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Silence settled in as I considered his answer. That made sense. Of course, blood would lead us to a dead body. However, I didn’t think the body would be in that neighborhood. Unless her husband buried her under the back hedges, that woman’s body wasn’t there.
I cast a sidelong glance at Maddox. There was a chance he’d been the one to kill her. That was…if he lost control. I still had no proof other than a mad ghost’s exclamation. Maddox would hate himself if he found out, too. I didn’t want him to know, either.
If he found out, he might turn himself over to the police. If that happened, they would find out that Maddox wasn’t human anymore. We couldn’t let that happen.
My hands were bound in this sticky situation. I didn’t know exactly how to explain it without giving away my suspicions. When I stole a sidelong glance at Maddox, he seemed unchanged.
He was the same distant martyr for justice that I’d met weeks ago. Though, there were some deeper dark circles under his eyes, and his skin seemed paler than usual.
I probed him with a bit of my arcana. He stiffened, but not before letting out a small moan like someone who’d just bitten into the richest BLT sandwich ever.
Maddox spoke between clenched teeth. “Addie. Stop. We need to talk about what happened.”
I turned and put my hands on my hips. “You need to eat!”
“I offered to order food, but you said no!”
“That’s not what I meant.” I met his furious glare with one of my own.
He huffed through his nose and crossed his arms over his chest. This conversation was over, according to him. That was fine. I wouldn’t force this. Instead, I let my arcana blossom around me. I’d been practicing with it, so the invisible skeletal hand wasn’t as greedy as it used to be. While I could feel the meat in the fridge, my arcana didn’t try to find a source of life to put into it.
I shuddered at the thought of wiggling bacon. I almost didn’t want to cook it now, but if Maddox wouldn’t accept my power, then he would need food. Protein and carbs would satisfy his corporeal body until I could slip him enough arcana to make up for the magical starvation he’d put himself through.
With my arcana drifting around me, I set about boiling water for pasta. I tossed chopped bacon into a frying pan to get it crispy. All the while, I let Maddox absorb my arcana like a plant in the sun. He didn’t do it consciously. I could feel him taking it little by little though we didn’t say a word to one another.
Finally, I broke the silence. I had my story straight enough to give him what he needed to know. “Your scent trail led us to the ghost of a woman. I think she lived there. She was in her mid-thirties, and she wore athletic clothes like she might have been out for a jog when she was killed.”
Maddox made a grumbling sound as he thought. “I don’t know what happened between the two of you, but I can tell she scared you.”
I salted the pasta water before dropping the dry noodles in. The interaction with the woman’s ghost turned over and over in my mind while I watched the bubbles rise.
“She wasn’t right,” I said, finally. “Parts of her were missing. She was inconsolable. No other ghost has ever behaved like that right from the get-go.”
Maddox tilted his head. “The one that threw a fit in your bedroom doesn’t count? I remember that night. Even if I couldn’t see what was happening, I could tell that ghost wasn’t right.”
“It’s not the same.” My lips twisted to the side as I tried to find a way to explain the two situations. “Jaden was dealing with grief. It festered like an infection that he refused to get treated. If anything, his wholeness was part of the problem. Because he was completely sentient, he could understand what he’d missed out on in life, and it made him bitter.
“This woman…she didn’t have a heart. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Maddox picked up the spatula and stirred the chopped bacon to keep it from burning while I’d been lost in my thoughts. “So, her heart was removed when she was killed?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t work like that. People don’t always show up looking the way they did when they died. It can happen with those who are really angry, but there’s always an element of…gore. This wasn’t bloody. It was like a black hole that threatened to suck in everything around it.”
I could tell that Maddox didn’t quite understand. That was fine. This wasn’t the first time we’d failed to communicate properly, and it likely wouldn’t be the last. I still needed to explain Bastien’s death to him. Maddox didn’t know that Bastien had been dead from the start.
But now wasn’t the time for that.
“She wasn’t killed there, either.” I dumped the pasta water into the colander. “I think her former life drew her back to that neighborhood. When we first arrived, she was staring at the house in front of her. I’m sure it’s where she lived.”
“I’ll pay them a visit tomorrow,” Maddox said. “If someone is missing, they likely put in a missing person report. If not, then I can narrow down our suspects there.”
I nodded and finished the carbonara. It wasn’t fancy, but it worked with what Maddox had laying around. I shoved a heaping bowl of pasta in his direction and told him to eat.
We retreated to the living room where Maddox turned on the television. We watched a ghost hunting show, and I pointed out all the things that the ghost hunters got right or wrong. My favorite one had a female host who could supposedly see spirits and demons. Maddox got a kick out of me yelling at the screen.
My cheeks warmed. I’d gotten so comfortable in his presence that I’d forgotten myself. It was too easy to relax around him. I didn’t have to suck in my arcana. Here, I could let it drift around me like an aura that he could bask in. We complimented each other that way.
And in other ways.
