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Still, it made me feel uneasy.
“What do you think we're gonna find this time?” Nog asked, interrupting my train of thought. “Pile of dusty bones in tattered clothes, or something cool like a zombie?”
My cousin had a very blasé attitude about our line of work, and very little scared him—which wasn’t a good thing. At nineteen, he had too little fear and too much confidence. It was a dangerous combination when he was a latent shifter and didn’t have much in the way of strength or power.
“Hopefully we just find the lapel pin we were paid to locate,” I answered, pushing my foot on the shovel as I continued to dig. We stood in a hole about five feet deep and probably about the same width, and we were almost finished.
“I wonder what it does,” he mused with genuine interest in his voice. “I can never tell if they want something that was buried fifty years ago because they want it as a family keepsake or if they want it for some spell.”
“Honestly, I try not to think about it.”
“Why not?” He’d completely stopped shoveling. “Aren’t you a little curious what people are up to?”
My cousin was the king of asking dumb questions.
“I try not to think about it because not all witches are good and those objects could be used for creating wards on people against their will, Nog,” I answered quietly.
Awkward silence spanned between us.
I held no ill-will toward any species. I was half shifter and half witch, but I also knew very well what witches were capable of. As far as everyone outside my family knew, I had an intricate tattoo of weaving ancient symbols on my back, but it was far more complicated than that. It was a ward—placed on me the night I was born—by a coven of doomsday witches. The very same coven of zealots that had raised my mother . . . and killed her after she’d given birth to me twenty-seven years ago.
The magic beneath my skin made me a guardian, destined to protect a darkness within me I wasn’t even sure I believed was there.
What I did know was that the ward had been passed down for centuries. My mother was a guardian, and her mother before her, and her mother—and each one of them was sacrificed in the transfer when they had a child at twenty-five.
Not me. I noped right out of that situation.
When I learned I was destined for the same fate, I escaped. I wandered aimlessly for weeks. Then my dad found me. He’d spent a decade trying to track me down, and now he spent his time tracking down a cure, for lack of a better word. My not having a baby only solved half the problem. At some point, I’d die. If there was even a grain of truth to the stories we’d been told, there had to be a way to pass on the duties of a guardian to someone else, but I’d be damned if I forced it on anyone.
My cousin’s eyes shifted toward my back before he quickly looked at me again, then his lips twisted to the side as he fidgeted with his hands. “My bad,” he mumbled. “You know we’ll find a way to fix it.”
“I know. I just want to get this hole dug and be on our way.” Angling my shovel slightly, I sprayed him with some dirt. “So, chop chop before I cut your pay.”
“All right, all right. I’m just stretching,” he said, brushing the dirt off his chest.
“Mmm hmm.” I shook my head.
A familiar laugh sounded, announcing my cousin Clara’s arrival, late as usual. “You do an awful lot of stretching, Nog,” she said with a snort. “There’s a reason Reagan has calluses on her hands, and you don’t.”
“Oh, nice of you to finally grace us with your presence, dear sister,” he said, bowing in mock respect and looking up where she stood at the edge of the pit. “Did you get lost, or were you busy with your fuckboy flavor of the month?”
“Stop calling him that.” Clara rolled her eyes, flicking a strand of her straight black hair over her shoulder. “I’m here, aren’t I? I made double today by taking a job with Crowley and his crew before coming to this one, thank you very much.”
“Now that you’re here, do you care to help out? You make ten percent from us, and you don’t do any of the work,” he grumbled.
“I am helping.” Clara plopped down on the ground and leaned against the headstone while she pulled out yarn and crocheted a little doll. “I’m a modern-day insurance policy, Nog. You never know when you’ll need me.”
“Insurance? Hardly. Extortion is more like it,” he argued. “We don’t even know if there’s a spirit in there. We pay you and you just sit around ‘in case.’”
“That’s how insurance works, genius.”
Nog looked at me while he gestured up to his sister. “Do we really need her?”
“You know we do. Two weeks ago a vampire popped out of a coffin and tried to use you as a snack,” I said, shoving the blade into the dirt with force. “She’s worth ten percent any day of the week, so stop bitching at her and dig so I can go home, for the love of the gods.”
“Home?” Clara repeated lightly, changing the course of the conversation the moment she caught my slipup. “It’s Saturday. You said you’d be at the pub tonight.”
Dammit.
