I raised my arms above my head and jerked them down. Fire trailed from my hands in two slender whips if blue flame. I aimed one for the ker’s neck. A sharp crack split the air as she dodged out of the way and the whip scorched the ground where she once stood, leaving a spurt of fire in its wake. I spun and arced the other whip behind me, where Moros had been trying to sneak up on me. It hit him in the side, and he screamed as the blue flames consumed the side of his jacket.
The ker slammed into my side, and we tumbled into the grass. The whips sputtered and died in my hands. Sheridan’s dead face spilt at the sides of her mouth as she grinned, revealing a row of jagged teeth. She held her hands in a claw-like fashion, and the fingernails lengthened.
“I think I promised to read your future from your entrails,” she hissed.
“Moros must suck at his job if you need to ask the Fates.” My gaze flicked past her. “Oh, wait, he’s ash now. Like you’re about to be.”
I shoved my hands into her chest released the inferno inside me. A gout of blue-white flame rushed up her chest and down her stomach. She jerked away from me and stumbled to her feet as the fire consumed her arms and legs. She ran though the graveyard, leaving a trail, until Sheridan’s corpse came to rest on the sidewalk only a few feet from Moros’s remains.
I stumbled to my feet and made it as far as to my aunt’s body before collapsing again. I pulled her into my arms and rocked her back and forth as the tears poured down my cheeks. Nothing held back the tidal flood, and it kept me rooted in the spot, even with the blaze spreading around me and the sirens wailing in the distance.
Chapter 28
The cold breeze from the air conditioner blew against the back of my neck as I sat with my hands cuffed to the table. The chair across from me remained empty. I glanced at the mirrored window and stared at the table, fighting down the lump in my throat. A dull ache refused to budge from my chest.
The door swung open with a squeak that bounced against the plain, white walls, and the detective from Sheridan’s suicide stepped in. He cleared his throat as he sat down and opened a manila folder.
“Hello again, Ms. Wayne.” His gaze met mine briefly. “I have to say, this is not the circumstances I wanted to meet you in again.”
“Yeah,” I said.
He threaded his fingers together. “So, you want to tell me what happened?”
“I came back to the cemetery and found my aunt dead.”
“And what were you doing there?”
I pulled my hands to the edge of the table, causing the chain to stretch. “I had fainted earlier. I came back for my car.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you were walking in the cemetery.”
“I wanted to give my last respects since I didn’t really get to earlier.”
“And what did you find.”
I ran a hand through my hair. “I’ve already gone over this. How many more times are you going to make me relive it?”
He sighed and tapped his fingers against the pages of the open folder. “The problem is there’s not a lot of your story that adds up. Such as how this fire started and burned the two you claim as responsible for killing your aunt.”
I swallowed again and stared at the floor. “I told you, I don’t know how that happened.”
“You claim not to know a lot.”
I shrugged and twisted my fingers together. Even if he believed I could create fire at will, he would never accept the truth about Moros or the ker. I didn’t even have the energy to come up with a good excuse. All I wanted was to curl up under my blanket at home and sleep forever until the ice inside of me thawed. But here I remained, stuck in handcuffs, staring down a cop who saw through tissue of an excuse.
He continued to stare at me, and I kept averting my gaze. He sighed, pulled out a glossy photograph, and pushed it in front of me. A girl, a few years younger than me, smiled up with hazel eyes in a typical portrait pose. Her auburn hair was pulled into a braid that hung over her right shoulder. I blinked at the picture and gazed up at the detective.
“Is this supposed to mean anything to me?” I asked.
“Do you recognize her?”
“No,” I said. “Do you think all redheads know each other?”
“Her body was found a mile from your apartments last Sunday.”
I shivered as I stared at the picture. “Okay.”
“The funny thing was, the body was showing that of someone who’d been dead for several weeks.”
My stomach churned as my mind flashed to the chunk of scalp and hair burning between Aunt Jo’s fingertips. Aunt Jo had said one of the Boston families went missing and the ker had come in one of them. Poor girl. Had she been fighting daimones or had she just been a bystander? I kept my face as neutral as possible as I raised my gaze to the detective.
“I’m still not sure what this has to do with me,” I said.
“A lot of bodies seem to be turning up around you,” he said.
“Are you accusing me of something?”
He shrugged. “It seems strange. The oddest part was this fire and how you managed to come out unscathed. How did that happen again?”