stayed inside while the rain hammered the roof. Home waited twenty yards away, and nothing moved behind the windows. She reached into her bag and closed her fingers around a small pouch of salt, then became instantly irritated with herself.
“For fuck's sake.”
She was a witch—a clairvoyant, a woman capable of occasionally doing things she refused to examine too closely. And apparently, she was going to defend herself with seasoning.
She shoved the pouch back into her bag and got out of the car. The rain soaked her completely before she even reached the porch, and she took the steps two at a time.
“Ned!”
Something black shot across the window beside the door, and she nearly fell backward. A second later, a furry face appeared against the glass. Emerald eyes. Green—ordinary, beautiful green. Relief hit her hard enough to make her instantly angry.
“You little shit.”
Ned opened his mouth. She couldn't hear him through the heavy wood, but the shape of the yowl was unmistakable. She unlocked the door, and Ned immediately began shouting at her the second she stepped inside.
“I know.”
MRRRAAAOW.
“I know.”
Mrrrrow!
“You're the one who called me!”
Ned trotted after her as she entered the hallway, his tail held completely upright. Cersei locked the deadbolt and turned to face him. The cat sat. He was large now, much larger than the rain-soaked handful she'd found years ago, with glossy black fur that swallowed light and a small white patch beneath his chin that only became visible when he tipped his head backward. At the moment, he looked infuriatingly healthy.
She dropped her bag. “You scared ten years off my life.”
Ned blinked.
“Don't.”
Blink.
“I saw your eyes," she insisted, pointing a finger down at him. "They were gold. Gold, Ned.”
Nothing. His tail curled neatly around his feet, and he casually licked one shoulder.
“Don't give me that. You called the funeral home.”
Ned stopped licking and looked pointedly toward the kitchen, his tongue partially sticking out.
“Oh, no. We're not changing the subject to food.”
He stood up anyway and walked away.
“Ned.”
The black tail disappeared around the doorway, and she stared after him. “Un-freaking-believable.”
She peeled off her wet coat and hung it beside the door. The house embraced her in familiar smells: old wood, beeswax, rosemary drying somewhere near the kitchen, and the faint smoke of yesterday's fire. Home. She needed that.
She kicked off her shoes and followed Ned.
Her kitchen was her favorite room in the house and the least impressive architecturally. No dramatic turret windows, no carved mantel, and no stained glass. Just old cream cabinets she'd repainted herself, butcher-block counters, an enormous farmhouse sink, and copper pans hanging from a rack above the island. Plants occupied the windowsill—too many plants. Most were thriving, though the basil was currently engaged in a personal vendetta.
Ned sat beside his empty bowl. Cersei shook her head. “You have food.”
He looked at the bowl, then up at her.
“There is food in there,” she insisted.
Ned looked down again. A single layer of kibble remained, covering the bottom of the bowl.
“Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize we were experiencing a famine.” His stare became devastating, and she surrendered, reaching for the bag to fill the bowl. Ned inhaled the kibble as though he'd survived a shipwreck. Then he hacked up six unchewed pieces, and ate them again.
She leaned against the counter and watched him, studying those perfectly green eyes. “Who was in the house?”
Ned continued eating.
“Someone said my name,” she said. Crunch. “A male voice.” Crunch. “Deep.”
Ned paused. His ears angled backward.
Cersei straightened, her internal alarms instantly resetting. “You heard him.”
The cat resumed eating. It was not an answer, but it also wasn't nothing.
She pushed away from the counter. “All right.”
She went room by room. Not because she expected to find anyone, but because not checking would have bothered her more.
The parlor was empty, the fire cold, and her books right where she'd left them. A half-finished mug of tea still sat on the table beside the sofa from that morning, proving that adulthood was largely a myth. In the dining room, shop inventory she'd brought home to catalogue occupied half the table, but everything was empty. She checked the windows: locked. Back door: locked. There was no broken glass, no mud, and no wet footprints.
She headed upstairs. Bedroom: empty. Guest room: empty. Bathroom: empty.
The little room in the turret she used for private magical work—
She paused outside the door. It was open. She always closed it.
Ned appeared behind her. No bell announced him because he had lost three collars in six months and Cersei had eventually accepted defeat. He sat silently at the top of the stairs, and his eyes were gold.
Her pulse gave one hard, erratic beat. “Okay,” she whispered, looking at the dark doorway. “That's new.”
Ned didn't move. Cersei took a breath and stepped inside.
The room smelled faintly of lavender and extinguished candles. Shelves curved along two walls, crowded with books, jars, boxes, and objects she preferred not to display at the shop. A round table stood beneath the turret windows, and her tarot decks occupied a wooden cabinet beside it. Nothing appeared disturbed.
Then she saw the floor. A single card lay face down beside the table.
She approached, knowing which deck it belonged to before she even picked it up: black edges, heavy linen stock. It was her oldest deck, one that had belonged to her grandmother.
She opened the cabinet. The deck remained inside, and every single card appeared accounted for.
Slowly, she looked down at the one in her hand.
Ned entered the room, his eyes remaining a steadfast, piercing gold. “Did you do this?” she asked, though he just sat silently beside her foot. “Of course you did.”
She turned the card over. The Tower. Lightning splitting stone, figures falling, fire, ruin.
She gazed at it. “No. Absolutely not.”
She shoved the card onto the table. The Tower wasn't a prophecy of literal catastrophe; she had explained this to customers so many times she could have done it under anesthesia. It meant upheaval, revelation, structures breaking, false security collapsing, or change that could no longer be avoided. Context mattered. Questions mattered. Surrounding cards mattered.
One card on a floor wasn't a reading. It was litter.
“I'm going to take a shower.” Ned looked pointedly at the Tower card on the table. “You can stare at it all night if you want.”
She left, and he followed. Naturally.
By the time she reached the bathroom, exhaustion had officially begun replacing adrenaline. She switched on the light, and her reflection arrested her progress entirely. She looked terrible: hair damp and tangled around her shoulders, mascara faintly smudged beneath her eyes, and her skin far too pale.
And then there was the contact.
“Right.” She washed her hands, then leaned toward the mirror. Removing the lens was such an ordinary part of her nightly routine that she rarely thought about it anymore. Tonight she did.
Her fingertip touched her left eye. Pinch. Lift. The green lens came away. She blinked, and her real face returned.
Right eye green. Left violet. Not lavender, not blue with an unusual cast—violet. It was deep near the pupil, lighter toward the edge, with a narrow dark ring around the iris. She had hated it when she was little. Then feared it. Eventually, she'd learned to hide it. Green contacts were easy; questions were harder.
She placed the lens safely in its case, but the woman from the vision continued staring back at her from the glass: barefoot in black water, red hair moving around her, green and violet eyes, blood falling from her palm. You found me.
She gripped the edge of the sink. The violet eye seemed unusually bright beneath the harsh bathroom light, and she leaned closer. Nothing changed. Of course nothing changed. Eyes did not glow, cats did not use telephones, and corpses did not grab morticians.
Apparently, tonight had decided rules were optional.
Ned jumped onto the closed toilet lid. His eyes were green again.
She watched him through the mirror. “You know something. You've always known something.”
He blinked. Cersei turned away from the glass to face him directly. “Who are you?”
For once, the question wasn't playful. Ned's pupils widened, and something passed through her mind—not a word, but a sudden, vivid image.
Rain. A door. Tiny paws slipping on wet concrete. Cold—terrible, biting cold. Then the door opening, light spilling across the ground, and a younger version of herself crouching beneath the awning, long red hair blowing across her face.
Oh, you poor baby. Hands reaching down. Warmth. Safety. Home.
She staggered back against the sink as the memory vanished. Ned remained sitting on the toilet lid. She stared at him, her chest heaving. Her own memory of that night had never looked like that. She had seen herself—from below. From his eyes.
“Ned…”
One black ear twitched.
“Did you just show me that?”
He quickly jumped down. Cersei turned after him. “Wait. You can do that?”
Ned walked out into the hall.
“Ned.”
He kept going. She followed him to the staircase, her voice echoing in the quiet house. “You have lived with me all these years, and you're only mentioning this now?”
Down he went.
“Ned!” The black tail disappeared around the landing. “You cannot drop a psychic kitten memory into my head and walk away!”
He did exactly that.
She came to a standstill halfway down the staircase, and a laugh escaped her—it was either that or scream.
“Fine!” Ned disappeared completely into the kitchen. “Everybody be mysterious tonight!”
She returned upstairs. The shower helped. Hot water washed away the mortuary, the rain, and most of the tension lodged between her shoulders. She stayed beneath the stream longer than necessary, her forehead pressed against the tile, trying very deliberately not to think.
Naturally, she thought anyway. The dead man. The symbol. The coin. The cave. The stranger—especially the stranger.
She shut off the water and wrapped herself in a towel, her own obsession becoming thoroughly embarrassing.
Twenty minutes later, she descended the stairs barefoot in black sleep shorts and an oversized gray sweater, her damp hair hanging down her back. Her face was scrubbed clean, and the contact lens remained upstairs. At home, she didn't hide the violet eye. There was no one here to see it, anyway.
Except Ned—and whatever ghosts had poor boundaries.
She poured herself two fingers of bourbon. Arthur would approve. Then she added another; Arthur would approve more.
Ned jumped onto the kitchen island, tracking the glass. “You want one?” she asked, moving it away as he leaned in to sniff it. “No. You're weird enough sober.”
She took a drink, feeling the sharp warmth spread down her throat. Better.
Her phone lay beside her bag, a quiet temptation on the counter. She considered it, then ignored it, knowing exactly what she would do the second she picked it up: search. Cave, symbols, unknown body, maybe rite, maybe the mark, maybe—him.
She drank again. “No.”
Ned looked at her.
“Don't judge me,” she muttered. Ned simply yawned. “I am perfectly capable of leaving something alone.”
Ned sat down. Cersei lasted exactly twenty-three seconds.
“Oh, fuck it.”
She grabbed the phone. Her first search was completely useless: occult rites Massachusetts coast. Thousands of results flooded the screen, a digital tide of tourist nonsense, modern pagan groups, historical witchcraft, ghost tours, and a Reddit thread involving a lighthouse and what appeared to be an alarming quantity of mushrooms.
“No.” She changed terms: branded palm occult symbol circle three lines.
It was worse. Images of bad tattoos, alchemy, heavy metal album covers, and a conspiracy website whose author apparently believed every celebrity in North America belonged to the same satanic knitting circle. She backed out of the browser.
Ned had begun watching her screen. “You have any suggestions?”
He placed one heavy black paw directly over the phone.
“Very helpful.” She moved his limb aside, but he immediately put the paw back. “Ned.”
Again, the paw came down. She looked at him, then down at the screen beneath his pads. Her search bar still contained the words: occult rite.
She slowly removed his foot. “Rite.”
The dead man's voice returned in a sudden memory flash—that awful, dry rasp. Right. Or rite.
She typed: Massachusetts coastal occult rite cave symbols. Nothing useful.
Then she tried: historical magical rites Massachusetts caves.
A handful of academic results appeared among the garbage. She scrolled until one title caught her attention—not because she understood it, but because she recognized the graphic symbol embedded beside the link. A circle intersected by three narrow lines. Her thumb hung frozen.
The page belonged to an academic journal. The article title read: Threshold Marks and Funerary Wards in North Atlantic Magical Traditions.
She sat straighter, her eyes dropping to the author: Professor Ian Wright.
The bourbon glass paused halfway to her mouth. Wright. She read it once, then again, as her mind instantly supplied the corpse's dry rasp. Right. Her skin went completely cold. “No.”
Ned stood up on the counter.
She tapped the author's name, and a university biography loaded. Photograph first.
She gasped. Dark hair. That face. And eyes so vividly blue that even a mediocre faculty headshot couldn't make them ordinary. Sapphire.
The glass slipped from her fingers. Ned leapt backward as bourbon splashed across the island, but Cersei didn't even notice. Her wide eyes were stuck on the screen. The stranger from her vision smiled pleasantly from an academic webpage, fully clothed, with no visible mystical markings, no blood, and no luminous light in his eyes. He was just a handsome professor looking mildly amused by whoever had taken his photograph.
Beneath it read: IAN WRIGHT, Professor of Folklore and Esoteric Traditions.
She heard herself whisper his name. “Ian.” The sound felt heavy and strange in her mouth. She looked at Ned, whose eyes had shifted back to a blinding, steadfast gold.
She looked back at the screen. The corpse hadn't been whispering right, and he hadn't been saying rite. He had been saying Wright.
Thunder shook the windows, and on her screen, the photograph flickered. For one fraction of a second, Ian Wright's pleasant academic portrait vanished. In its place, she saw sapphire eyes blazing with raw light and intricate symbols crawling furiously over bare skin. Then the photograph snapped back to normal.
Cersei dropped the phone. Ned hissed.
And the lights went completely out.