Chapter Three
IT WAS TWObeers, half a box of cold kung-pao chicken, and one episode ofLaw and Order: SVUlater that the phone pinged with a notification. Jonah could have checked it then, but he didn’t. Instead, he left it until Olivia Benson had stared plaintively after the ADA and straight into the end credits
He took the phone into the kitchen with him and grabbed another beer from the fridge. The glass was wet and cold through his T-shirt as he tucked it absently under his elbow while he scanned the message.
StellaG had gone along with Emily's confidence she’d been remembered. It was a common name; it had been a safe assumption there was at least one of them StellaG hadn’t kept in contact with.
I’m so sorry, Em. I thought someone would have told you,StellaG had written.He did it last year. There was no note, but apparently he’d started to drink again, and I guess he couldn’t face it, you know? He was so into being sober, hosting the meetings, and all that. But my boyfriend, well, ex-BF now, found him, and the whole room just stunk of gin. He’d taken some pills. Broke my heart, you know? God, I can’t believe you didn’t know. You OK?
Jonah felt a pinch of guilt as he traded the phone from one hand to the other and popped the cap off the bottle against the edge of the counter. He ignored it. If he took the time to feel bad about all his past misdeeds…
By the time he worked his penance far enough down the list of misdeeds to get to “lied to a college student,” he’d be dead.
Jonah licked spilled drops of beer off his knuckles and then hesitated as the sharp, yeasty taste caught on his tongue.
He knew Deborah was a drunk; she’d followed him out of the AA meeting. It was a safe assumption that Daniel was too. Both of them had made efforts to get sober and failed? Daniel with a bottle of gin and Deborah with Arlene, the stripper from her story.
It had been a while. The thought hung in Jonah’s head for a long, lazy moment before he realized that he’d not finished it.
He’d only given half an ear to what Deborah shared about the last time she’d lost her sobriety, but hehadlistened. It just needed to be dug up from the clutter he’d not bothered to file on the way in.
Where had Deborah said she met Arlene? The conference hadstartedin Vegas, but that’s not where she’d ended up. That had been… Columbus.
The same place where Daniel had washed down his pills with booze.
Magic loved coincidence. It gave so much scope. Most of the time, hexes and horrors worked in the shadows. If it drew too much attention—if the modesty curtains of This is How Things Work were yanked back for too many people—it could cause a sort of allergic reaction for reality.
Luckily, people had a real talent for self-delusion. Deja vu. Coincidence. Goose on their grave. It all let people turn a blind eye when the unnatural slipped through the cracks.
The conference had been…
If the information was there in the trash drawer of Jonah’s brain, he couldn’t find it. Last year? Maybe. When had Daniel died?
Urgency itched at the nape of Jonah’s neck. He had a feeling he could guess, close enough anyhow.
He grabbed the clipping from the salt circle and shook it out. Salt clung to grease spots where the paper had been handled, folded, and refolded over and over. The paper pilled up in dry balls when he tried to brush the crust away. He could still make out enough to read the date.
The anniversary of Daniel’s death was… today. Of course. Jonah should have known. This was how his luck always ran.
“If you didn’t have bad luck, boy,”his granny’s voice echoed between his ears, “you’d have no luck at all… but maybe more of your friends would be alive. That’s how it works.”
“No, no, no,” Jonah argued with that as he crumpled the bit of paper between his fingers. “This isn’t on me. Not this year, not last year, and not in fuckingColumbus.I’m a Carrow, not fucking Merlin.”
The silence around him reminded him that he wasn’taCarrow; he was the last Carrow. Because if she’d been alive, Granny would have laughed her tits off at him for that one—either because he was wrong or because he was so full of himself he’d even entertained the idea he could be responsible. His grandmother had found a lot of joy in people’s problems, a lot of profit too.
Except this wasn’thisproblem. Jonah tried to believe that. He really did. But it rang hollow. He’d leeched commitment and sobriety out of AA meetings for the last year. Not with a hex. He had just turned up and passively absorbed the ritual of it. Maybe they didn’t know it, but he’d used their problems to his advantage. If he suddenly dropped that now?
Well…
Nature hates a vacuum, and magic hates a hypocrite.
Ram had hitched a ride in the bed of the pickup, hunched down like a hound as he clung on for dear unlife. His face was twisted into a mute, exaggerated howl as the wind stripped bits of his spectral form away and unmade them.
What Jonah saw when he glanced in the rearview mirror was wet, black, and unsavory. There wasn’t a lot left of a body after a decade wedged under rocks at the bottom of the river. Jonah already knew that—he’d checked before he left Babylon—so he didn’t need to see it again. He kept his eyes on the road.
It had rained while he was asleep. The road was black and slick, flecked with rainbows. The spray hissed up from under the pickup’s wheels as he put his foot down on the gas. Closed-up storefronts zipped by in his peripheral vision as he navigated his way back to the church hall.
He wasn’t entirely sure what he was going to do if the place was locked up when he got there. The whole “anonymous” part made it hard to track down any of the other people at the meeting.
