Chapter 41 #4
Once, I destroyed my fated mates. This time I'm going to save them.
One moment, I'm living my downtrodden life: disowned, outcast, and barely scraping by.
The next, I'm wrenched into an alternate universe where I'm rich, privileged—and dead.
No one knows that last part yet except the killer and the woman who summoned me. And she won't send me home until I pose as my spoiled other self, infiltrate the upper echelons of magical society, and flush out my own murderer.
If only I didn't walk into Luminary Academy and find myself face to face with my worst regrets: my fated mates.
These formidable men have no idea I'm their destined match—or that I ruined their lives in my own reality. At best, they see me as a rival. At worst, a heartless enemy.
But our fractured connection keeps pulling us closer despite my efforts to resist.
I need to expose the murderer and leave this world before our bonds can spark. Because no matter how much my would-be mates torment and crave me, they have no idea how much blood I have on *my* hands.
One wrong move, and I'll be the death of them... again.
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BLOOM & BLOOD
1
Every year on the date of his death, we honor the first man I murdered.
Cole sets the photo on the small table by the living-room window and lights a white candle on either side. The flamelight dances on the pewter frame.
Behind the glass, Asher beams at us with his easy grin. A breeze has ruffled the short waves of his fawn-brown hair. The sunlight makes his green eyes gleam even brighter than usual.
It’s not completely accurate to call him a man. He was only seventeen when he died.
When I killed him.
A prickling sensation spreads through my palm. I rub the mark there, tracing my thumb over the dark pink shape that stands out against my light brown skin. Following each of the narrow points that jut from the center to make it look like a star: one, two, three, four.
One for each of my fated mates, the matches who can set off a spark down to my soul for the rest of our lives.
Most of us only get one or two. Other people would say I should be happy with the three I have left.
Those people are fucking idiots.
Cole brings a stick of incense to one of the candle flames and then sets it in the holder. A sharp herbal fragrance laces the air: rosemary, for remembrance.
As he lays out the rest of the objects we use in our private ceremony, the prickles in my palm spread to my stomach. They jab deeper with each memory provoked.
There’s Asher’s favorite sweatshirt that he wore even after the cuffs were worn to threads. He lent it to me one chilly evening, and I put it on over my pajamas that night so I could sleep with his warm amber scent wrapped around me.
There’s the picture book about a new puppy that Asher kept on his bookshelf even though he outgrew it more than a decade ago. He once showed me the loving note his mom wrote on the inside cover, with a doodle of a mother and father embracing two kids. “It’s the last thing she ever gave me.”
There’s the “lucky” stone Asher always carried in his pocket, a smooth oval of rosy granite flecked with mica. He never told me why he thought it was lucky. When I prodded him, he’d give me a secretive smile and say, “As long as I have it, anything I lose will come back to me.”
Maybe that was true, but it can’t bring him back to us.
And no one else in this room has any clue I’m the one who took him away.
Cole steps to the side of the table, angled so he’s partly facing the three of us and partly the photograph, as if he’s talking to both the living and the dead. As Asher’s older brother, he always speaks first.
He rakes a pale, sinewy hand through his chestnut hair as if to sweep it even farther back, but a few strands drift across his forehead anyway. His jaw works beneath its shading of stubble.
When his voice comes out, its usual crisp tone has gone hoarse.
“It’s been three years since Asher passed, but he’s still with me every day.
The comments he’d have made, the things he’d have laughed about.
News I’d have shared with him, meals he’d have shoveled down.
Or maybe he’d have finally lost that crazy teenage appetite by now… ”
The hoarseness thickens. Cole stops to clear his throat.
“He was a fantastic brother. Always finding a bright side, always looking after every person and creature around him as much as he could. May the goodness in him live on in everything he touched. He deserved so much better than what he got.”
Yes, he did.
A burn forms at the back of my eyes. I’m pretty sure there’s a whole dagger in my stomach now, twisting hard.
Cole touches each of Asher’s former possessions in turn and then rests his hand on the framed photograph.
Salvatore slips his fingers around mine to give them a quick squeeze. He pushes forward when Cole steps back.
In the otherwise dim room, the candles’ glow highlights the mingling of Salvatore’s mixed Irish and Italian heritage: the ruddy undertones in his messy black hair, the smattering of freckles that nearly blend into his tan skin.
His massive shoulders flex before he shoves his hands in the pockets of his jeans, his posture unnervingly awkward for a guy who’s usually so brashly confident.
“I didn’t get to know Asher very well,” he says, “but I can tell I missed out. I know no matter how much the pricks at school hassled him, he never showed that he was shaken. He’d be smiling away an hour later.
He must have been pretty tough to put up with all that.
I’d have liked to have a guy like that in my family. ”
He doesn’t mention that he was one of the pricks back then—not as bad as some, but I had first-hand experience with his “hassling” too. We all know how guilty he feels about it. He talked about that part a lot the first time we held our memorial.
With a dip of his head, Salvatore steps back to make room for Byron.
The last of my matches takes a typical imposing stance next to the table, as if he’s braced for a challenge. Or maybe tensed against his own guilt. Byron never stooped to casual insults tossed across a room, but I’ve seen him cut a person down with a few coolly dismissive words.
He dips his head. With his short coils recently shaved off, his deep brown eyes look even more penetrating against the rich but slightly lighter brown of his skin.
As always, he keeps his remarks brief and tactful. “Any life lost among us is potential unrealized. I regret that I never got to see what our union would have become with Asher in it. We recognize his place here and commemorate what could have been.”
He eases away, and my three living matches look to me.
It’s my turn. As the mourning mate, I’m always given the final words.
I blink hard and push myself forward. My feet jar to a stop by the table. My fingers itch to reach out and stroke the objects Cole laid out.
In lucent society, people say that the dead live on in the traces of energy they left on everything they touched—the ephemera that forms from every interaction with our surroundings.
If I concentrate, I can still sense tiny reverberations of Asher’s presence in the sweatshirt, the book, and the stone.
The guileless warmth that drew me to him in the first place, run through with quivers of grief and guilt that prove he was more than just his smile.
It’s hard to believe I deserve these final fragments of his presence.
It’s hard not to be afraid that my guilt will radiate right out of my body if I give in to my grief.
Rather than touching Asher’s things, I hug myself, running my hands over my upper arms. It takes a few swallows to clear the lump from my throat.
“Asher was my best friend… my only friend… since we were thirteen. No matter what either of us was going through, I could always count on him. I hope he was able to lean on me just as much.”
Until his final moments. A fragment of memory—scarlet blood streaking across gray asphalt—flips my stomach over.
I hug myself tighter. “I adored him for years. There’s no one else I’d rather have had as a match. I wish we’d gotten the chance to find out what we’d have made of our full connection. He’d have brought so much light and happiness into our lives. I’ll never stop missing him.”
My lungs ache with all the other things I could say. But what would be the point? I’ve said some of it before, and there are too many things I can’t say.
Not unless I want to lose the mates I do still have.
Instead, I extend one hand and concentrate on the tickling energy contained in everything and everyone in this room.
Ephemera is much more than the traces of energy all living things leave behind as they pass through the world. It’s the power that fuels our magic.
With a curl of my fingers and a knitting of my brow, I grasp enough of that energy to sculpt it into an illusion. A filmy image of Asher forms above the table, showing him from the torso up as if I’ve brought his photograph to life.
Wouldn’t it be something if I could really summon him, like the mediums a century ago used to claim? Hold a little séance, have a chat with his ghost.
Maybe I wouldn’t like what he’d have to say to me now, but at least I could apologize.
Too bad spiritualism is mostly a sham.
I’ve spent three years researching every occult theory and mythic tale I can dig up, and all I have to show for it is a lot of random facts about made-up bullshit.
I do the best I can. The illusion of Asher gives a light chuckle and lifts his hand like he did the last time I saw him before that blood-drenched night.
Before tears flood my eyes again, I release the conjured image. As I move away from the table, Salvatore and Byron draw in on either side of me. Salvatore slings his arm around my back, and Byron twines his fingers with mine.