15. Where Death Wears Many Faces
Chapter fifteen
Where Death Wears Many Faces
Fate
Mina’s shop smells like dried lavender, candle wax, old velvet, and the kind of bad decision people only make after midnight.
Naturally, I arrive at three in the afternoon.
The bell over the door gives a soft chime as I step inside, and every crystal hanging in the front window shivers like it recognizes desperation when it sees it.
The shelves are crowded with spell jars, tarot decks, bundled herbs, moon-water bottles, charm cords, antique keys, and enough labeled powders to make a health inspector cry into a clipboard.
Mina stands behind the counter grinding something black and glittering with a pestle.
She looks up once.
“No,” she says.
“I didn’t ask anything yet.”
“You have séance face.”
“I do not have séance face.”
“You absolutely have séance face. It’s like panic face, but with more unresolved maternal trauma.”
“That is very specific.”
“I am a specialist.”
I drop my tote onto the counter. It makes a dull, exhausted thump. So do I, spiritually.
“Books aren’t enough,” I say.
“They rarely are. Books are excellent at preserving answers after they have stopped being convenient.”
“I need someone who knew what this curse actually was before everyone decided vague warnings were a family communication style.”
Mina’s expression softens. “Your mother.”
The word lands harder than it should.
Audra D’Amour, who smelled like bergamot tea and foxglove soap.
Who taught me how to sharpen pencils, read footnotes, and question every official story twice.
Who pushed journalism at me like a life raft while I kept swimming toward matchmaking with all the stubbornness of a woman determined to drown creatively.
I did what she asked. Followed her dream for me. And ended up as a glorified gossip columnist at the local newspaper. Not quite what she had envisioned for me, but in my mind, it was the best compromise I could achieve under her watchful eye.
We were never as close after that.
She was always too watchful. I was always hiding my instincts. During one of our last conversations, she told me matchmaking would consume me. I told her fear had already consumed her.
Then we stopped speaking about the thing that mattered most.
Then she died.
There was too much said. Too much unsaid.
Mina comes around the counter and takes my hand before I can pretend I am not about to crack. “We can try.”
“You say that like there’s a chance we’ll accidentally invite someone else.”
“There is always a chance we’ll accidentally invite someone else. That’s why we use salt, mirrors, names, and sarcasm.”
“Sarcasm is protective?”
“In this town? Foundational.”
She leads me through the velvet curtain at the back of the shop into her séance room.
The space is smaller than the front, windowless, and painted deep indigo.
Shelves line the walls, filled with spirit bells, bone-white candles, black salt bowls, polished obsidian mirrors, and decks of cards wrapped in silk.
A round table sits in the center beneath a hanging brass lamp.
The only light comes from seven candles already waiting in a circle.
“You knew I was coming,” I say.
Mina begins placing cards around the table. The Moon. Death. The High Priestess. The Lovers reversed. Then, after a pause, Temperance.
“As soon as you looked at your phone yesterday and didn’t call Dorian.”
I swallow.
Her gaze flicks to me. “That was not judgment.”
“It sounded adjacent.”
“It was worry wearing earrings.”
She pours salt in a perfect ring around the table, then sets three mirrors outside the circle facing outward.
“To reflect unwanted listeners?” I ask.
“To confuse them. Spirits, curses, ex-boyfriends. Same principle.”
“I do not like that list.”
“Who would?”
I sit because my knees are considering public betrayal. Mina places a shallow bowl in the center of the table and adds a lock of my mother’s hair from the small silver locket I brought with me for just this purpose. My fingers shake when I hand it over.
Grief is strange. It can sleep under your ribs for years, then wake furious because someone says a name in the wrong room.
“I’m angry at her,” I whisper.
Mina nods.
“I miss her.”
Another nod.
“I don’t know which one is worse.”
“Ties are acceptable.”
My eyes burn. “She tried to make me smaller.”
“Maybe.” Mina lights the first candle. “Or maybe she was trying to make the target smaller.”
That hits too close.
One by one, the candles catch. The air thickens with heat, salt, and the metallic hum of magic. The mirrors darken until they no longer reflect the room. Mina sits across from me and takes both my hands.
“Do not chase,” she says. “Do not bargain. Do not offer blood, years, memories, or dramatic promises involving your soul.”
“I hate that you have to specify.”
“I know my audience.”
The final candle flares blue.
The shop goes silent.
Not quiet.
Silent.
Like the world has stepped back from the door.
Mina’s voice drops into ritual cadence. “Audra D’Amour, daughter of the red thread, mother of the fox-seer, if love remains, if memory holds, if the path is permitted—come to the circle.”
The candle flames lean inward. The salt ring glows. A cold draft brushes my cheek, carrying bergamot tea, foxglove soap, and the faintest thread of an old lullaby.
My heart stops. The circle opens.
At first, my mother is not a ghost.
She is scent. Warmth. Memory.
Bergamot tea in the air. Foxglove soap. Warm hands smoothing my hair when I was seven and feverish and too proud to admit the blanket on my bed was not enough.
Then comes the lullaby. Not words. Not yet. Just the melody, soft and uneven, the way she used to hum while checking proofs at the kitchen table with a red pen between her fingers and a cup of tea gone cold beside her.
My throat closes.
“Mina,” I whisper.
“I know.” Her hands tighten around mine. “Stay in the circle.”
“I’m not moving.”
“You have dramatic instincts.”
“I have never once—”
The blue flame snaps higher.
The rest of my argument dies, which is probably for the best because lying inside a séance circle feels like asking for spiritual paperwork.
A shape gathers above the bowl. Mist first. Then light.
Then the suggestion of a woman sitting where there is no chair, her outline blurred by candle smoke and memory. Dark hair. Sharp cheekbones. The familiar tilt of her head, as if she is listening to the room and deciding which version of the truth everyone is trying not to say.
My mother. Audra D’Amour. Dead three years. Present now.
Impossible and not enough.
“Fate,” she says.
The sound is not quite voice. It is sensation given language. Warmth against my cheek. Thread tugging through my chest. Fox-magic soft as a tail brushing my wrist.
I make a noise that is not dignified.
Mina, wisely, pretends not to notice.
“Mom?” My voice breaks on the word.
Her image flickers. For one instant, I see her as she was the last time we argued: tired, beautiful, furious, afraid. Then the fear softens into something worse.
Love.
“Oh, little fox,” she says.
That undoes me.
I hate that it does.
“You don’t get to call me that,” I say, and the anger arrives like a match struck in a dark room.
Mina’s eyebrows rise in warning.
My mother’s spirit does not flinch. Of course she does not. Audra D’Amour could make a tax auditor apologize to her filing cabinet.
“I know,” she says.
“You steered me away from everything I was. You acted like matchmaking was a childish phase, like my magic was some embarrassing habit I would outgrow if I just took enough journalism classes and learned how to properly cite a source.”
The candles tremble.
Mina murmurs, “Gentle.”
“I am being gentle. I haven’t thrown anything.”
“We are inside a salt circle.”
“Exactly. Limited options.”
My mother’s faint smile appears and vanishes. “You always were determined to turn every locked door into an insult.”
“What mother locks the door!”
“That I did.”
The simple admission knocks some of the fury sideways.
I stare at her. “Why?”
The room tightens. The mirrors go colder.
My mother looks toward them, then back at me. “Because you were born a Thread Seer.”
The words hum through the circle. Not loud. Deep.
My pulse stutters. “A what?”
“You do not only match hearts,” she says. “You see the living architecture between them. Desire, devotion, grief, choice. The red threads were never decoration, Fate. They were inheritance.”
Mina’s grip tightens around my hand.
“My family’s inheritance,” I say.
“Our family’s burden,” my mother corrects.
The old anger flares again. “So you knew. You knew what I was, and you lied.”
“I tried to delay what would notice you.”
A chill crawls down my spine. “The curse.”
The blue flame gutters.
Mina hisses, “Careful.”
My mother’s outline blurs violently, as if the word has pulled something’s attention toward the circle.
“Yes,” she says, softer now. “Everwilde’s old hunger. It wakes for Thread Seers who claim their own bond and for matchmakers who make too many true ones.”
My stomach drops. “Then why didn’t you warn me?”
“Because telling feeds it when the walls remember.”
The phrase lands like a hand around my throat.
My anger does not disappear. It becomes more complicated, which is rude of grief. I was prepared to hate her cleanly. I was not prepared to understand her.
“You wanted me to become a journalist,” I whisper.
“I wanted you to leave trails on paper, not in blood.”
The circle goes silent.
Loved. Betrayed. Protected. Unprepared. All of it hits at once.
My mother reaches toward me, but her hand dissolves before it crosses the bowl. “I failed you,” she says.
I shake my head, tears burning hot now. “You loved me.”
“Yes.”
“And you lied.”
Her eyes shine with spirit-light.
“Yes. There’s my little journalist, capturing the story,” she says.
The salt ring hums under the table.
My mother’s spirit flickers above the bowl, edges thinning like smoke in a draft. Mina leans forward, one hand hovering over the Death card, the other still gripping mine.
“Stay with us, Audra,” Mina says.