Bran wondered, distantly, if he’d have been in the third cold storage drawer if he had been home for a visit.
He unzipped the bag down to her navel with shaking fingers, revealing his mother’s cold, lifeless face. She didn’t look how he remembered her, and Bran couldn’t stop the sob that ripped its way out of him. He covered his mouth with one hand, hunching over as everything blurred from tears, jostling the gurney. His mother’s hand slipped out of the bag, bloated fingers dangling off the side. Something fluttered free of them, drifting to the floor.
Bran wiped away a couple of tears, breathing in deep a couple of times to try to get himself back under control. He crouched to retrieve what had fallen, peering at the crumpled flower in his palm. The bruised petals were a color blue he’d never seen before, its pollen a startling, vibrant pink. Even the one smelled like a dozen, a sweetly floral scent reminding him strongly of spring.
His lips trembled—from rage or grief, he couldn’t tell—as he stared at a flower that didn’t belong in this world.
“Fuck,” he rasped, fingers folding around the delicate petals.
The lights were back.
Shoving the flower into his pocket, Bran zipped the bag back up over his mother’s body, gaze averted. He hesitated before settling his fingertips on her covered forehead. “I name you Juliana Gallagher, witch of the Gallagher coven. May your mantle be mine in the shroud of your passing. May your soul rest in our world and never haunt the wyrding. May your body and bones return to the earth.”
Bran drew the same witchmarks he had with Ray’s body over his mother’s, pushing his magic into the memory of her, for she was gone from this mortal world now. As the last glitter of magic faded at his fingertips, an impossible breeze that came from nowhere blew past him, rattling everything not bolted down in the morgue. It carried the smell of earth and a hint of his mother’s favorite perfume with it. Bran breathed it in, trying to commit it to memory, as the witchmarks inked into his right forearm burned with power.
He bit back a cry, gripping his forearm with his other hand as the coven’s broken generational circle closed there in the morgue, with Bran the last witch of their line to carry a duty, a mantle, in the face of a threat that would see them dead. All the knowledge his mother once held had died with her, and Bran ached for that loss, for the grimoire that was missing, too. He didn’t know how he was supposed to stand against the horror found in the depths of the forest when it had been strong enough to take his mother from them.
The strange breeze faded to nothing, leaving Bran aching to see sunlight. The circle had closed, and the Gallagher coven was his to lead. It was just him and his sister, and his sister carried a geas on her throat that proved she was a target as much as their mother had been.
The lights had certainly whittled his coven down to nearly nothing.
Bran gripped the gurney and rolled it back into cold storage, closing the square door behind it. He headed for the exit, stepping back into the hallway where Mac waited. Bran nodded stiffly at the other man, not up for speaking just yet as he tried to swallow around the knot of grief stuck in his throat.
“Let’s get back upstairs,” Mac said quietly.
Bran finally found his voice. “The grimoire is missing.”
Mac froze, panic flashing across his face. “What?”
“It’s missing. It wasn’t in the Shoppe. Can you check with the police to see if it was at the house?”
Mac closed his eyes. “Yeah, I will.”
“Great. Thanks. I need to get the hell out of here.”
Mac didn’t argue his request. They returned to the work area on the first floor, and Aisling stood from the chair she’d been curled up in at the receptionist desk, hurrying over to him. Bran hugged her tight, refusing to cry in front of her.
“Mac?” the woman manning the dispatch desk called out worriedly. “We got another 10-65.”
Mac swore, leaving them with a hasty goodbye. Bran tracked his passage, wondering what that was all about. Aisling tugged on his hand, and Bran jerked his attention back to her. “Yeah, I know. Let’s go get breakfast.”
Red’s Diner was the only place in town that offered milkshakes, something he knew Aisling loved. While it wasn’t Dunkin’ Donuts, it would do.
Chapter Four
Cillian circled the tiny, one-room cabin hemmed in on all sides by trees with their lower branches broken and trampled bushes. He watched where he stepped, not wanting to disturb the impressions in the dirt that could have been animal tracks. He reached the front of the cabin again, grip on his rifle tight as he peered at the front door and the claw marks gouged deep into the wood. The door had held up to whatever had tried to get in, as had the walls. The cabin, like all the others scattered through the forest, didn’t have any windows.
What they did have were iron nails used in its build and tiny witchmarks etched into the doorframe and along the top of the walls, beneath the eaves of the roof. The markings were difficult to see, but they matched the ones he’d passed on some trees along the path leading to the cabin. Growing up, he’d never known what the witchmarks meant other thanthis way to safety. Everyone in Pelham knew to follow them to a cabin in the woods if you were out too late and got caught in the twilight, home too far away.
Some early morning hikers had found a body down the forest path. Maybe the victim had been trying to reach the cabin, hoping it could save him from whatever he’d been running from. Cillian was good attracking, and the dead man’s footprints had ended where he’d fallen, but a second set had made it to the cabin, and the door was locked when he tested the knob.
He stepped back and off to the side of the narrow dirt path, the sole of one hiking boot catching on a knot of grass. Something caught his eye by the foundation, and he knelt in the dirt, reaching for the blue blossom of a flower he’d never seen before, and he knew plenty of the local flora.
Cillian picked it up, careful to keep his fingers away from the broken stem. The brilliant, almost electrifying blue petals weren’t a color he’d ever seen any plant come in, pollen a bright pink that seemed out of place. The petals weren’t a shape he was familiar with. The flower was strange-looking, and it had a strong, sweet smell that he couldn’t place. Frowning, he stood and carefully tucked the flower into his pocket.
He knocked on the door loudly, calling out as he did so. “Ranger Dunne out here. Anyone inside? Hello?”
Cillian canted his head toward the cabin wall. It sounded as if someone was moving around inside, but no one answered his query. He knocked again, glancing around the trees, keeping an eye on the woods. “If anyone is inside, you can come out. It’s daylight. I’m a park ranger, and I can escort you back to town.”
