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Eli gave a single nod at her. “I, and my blood, belong to Geneviève Crowe. . . and she to me.”
Beatrice looked back at me appraisingly while I was trying to figure out what that vow was. Beatrice smiled, and I swore she belonged in a court, not a crumbling asphalt parking lot outside a funky smelling morgue. She looked like there ought to be a throne, elegant cloak, and simple jeweled circlet. Nothing ostentatious, but definitely not this kind of run down.
Her royal deadness fixed that imperious gaze on me and half-ordered, half-offered, “Gift Odem to me. I will mind him and ask the pertinent questions. If his conversion to clarity is temporary, I shall inform you.”
“And you won’t release him to his family,” I said. The brief flicker of seeing Beatrice’s humanity seemed to vanish at hearing her admission that even thosedraugrI did not see were killers.Shewas a killer.
But then again, so was I.
“Agreed,” Beatrice said. “I will safeguard him and take him as my subject. I will neither murder him nor release him into the wild.”
“Geneviève!” Tres called. “Miss Crowe!”
I ignored him. I knew I was handing his hope of more answers to a monster. I knew, too, that if there was information about the injection, Beatrice would learn of it. She might be adraugr, but on this, we were on the same side. At least, I thought so.
“Beatrice, I release Mr. Odem to your care.”
I watched him, wondering if the transition of the binding to her would change anything about his grip on reality. Had I accidentally created his sentience by binding him? Or was it the injection? Or was it simply a result of my magic being released?
Beatrice held out her hands, and Odem took them. In that moment, it looked like the strangest handfasting ceremony I’d ever seen. Beatrice looked bridal in her Victorian evening gown as she gazed at Odem in his mismatched suit. No words were spoken, and we had the necessary witnesses—which left me as the armed minister. It was an apt, albeit amusing, image in my head. Beatrice was about to bind him to her until one of them had a second death.
I felt her magic flare out as she tied the recently reviveddraugrto her. It was familiar in a way that answered a question I hadn’t thought to ask until now.
“You’re a w—”
“Hush, daughter.” Beatrice held a finger to her lips.
Maybe it was knowing that she was a witch, too, or maybe it was that she was a more-or-less-dead witch in a Victorian dress. Questions. More of them. She was like a bottomless well of details and clues I didn’t understand. There was adraugr-witch standing in front of me. Like me, but far more dead—and I truly doubted that she’d been born like this.
When I opened my mouth to comment, she said, “Shush!”
I shuddered at the creepy,draugr-witch standing in front of me with a glee-filled grin. Not even the unblinking china-faced Victorian doll at my mother’s house looked as eerie as Beatrice did in that moment. I didn’t speak her secret, although it was clear to me. Beatrice, who was seemingly whatever thedraugrcalled their leader, was a witch before she walked as a dead thing.
“I have questions,” I said once she’d released Odem’s hands.
She nodded once. “Of course, you do. I would expect no less.”
But then sheflowedwith Odem trailing behind her. I had no answers, no corpse, no quarrel or anything else to explain the unsettled feeling rippling over me. I couldn’t have left Odem unsupervised, though. If he lost the clarity he seemed to have or even just got too hungry, his family would die.
As would neighbors.
And strangers.
So, I was left standing in the darkened lot with Eli, Tres, and the suits.
“What just happened?” Suit One asked.
The other suit shrugged.
“Miss Crowe sent Mr. Odem away with adraugr,” Tres said coldly.
“Not just anydraugr,” Eli amended.
Tres glared at me. His adoration of before was tinged with a hostility that was equally unwelcome. I was neither goddess nor demon. I was a woman who had an uncanny gift for ending up in bad situations, and I was over it. “What if he didn’tstaycoherent, Mr. Chaddock? Would you let his entire family die?”
“You healed him,” Tres insisted with the obstinance of a man who just couldn’t grasp that I wasn’t able to be what he wanted me to be—or maybe it was the privileged rich perspective. I had no doubt that Tres was used to getting exactly what he wanted.
“I did not.” I pointed at him with the sword that was hanging loose in my hand. “He was injected. I simply bound him to me, and I cannotdraugr-sit. My neighbors are still pissed about covering the lawn with the ‘zombies.’”
