AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She was odd in all the best ways. The woman was in her sixties and didn’t like anyone. She was prickly, hard-headed, and yet few crossed her.
What she was, I had no idea. I’d asked once, and she’d laughed, saying that if I had to ask, I wasn’t ready to know. It wasn’t the most helpful of answers, but I’d also gotten used to that from her. She made cryptic puzzles seem straightforward.
“Morning.” She unlocked the front door, then let me in behind her.
The shop smelled of sage and incense and blood. I always ignored that last one, too unsettled by it to consider the why.
Some questions were better left unasked, let alone unanswered.
“You’re up and about early. Tea?”
“Sure.” I slid onto the stool at the far end of the sales counter as she went about turning on an electric kettle—the same type as the one she’d bought me for my housewarming present. Really, it was a nice present, considering she could have gotten me something far scarier from her store.
“Are there any other ways spirits leave this realm? They go to the afterlife, to purgatory or become a poltergeist, right? There are only the three options?”
She poured something into the tea, but I’d long ago stopped asking what anything was. She hadn’t poisoned me yet, and I didn’t see that changing. “Yes. Spirits do not belong to this world but are anchored here by the physical body. A reaper cuts the bond at the moment of death, and when their tether fades, the spirit moves on.”
Just the mention of reapers made my skin crawl. Of all the things that were out of my weight class, reapers had to be the meanest. They weren’t living or dead…but were more powerful than either.
Thankfully, I’d never had to deal with one. Would I even see them if one appeared? I could see spirits and the things in the afterlife I’d glimpsed, the horrors that glimmered through our realm, but perhaps reapers would have been too different.
Which served me fine. If I never had to see such a thing, I’d chalk it up to a win.
“Why are you asking? In all our years together, I’ve never known you to be an overly curious girl.”
That felt like an understatement. “Curiosity is a dangerous thing in my position.”
“Ignorance isalwaysmore dangerous, dear.”
I sighed at the lesson she’d tried to teach me before. It was easy for her to say—she was part of that world. I’d seen it in the way others dealt with her, when old vampires would walk in and treat her with a reverence that reeked of fear. It was so easy to want to know about things that could keep me safe.
What would knowing do for me? Only drag me farther down a path that would get me killed. “Humans don’t last long in that world. We aren’t built for it.”
“And yet every time you try to avoid it, every time you try to pretend like you’re no part of it, you end up in worse trouble.”
“That isn’t a lesson. That’s bad luck.”
“Luck is often the best teacher of all. The others you talk about—the mediums, the two-bit witches, the telepaths—those humans have to work extremely hard to become part of this world. They have to chase it. You? It won’t leave you be.”
“Your world is a fucking stalker, then.”
She smiled, the winkles in her face deepening with the action. “Fate gets what it wants, Ava, no matter what we think about it. Now, explain to me what happened. No more being coy.”
The story came slowly, as if by telling it I could figure something out I’d missed before. Not that it helped—I ended up as confused as I’d been before.
“Close your eyes,” Gran said.
When I did, her fingers brushed my wrist, warmer than I’d have expected, and far stronger.
She touched me, and some of that coldness, the place inside me that had seemed frozen from the void, thawed.
No, not thawed, but retreated as though the heat inside her forced it to flee.
Shivers took hold, making me tremble as that coldness thinned but spread and seemed to try to escape her.
Ifelther hand wrap around it, as though she’d reached inside me and taken hold of that freezing darkness.
I opened my eyes to find her hand, fist closed, in front of me. She opened her palm and mist drifted out, as though she had a piece of dry ice hidden there.
