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“Inside a glass box,” I said. “There is a heart in a box.”
“Could you release it from your necromancy? Let that one be released from the call of your magic?” Eli asked, pulling my gaze to him and temporarily away from the trail.
“It’s coated in grave dirt.” I felt that oddity as surely as the dead in the earth—and more recently, the dead in the sea. “The heart belongs to my necromancy. I have to hold it, Eli. I must carry the heart with us.”
Eli shot me a look that made me doubly sure that something was wrong here. I knew it in my bones, but the compulsion to hold that suddenly beating heart overwhelmed me again.
“Of the earth,” I said, needing to feel that grave dirt wrapped around the stone heart of someone who needed that heart back.
My fist smashed through a glass case as if my body was no longer in my control. My entire body felt off, as if were a marionette whose strings were tugged and steered by someone else.
I paused with my hand curled around what looked like stone but felt like soft wet flesh with granules of dirt coating it. I could already feel it thumping against my fingers like a wild thing trying to escape.
I tightened my hand on what looked like a rock.
“Bonbon? That’s a . . . stone,” he touched my arm.
I glanced at Eli. “I don’t know whose idea it was to grab this. Maybe mine? Maybe not. The heart wants to escape.”
“The rock . . .?”
“Heart.” I pulled it out, my blood rolling along my wrist and coating the rock-that-was-a-heart. “This is a heart, Eli.”
And in that moment, whatever control I still had over my necromancy flickered. I could see the body that needed the heart. It was not on the beach. It was inside one of the neolithic structures.
“The weapon . . . the heart is part of the weapon,” I whispered.
“A heart that looks like a rock?” Eli asked. “Is it Chester’s heart? Can you stab it?”
I wasn’t sure. Sometimes my various magical threads worked separately, but in this moment, it felt as they were a giant three-part braid twisting together in the marrow of my bones. I didn’t quite know what to do with the stone-looking, heart-feeling thing in my hand. I was only certain that I needed to hold it tightly, protect it, shelter it.
“Eli?” I whispered, as panic filled me. The heartbeat in my hand raced louder. Terror from the heart slid into my body.
The air shifted, and whatever danger was building was one I didn’t want to face.He’ll destroy me.The thought—I realized with an uncomfortable pang—was the heart’s thought, not mine.
Before I could puzzle out how I was communicating with the heart, I felt the insistence of the heart’s terror, and I realized the cause of the fear.
“Run.Flowwith me,” I urged. “Now.”
Eli, used to the weird that was my life, caught my free hand in his, and we ran toward the beach. My grandmother was directing the dead, but as one they all paused and nodded toward me, like a zombie army welcoming their mistress.
I nodded once, greeting them. What else was I to do? It felt like the right thing to do in that moment, and as much as I argued with Iggy, I still was a witch who ultimately ran on a mix of instinct and sheer bravado.
“Bless it. The site,” I urged Eli as we stepped into the ruins of Skara Brae. “Bless this soil. Hurry.”
“Granddaughter?” Beatrice looked away from our army of the dead. The Vikings watched over the living like sentinels, but the pirates dug in search of some mythical treasure. They all looked strangely cheerful, as if the act of digging holes in the beach was a treat.
“Did you find something?” Beatrice asked, staring at the bleeding stone in my hand.
But before I could answer I heard a voice that sent chills over my body. “You are becoming bothersome, Ms. Crowe.”
Chester’s voice was scratchier than normal. He’d shed his priestly garb, but his chilling expression was somehow worse coming from such an innocuous looking man, dressed as he was in his bland khakis and button up. And honest to frogs, he’d donned an olive sweater vest.
“Sore throat?” I asked with a smart-assed tone that I couldn’t entirely contain.
“You can’t help yourself, can you?” Iggy muttered from my side.
Chester paused, gaze switching from me to Iggy. “I killed you. I do not recall suggesting you should come back to life. We shall correct that, too.”
