Page 49 of Awakened Ash and Alchemy

“Thank you,” she whispered.

He squeezed her hand. “Balance isn’t peace, Angela. It’s tension held with purpose.”

She frowned. “You’re doing the riddle thing.”

“I’m saying your friend—”

“Non-friend,” she corrected automatically. “He doesn’t even qualify as an acquaintance.”

Father Michael chuckled. “Fine. Your non-friend… may be the kind of man who was never taught what to do with how he feels.”

More riddles. Only now her mind supplied Zarek’s handsome face, his sullen silence, and the way he’d left without a word.

“Great,” she muttered, “so I’m the emotional regulator.”

“Something like that.”

“Well, thanks for listening. I mean it.” She felt better, even standing taller to brush herself off. “I’ve got one more place to visit.”

Father Michael crossed to the floral display near the altar, returning with two white roses. “Take these for your mother.”

She hugged him harder this time. “Thank you.”

“And Angela?”

“Yes?”

“Listen before you strike.”

What did he mean by that? “I’m not a violent person.” Which is why she struggled to understand her need to strike out like she’d done last night with the Black Cloak.

“I know. You’re one of the good guys.”

“I like to think so.” At least she felt better than when she’d arrived. With a wave, she headed back into the light, doing her best to forget what’s-his-name.

TWENTY-ONE

Angela kneeled at her mother’s gravesite. The headstone read:

ROSALEEN DUBOISE

Beloved Mother & Sister

She pulled weeds from the edge of the headstone like she’d done a hundred times, then rinsed the little vase at the nearby tap. The two white roses Father Michael had given her sat upright in the vial in stark contrast against the gray stone.

Angela lowered herself onto the grass with a sigh. The fall sun warmed her skin, under a sky that held an impossibly calm blue. She held her new medallion loosely, letting her thumb trace along its edges.

“I miss you, Mom,” she whispered.

The worst part was how little she remembered of her mother. Angela was nine when she’d been told her mother had been in a train accident. One of the many casualties when debris left by a construction crew brought down a passenger service on an ordinary Tuesday morning.

“Complications,” the doctors had told Claudine in a hallway filled with people hurt by that same train. A word that explained nothing and somehow said everything to the grown-ups that ignored the child holding Claudine’s hand.

Rosaleen’s internals were ruined, supposedly scarred during childbirth, and other words mumbled in the way adults spoke when they didn’t want a child to understand. Yet it had never stopped her mother. The woman with warm hands that smoothed over her hair, never once letting on she was unwell, while helping everyone else in the apothecary with their ailments as she quietly managed her own.

“It would have only been a matter of time, if the train hadn’t…” a student doctor mumbled to his colleagues by the water fountain, discussing her mother’s file without realizing the nine-year-old daughter was sitting just around the corner, waiting for Claudine to sign forms and identify what remained of her sister.

What remained today of the mother were fragments: a laugh, that hint of a certain perfume, the particularly neat handwriting in her notes and recipes found at the bookshop.