A stench of death was in the air, and not just the almond sickly sweetness of decay, but death itself. Beneath the sweetness was the odor of something sour and bitter.
“Mebbe she’ll listen to ye,” my aunt said.
I frowned, wondering who she was talking to and wondering why I still hadn’t been able to move my feet yet. Maybe I was in shock.
Was that why I felt so cold all over and why even my toes tingled? I brushed my hands over my legs and winced as my pinky, which up until a second ago I’d completely forgotten about, began to ache and throb most terribly. Wincing, I brought my digit to my mouth and bit down on it, hoping to alleviate the pain that was starting to radiate down my forearm.
“Zinny,” a familiar female voice whispered huskily.
I grunted out a “huh” sound and turned in time to see Eerie take my hands in hers and squeeze. Eerie’s body temperature always ran colder than mine, but tonight she felt warm to me.
Her smile was bright red, and her clear eyes guileless. “C’mon, Zinnia. Come on, and let’s take a look, okay? That way, Dru can finally leave.”
At the mention of Dru, I glanced over at her. She still reminded me of a wilted flower the way she was draped over my counter. But she was no longer sobbing. That was a good sign, surely.
Eerie tugged on my hand, and finally the shackles that had been restraining my feet were loosened. I took a step, then another, and another, coming around the table that had blocked the body’s face from my line of sight.
But I knew who it was before I even saw the pretty face. She’d never left. The poor girl had never left.
She was sprawled out, looking like a comely doll. Her purse sat on the stool beside her, its contents appearing untouched. To me, that ruled out any kind of a robbery. Even though my diner looked as if a whirling dervish had taken up residence, my spells would have alerted me if there’d been a burglar about.
The blond woman was laid out on her back, and her hair was fanned out around her face as though someone had positioned it just so. Her eyes were open and looking very much alive. Her features were smooth, and there was even a hint of a smile lacing her lips. Her skin was flushed pink.
But her chest did not rise.
Lapis had a massive sneezing attack behind me, but I couldn’t turn my eyes away from the beautiful corpse in front of me. I felt detached from myself. It simply wasn’t possible that she could be dead. She didn’t look dead.
Yet seconds ticked past, and she did not breathe. That made my heart sink lower and lower still.
In her slightly curled left hand was one of my iced cupcakes with several bites taken out of it. I started shaking.
“Did you know her, Zinny?” Eerie asked into the hush.
I glanced at her. She was pale, as she always was, but she’d not had a chance to apply her stage makeup, which helped her look a little more on the living side, so her features held the bluish tint of death. Her clear, colorless eyes stared at me with something that looked a lot like worry.
I clutched at my friend’s hands. “I fed her. I—”
I wasn’t even certain what I’d been about to say because at that exact same moment, both Lapis and Gwenny cried out, the kind of bloodcurdling screams that one heard rarely in life.
A flicker of apprehension coursed through me. Goose bumps erupted all over my body, and my spine went taut with terror. I felt as if I were outside of myself, like it wasn’t me turning, but someone else. I watched as they both gave one final, ear-splitting scream then dropped.
Neither of them was moving.
In that weird stillness of absolute disbelief and shock, my pinky began to burn, and I hissed. Making that sound finally snapped me out of my stupor.
“Oh my goddess!” I yelled, running toward Lapis as Eerie ran toward Gwendolyn. Tears blinded me as I picked Lapis up and hugged her to my breast. “C’mon, sweet kitty, don’t you be dead too. Don’t you be dead.”
I ran my fingers over her hard body. She was in full rigor and no longer breathing. I shook my head, mouthing “no” over and over. It was the only sound I seemed capable of making at the moment.
I felt the pain begin to spread, spiraling from my forearm into my chest, and I knew. I just knew. Lapis was my oldest familiar, my most trusted furred companion. I pressed on her chest with my fingers and gave her tiny breaths, watching her otherwise still chest rise and fall.
But no matter how many breaths I gave her, my kitty didn’t move. She didn’t move.
My mouth was tingling and starting to burn, not from the breaths, but from... I didn’t know what. From something foul, something wrong, terrible. My thumb and arm hurt like the blue blazes. I growled, and tears squeezed out from the corners of my eyes.
“Gwenny’s got something in her throat, Zinny,” Eerie cried out in a panic.
I shook my head, not even sure what I was doing anymore, only that I had to give Lapis breath. I had to make her live again. She’d been with me for over fifty years. Fifty years!
I cried as visions began to crawl through my head. I recalled Eerie on that bed, pale and bloodless. I had screamed and raged at the moon that it could not be, that I could not lose her.
I felt that same kind of madness rising in me now.
Lapis had been just a kitten when she’d come to me, just a helpless baby. My baby.
“C’mon, Lapis,” I cried. “C’mon. You can’t leave me. You can’t. You just can’t.” I couldn’t pull her back from the dead. I couldn’t do again what I’d done to Eerie. I just couldn’t. I knew it wasn’t right. I knew it wasn’t okay.
“You have to come back, Lapis,” I pleaded. “You just have to.”
“Give her to me,” Aunty called out. “Give her ’ere,” she hissed, but she wasn’t talking to me.
I looked up just in time to see my aunt snatch Gwendolyn’s lifeless body from out of Eerie’s hands.
I hugged Lapis to my chest, vainly continuing to breathe for her even as I felt that sickly foulness begin to invade the back of my throat like heated tar, clinging and sticking and making me want to sneeze and hack. But I pressed on, giving her life, doing whatever it took to keep her alive.
My aunt tossed Gwendolyn upon the only table still standing upright and, in her no-nonsense manner, opened my bird’s mouth.
I blinked, starting to feel light-headed and dizzy. I watched my aunt even as I pushed onward and breathed for my baby.
Aunty reached into Gwenny’s mouth and tugged on something I couldn’t see. Black spots started to dance in my vision, and that tar was sliding down my throat. I was getting tired, so bloody tired.
Then Aunty screamed and whirled on me, looking mad with panic as she pointed dead at me. “Zinnia Rose, stop what ye’re doing at once! Dinna place yer mouth upon that cat’s. Dinna—”
But the room suddenly spun out of control, and I felt myself drop like a stone.
Zane Huntington the III
I WATCHED WITH MY HEART in my throat as the three aunts encircled my Zinny. Hyacinth had rushed through the doors not a half hour past, carting Zinnia in a web of glittering gold that hovered close on her heels.
But she hadn’t only brought Zinnia back. There was a strange woman in another net, and in two smaller nets were Lapis and Gwendolyn, Zinnia’s favored familiars.
Hyacinth, never one for mincing words, had barked at me to get off the “bluidy couch” as she’d put it. She’d told me to put myself to bloody good use, race to her hut, and grab her bag of herbs and her grimoire.
Aunt Violet had looked at me with kindness and had promised to keep watch over Edward, who’d been in the other room. When everything had gone down in the barn, Zinnia had zipped Edward and I there to safety.
But watching her now, her beautiful body so deathly still, I felt sick to my stomach. My hands were clenching and unclenching.
I’d gone through this before with Elle, and I’d promised myself it would never happen to me again, that I would never fall in love again. I would never watch another
woman I loved die in front of me.
Heat filled my eyes as the aunts began chanting and moving in a counterclockwise circle. Each of them held on to a bunch of dried herbs tied with a desiccated something that looked as though it might have been an animal of some sort at one time. I was quite sure I didn’t want to know what it was.
I didn’t know what had happened or why Zinnia didn’t look to be breathing. And anytime I asked anything, no one seemed to hear me.
Zinnia was a splash of bright color against the dark-gray fabric of her couch. Her auburn curls spilled like a silky waterfall onto the floor. She always kept her hair pinned up in the era of the 1920s, but the pins had fallen from her hair, and I could finally see just how long it really was. Her shoes were off, and her stockings had been pulled off too. Her toenails were painted a bright, cheery red, and her skin looked smooth as silk.
Her face was not just pretty, but otherworldly. She had rosy-hued cheeks with skin as smooth as cream. Her mouth was slightly parted, her features in calm repose, as though she dreamed the sleep of angels. But it wasn’t just Zinny’s beauty that called to me. It was her heart, her soul, and how good she was not just to me, or even Edward, but to everyone she passed.
She had a good heart—a great heart. She was the kind of person that only came around once in a lifetime, and I didn’t want to do this again. I didn’t want to live in a world in which all the good ones kept leaving me.
I felt cursed, adrift, lost.
I plopped onto the chair behind me, squeezing my fingers tight. I wasn’t a praying man, but I found myself doing what I’d sworn I would never do again after He’d failed to save my Elle.
“Please,” I pleaded even as I heard the aunts’ words begin to rise in cadence. My skin began to prickle with the hum of their collective power. “Please. If you’re there... just... please.”
Breath left my lungs in a whoosh. Exhaustion, the likes of which I’d only ever felt once before, began to consume me, and I wilted in my seat. Past and present collided painfully, making it hard for me to take a proper breath or even to focus on any one thought.
Memories like wispy curls of fog rolled in and out, heightening the tension squeezing the back of my neck and making my pulse race as if I’d just run a marathon.
I would hear the ghostly beeping of a lifesaving monitor one second then hear the hypnotic and rising cadence of the aunts’ spell. It was hard to remember that I wasn’t sitting in a hospital room, watching the love of my life slip through my fingers, but in a living room, watching my future trying to do the same.
I bit down on my tongue as the aunts rubbed their herb bushes around, filling the room with the aromatic smell of sage and lavender and other things I had no name for.
I watched as Zinny’s beautiful body remained frozen in place, and I stared in helpless horror as the ghostly beeping of the monitor turned into a one-note death ring that I could never escape and never forget. Elle hadn’t wanted to leave Edward and me forever, but she had. In the end, she’d been ravished from the cancer and just a shell of her former self. Life was fragile, delicate. I’d learned that years ago.
I recalled with perfect clarity the nights that I’d been forced to live through after Elle’s death, remembering each moan that would just spill off my tongue without thought or reason. Each cry that would suddenly just come out of nowhere and drop me to my knees. I recollected all the times I’d had to jam a pillow into my mouth just so I could scream without forcing Edward to hear his father falling apart.
Zinnia was supposed to be different, an end to that kind of pain. Because she was a witch, a long-lived witch who should never have known the sting of a human’s mortality. She would outlive me, and Edward, and maybe even our children if we ever got around to it.
I shuddered and closed my eyes, shaking my head. I couldn’t do this again, not again. I couldn’t lose Zinnia. I just couldn’t.
I couldn’t.
“I can’t.” My breath caught on a silent sob, and I shoved the knuckles of my right hand into my mouth to keep from uttering a sound.
Then Hyacinth began to chant loudly, speaking in a tongue I didn’t understand. The words were mellifluous, drawing me out of my horror despite myself, making me watch in hypnotized wonder as threads of colorful, glittering smoke writhed around Zinnia’s body like enchanted serpents.
Hyacinth held up her arms, causing the bell-like sleeves of her gown to slide down and reveal the mint-green tinge of her flesh. Her silver hair sparked and crackled with power.
Then Primrose took up the chant, and the resonance of power flowed through the room, making my skin burn. But it was a good burn. It was like a foot waking up after it’d been asleep too long. My breathing grew heavy as I leaned forward on my seat, desperate to keep the flame of hope alive but terrified to give into it.
Primrose lifted her arms too, and her blue hair snapped like flame.
Violet was the last to join in, but when she did, power thundered through the room, and veins of jagged lightning danced all around. Her skin glowed as if molten metal slid through her pores.
I glanced down the hall to where Edward waited. They’d promised he would be safe there. I was relieved when a second later he peeked his head out the door. His brown eyes were so much like Elle’s as he stared at me with wide-eyed curiosity.
I held my hand out to him. “Stay where you are, Edward. Close the door and stay there.”
He swallowed hard but nodded and slunk back into the room.
When I looked back at the sisters, all three of them had interlocked their hands above their heads and were again walking a circle around Zinnia. All around us, the room raged with their sorcery, but Zinnia was in the eye of the storm. Not even a strand of her hair twitched.
“Cast off the shackles of this darkness and arise. Arise. ARISE!” all three aunts said in unison.
At that last “arise,” I held my breath, feeling as if time had literally stopped. The wind had ceased. The lightning was gone. And the aunts’ glow was no more. It was as if the world had hit pause.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Time felt interminable, just as it had when I’d waited for my sweet Elle to take her final breath. I’d feared it even as I desperately craved an end to all her suffering. What if Zinnia didn’t wake up?
What if this was over?
What if—
She coughed.
“Oh my God,” I breathed in thank you, in prayer, in I wasn’t sure what. But the words were pulled from the very depths of my terrified heart.
I rushed from my seat to her side and drew her into my arms just as she took that next sweet and wonderful inhale of breath. Her long lashes fluttered then opened, and I gazed deep into glass-green eyes, enchanted all over again. She clutched at my sleeve, bunching the fabric tight and making me shiver.
“I thought I’d lost you,” I whispered. “Zinny, I thought... I thought...” My voice cracked, and I felt myself shaking, felt myself losing what little composure I had left.
She rested a cold palm on my cheek and took in several deep breaths, panting slowly. “You... you didn’t. I’m sorry.”
I leaned over, desperate to kiss her, to feel her lips on mine.
But a hand was swiftly placed over hers—a very mint-green hand.
“Nay,” Cinth snapped. “Nay, no jus’ yet.”
I frowned, and Zinnia coughed. Her lungs rattled but sounded clear.
Hyacinth and I helped her sit up, and I gently rubbed her back. She coughed a few more times before finally sighing and leaning her weight against me.
It felt good to hold her. So good. Scarily good.
I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her tighter into me, hugging her close. Breathing in her scent of sugar and flowers, I trembled with relief.
As I held her, I realized just how much I was coming to care for her. When she turned her cheek and pressed a sweet, soft kiss to my chest, I knew it wasn’t just me feeling that way.
/> I wasn’t sure how or even when, but we’d formed a bond already, a deep one.
“How are ye doin’, sweet child?” Violet asked, pressing a soft hand against Zinnia’s forehead and nodding to herself as though satisfied with her findings.
Zinnia gave a small shrug. “I feel better, but still—”
“Ye’ll be queasy for a while longer, I’d wager,” Primrose said primly, grunting as she poured a cup of tea from a steaming teapot, which had literally just appeared out of nowhere. “Here.” She thrust it at Zinny. “Sage tea. It’ll help with the flatulence, dear.”
Zinnia stiffened, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. I was still trembling from the adrenaline runoff, yet I couldn’t help but snicker.
“I don’t have gas,” she squeezed out beneath her breath, her cheeks blazing scarlet.
“Aye, no yet.” Violet grinned. “But ye will, dear. Ye will.” She patted Zinnia’s head.
Zinny frowned and glanced at me from the corner of her eye as she took the cup in hand. “I don’t have gas,” she said, her voice sounding slightly shrill.
I buried my face in her hair because I could no longer hide my smile.
“What happened to me?” she asked before taking a small sip of the hot tea.
Hyacinth, who didn’t at all look as though she’d just helped create a storm from her fingertips, thinned her already thin lips into oblivion. Taking a seat on the cushion Zinnia had vacated, she crossed her legs and plucked at her lavender silk skirt.
“Ye were cursed, lass.”
“What!” Zinnia cried.
Primrose, who was sitting in a tufted pink chair opposite us, rolled her eyes. “What me sister is trying to say is tha’ ye were cursed.”
I frowned.
Zinnia shook her head.
But Violet chortled as she chewed on the crumbly tip of a cookie that had not been anywhere near our vicinity just moments ago. “She literally jus said that, ye baboon’s arse.”
“Daddy.” Edward’s voice came from down the hall. “I’m scared.”
I looked at Zinnia, not wanting to leave her, but satisfied she was on the mend.