All of the blood rushed out of my head as I watched the ghost. “Amanita?” Ember followed me as I walked into the office. “Amanita?” I said again, hoping that by saying her name, she might hear me, might recognize my voice.
I had only been a child when my parents were killed, but Amanita had been my mother’s best friend. She’d been visiting the shop the day my parents were executed, same as she did dozens of times a month. Just passing time gossiping with my mother, arranging flowers and laughing.
“Amanita,” I pleaded again.
This time, she flickered halfway across the room. I didn’t want to yank on her aura. That could be disorienting for spirits, and the way she looked, locked in grief like this… I couldn’t cause her more harm. She was repeating something in that voiceless way that so many Echoes had.
“Can you read her lips?” I asked, looking back at Ember.
Her kaleidoscope eyes were heavily hooded with grief,perhaps for me, but mostly, I thought, for Amanita. She nodded, swallowing hard before choking out, “She’s saying,the safe is a decoy. It’s under the rug.” Ember shook her head. “I don’t understand, Ares. This isn’t where she died, is it?”
“No,” I murmured. “She died in the flower shop with my parents.”
“Amanita Erebis,” she whispered, surprising me with her knowledge. “But how… why is she here? Loopers tend to stay near something important from their lives, or their deaths, right? Cromvale’s ancestors probably weren’t even born when your parents and Amanita died.”
I inhaled deeply. This was what came of keeping secrets. Of keeping the Trinity’s knowledge siloed within each dynasty. “That’s not exactly true. Echoes don’t always start out as loopers. Sometimes they start out as Shades, going where they please, and sometimes even seeking out aspects of their old lives.”
Ember drew in a slow breath. “Are you saying she might have found out something so disturbing she got stuck like this?”
She was so smart, so quick, I didn’t even have to try to explain things further to her. I loved it. “Yes.”
“But what rug?” she asked. “There’s not a rug in this place; not that I’ve seen, anyway. Is there one in the bedroom?”
I shook my head, then drew a sharp breath in. “But I didn’t get to the closet yet.”
I spun on my heel, running through the apartment, Ember close behind. There was no telling how little time we had left, and we’d come up empty thus far. When we got to the closet, it was there. A plain black rug in the middle of the walk-in closet, with an incredibly heavy-looking stone table standing atop it. We glanced at one another and then worked to move the marble table.
For mortals, it likely would have been too heavy to move. But for Ember and me, it took just a little effort. When the tablewas off the rug, we pulled it back, working in perfect time with one another. Below the rug, there was a trapdoor.
Ember stared at me for a long moment before bending down to open it. Both of us were silent, my pounding heart and the trapdoor creaking open the only sound in the apartment. I glanced up as the door opened, movement distracting me. Amanita stood opposite me, behind Ember, her tear-stained face full of relief. A smile stretched her heart-shaped face into an exhausted, but happy expression.
You found it, she said before she started to fade.
There wasn’t enough time. There was never enough time. My emotions hadn’t caught up yet. I hadn’t had time to process this, to try to pull the feelings I’d had to abandon, along the long road of my life, up from the depths. Amanita would be here and gone before I had a chance to say what I needed to—tofeelwhat I needed to.
“Tell my parents I love them,” I whispered, dredging as much feeling as I could into my voice. Numbness threatened to pin me down in this moment, but I staved it off the only way I knew how: By talking about the one person I always trusted, that I knew as well as I knew myself. “When you see them, tell them that Eryx is just like Papa. I tried my best to make sure he would be a good man. That he would be strong enough to withstand this world, and all its horrors. Everyone who knows him loves him.”
Ember’s hand clapped over her mouth as I spoke. Tears welled in her hazel eyes, clinging to her long lashes. Amanita nodded, then looked down at Ember, whose focus was so closely narrowed on me.
And what about you, Ares?Amanita asked. The tears had disappeared, and she was translucent—the way spirits whose business on the mortal plane always looked when they were not long for the world.What shall I tell them of you?
I shook my head. “There is nothing to tell. Eryx is my greatest accomplishment. Roman will have told them the rest.”
Ember’s breath shuddered through her as she listened to me. The tears in her eyes fell onto her cheeks in streams now. She shook her head at Amanita, but could not seem to form words as her fingers stretched toward the spirit.
My mother’s best friend seemed to understand something of her intention though, because she smiled gently at Ember, a comforting expression that seemed to soothe her, at least a little.I will tell them you found the love of a good woman,Amanita said, placing her fingers under Ember’s chin.It will please your mother to know it.
Amanita’s relief was palpable in the closet as she dissolved into thousands of glowing particles, breaking apart and then faded into nothing. She would be at peace now; whatever was behind the trapdoor was the thing that tied her to this place. I looked down to see only one thing in the space below: a manilla file folder. Ember glanced at me, wiping tears from her eyes, before pulling a set of rubber gloves out of her jacket pocket.
Ember Verona was everything I’d hoped for. I had no idea how long I’d been falling in love with her, but now that I saw myself through Amanita’s eyes, I knew it had been longer than the past few days.Years. I’d been watching her, longing for her, since the inquest into the fire.
Since I pulled my head out of my ass and realized the harm I’d done. The mistakes I’d made in service of my people. For the past twenty years, I’d been searching out ways to make things better, and she’d been here all along. Right by my side, annoying the shit out of me—the answer to everything.
The love of a good woman. Yes. That, but also a partner in this lonely life. The chaotic complement to all my desire for order.
Ember pulled another pair of gloves from her pocket and handed them to me, before bending down to lift the folder out of its shallow hiding place. She placed the folder on the marble table we’d just moved, and opened it. I went to stand next to her. The harsh overhead light in the closet was unpleasant, its dull whine making my ears ring.
There were several photographs inside the folder. Some were old, over a hundred years old, by the looks of things. The photograph from the wall—of the lot where the old florist shop had been—was among them. There was also a document, a single piece of paper that showed a web of dates. Ember pressed her gloved finger to the day my parents died, her eyes flicking over the other dates on the web.
