Chapter 14 #2
A fleeting smile crosses her face. “I would like that very much. And I feel much better about being able to help Ashton now. If it was a curse, I’d be able to break it. If it was something else, I might not have been able to… but looking at his heel, I have a pretty good idea about what happened.”
“What?” asks Ash.
“Yeah,” I say, though I know she can’t hear him. “What is it?”
Penelope’s eyes twinkle. “How about I show you? Roxy, if you would… stand here and hold the mirror for me.” I move exactly where she wants me, angling the mirror like she said while Penelope opens the first aid kit and grabs the bottle of rubbing alcohol first. She pours some over Ash’s heel, swaps the small bottle for the gleaming stainless steel scalpel, and makes her first incision like she’s done this a million times before.
To the left of me, Ash hisses out a breath.
“You okay? Did that hurt?”
He shakes his head. “It’s weird. I didn’t feel a thing, not like…” He stops short, a hint of color finding its way to his cheeks. I know exactly what he was going to say, too: not like how he feels whenever he’s inside of me. “It’s more like, I see my foot getting cut open and it should hurt.”
Considering the amount of black goo running out of the slice Penelope just made, it’s going to hurt when he finds his way into his body…
Gus might not be able to speak any longer, but he’s still the smartest wild animal I’ve ever met.
He hightails it out of the room, returning a moment later with a towel between his fangs.
He spits it out by my boot. While still trying to keep the mirror steady, I crouch down, grab the towel, and offer it to Penelope.
“Thank you,” she says absently, using it to wipe away the goo.
“Thank Gus,” I tell her. “He went and got it for us.”
“Thank you, Gus.”
Gus chitters in response.
Ash chuckles and says, “Gus wants the magic lady to know she’s welcome.”
I pass the message along and pay attention as she really begins to dig into Ash’s heel with the tweezers.
“I think something embedded itself in his heel,” she explains as she uses the magnifying side of the compact to see what she’s doing. “Probably during the scare in the alleyway.”
“I stepped on something?”
“He stepped on something?” I say for Ash.
“There was a small black dot in the center of his heel. It must’ve been something very sharp to make it through his shoe and his sock and his heel, but I think that’s what happened here.”
Let me get this straight. “He stepped on something pointy, that happened to his foot, and that’s why he’s a ghost?”
Penelope nods, the tip of her tongue sticking out as she focuses on her task.
Wonderful. You learn something new every day. I guess, magical tetanus exists—
“Got it.”
Penelope pulls with the tweezers slowly. At first, I can’t believe what I’m seeing. There’s no blood, black or red that comes out with it, just pure, sparkling silver that has my mouth falling open as I recognize what that is.
It’s a needle. About three-inches long and pure, unadulterated silver, it’s a sewing needle that Penelope just pulled out of Ash’s heel.
The second she does, everything happens at once. The black veins vanish instantly beneath his skin. Penelope releases the tweezers, dropping the silver needle into her palm.
And Ghost Ash gets violently whipped around the room.
“Holy shit! Ash!”
I get a single glimpse of the fear in his purple eyes as he gets thrown toward the body on the bed before he’s gone.
The ghostly form of Ashton Morgan is gone.
And the body on the bed? It looks just as dead as before, only with one sock on, one sock off, and his heel back to what it must have looked like before he stepped on a needle.
Not even thinking about what I’m doing, I slam the compact closed and shove it in my jeans pocket. I dart for the bed, throwing my body over his. He’s warm. I drop my ear to his chest. Alpha, yes! There’s a heartbeat. I hear him breathing.
“Ash… you gotta wake up, babe. I need to know you’re okay.”
“Rox… Roxy?”
My heart skips a beat. “Ash?”
He gasps, sucking in so much air, it’s like he’s making up for every breath he couldn’t take while his soul was trapped outside of his body all because he stepped on a fucking silver needle.
It’s so ludicrous to think about. My opossum mate played dead because he was startled, somehow got a piece of silver lodged in his skin, and those two distinctly different things combined to make it so that he couldn’t wake up from his catatonic state.
Worse, he was as good as dead until one anxious witch saw past the magic and realized that—when it comes to shifters—silver is actually worse.
Seems like dealing with the removal is just as bad. His body bucks, I go flying, and the next thing I know, I’m sprawled on the floor of the spare room as his purple eyes fly open.
For one stunned second, he just stares upward like he forgot what it was like to be alive. Then, with another breath—this one through this nose—he jolts upright, searching for me as he croaks out, “Cinnamon. I smell… I smell cinnamon and… fresh laundry.”
In twenty-eight years, I’ve never known exactly what my true scent is.
Crystal said I stunk like trash. Previous lovers told me I had a fiery, spicy smell with a hint of soap that made me think they picked up on my hygiene obsession and were just flattering me to get in my pants. I just figured I smelled like me.
But to Ash…
“Cinnamon and linens. The scent I’ve been chasing for almost twelve years. The scent from Onancock.”
His head twists, his eyes locking on me. His voice is rough and ragged, so unlike my gentlemanly librarian opossum, I gape at him in return.
And then Ash grates out, “It’s you, Roxy. It’s always been you,” and I think I forgot to breathe.