Blood and Salt (Blood and Salt #1)
Kim Liggett
For Maddie and Rahm. It started with a feather.
1
BODY OF YEARS
THE DEAD GIRL hung upside down over our kitchen table.
Ropes dug into her ankles as she swayed from the chandelier. Blood traced a line from the familiar cut across the palm of her hand to one of her delicate fingertips. The drop quivered before joining the little puddle headed for my twin’s cereal bowl. I pulled it out of the way, sloshing rice milk and granola onto the table.
“Ash,” Rhys yelled at me, mouth full, spoon mid-scoop. “I’m not finished with that.”
Ignoring him, I dumped his soggy old-man cereal into the sink. I knew he couldn’t see the blood, but I couldn’t bear to watch death touch him.
The dead girl belonged only to me.
“Perfect,” Rhys said, pushing his lanky frame away from the table and holding up his milk-soaked sleeve.
“You’ll live.” I lobbed a tea towel at him.
My mother moved barefoot through the open kitchen, her long chestnut hair swinging behind her as she lit a bundle of sage. “To ward off grouchiness.”
She wasn’t some wannabe hippie. The sage was a holdover from her childhood. Seventeen years ago, my mother escaped Quivira, a spiritual commune in Kansas, with a ton of gold ingots and the two of us in her belly.
“Coffee works for that, too.” Rhys smirked as he poured the last bit into his mug.
“Ooh yes, thanks, love.” Mom took it right from under his nose.
I had to press my lips together to stifle a laugh.
Rhys glared at me as he scooped the oily black beans into the machine and stabbed the button.
This was as aggressive as my brother ever got.
I welcomed the high-pitched grinding noise—anything but the sound of that rope.
The dead girl had been with me for as long as I could remember, hanging above my crib, my bed, but her visits had grown further apart with each passing year.
Because of my mom’s freaky upbringing, she thought I was born a conduit—meaning that I had a special gift allowing me to tap into the senses and emotions of my deceased female ancestors. So far, I’d only seen the one girl and she never made me feel much more than annoyed.
The grinding stopped. The rope crackled and creaked as it spun the dead girl around to face me—and it felt like all the air had been crushed from my lungs.
Bracing myself against the cool granite countertop, I stared up at the face I’d seen so many times before. What had once seemed a vague family resemblance had turned into a startling revelation. It wasn’t just her wide-set eyes, which had rolled back into her head as if trying to escape a terrifying last image, or her down-turned mouth, stretched open, frozen in mid-scream. With our long dark blond hair and pronounced cheekbones, we could’ve been twins.
My mom did a flyby, leaving me in a cloud of sage smoke.
“Wait.” I sucked in a singeing breath as I climbed onto the table, stretching my fingers toward the chandelier.
When the smoke cleared, the dead girl was gone.
“Please tell me you’re not on acid.” Rhys’s voice startled me.
I glanced down to see my mom and brother staring up at me with the same moss-green eyes—comforting and disarming all at once.
I forced myself to breathe. “I saw her.”
“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.” My mom climbed up on the table, placing her hands on my shoulders.
“Are we really doing this?” Rhys sighed, navigating his way onto the table and making the china clatter. He had no spiritual gifts to speak of, but he didn’t like being left out.
As a rule, I didn’t keep secrets from them, but they both got weird whenever I saw the dead girl. If I told them she looked exactly like me now, that somehow in the past year she’d grown into my face, or I’d grown into hers, God only knows what they’d do.
My mom brushed tendrils of hair from my face, and my eyes filled with tears. I had no idea what was going on with me; I wasn’t much of a crier. Maybe I was just stressed about what would come next: getting a new mark.
As if reading my thoughts, my mother traced a symbol below my collarbone with her fingertip. “If you’d rather wait, we can do it after school, or—”
“No, I’m fine,” I said, patting her arm. No reason to prolong the agony.
My mother had developed a series of what she believed were protection marks to shield me from the worst of the visions, but she believed a lot of things. The Larkin women had a long history with alchemy and batshit craziness, so since I had the “protection marks,” there was no real way of knowing if I was a conduit or just another functioning schizophrenic.