Page 113 of Midnight Auto Parts

Slowly reality crept in, filling in the blanks. Most of them. Enough for me to grasp the situation.

“I don’t remember how I got here.” I sounded broken in my own ears. “What happened?”

I was back at the commune. In the flesh. Not astral projecting.

“You dematerialized, like I do.” He stroked my cheek, my chin, my jaw. “I followed you.”

Followed me from…the pit. Where the Morgan…died. After she…

“Oh, God.” Hazy memory crystalized into bone-juddering horror.“Josie.”

“Josie is fine.” Kierce kept soothing me. “You saved her.”

“She’s alive?” Tears flowed down my cheeks. “You promise?”

Time warped around me, leaving me cold with uncertainty how long I had been gone from her. Not too long, surely. Ten or fifteen minutes? Twenty max?

“I promise.” He wiped them away with his thumbs. “I wouldn’t lie to you about that.”

“The crow.” I gripped his wrist. “She was here.”

“The omen.” He nodded. “What did she want?”

“For me to eat from the tree.” I flinched from the prospect of its mealy fruit rolling on my tongue. “Who is she?”

“Someone like me, or Ankou, I suspect. A mere omen wouldn’t possess the information she gave you on how to summon Him by marking Little’s soul as His. She wouldn’t press you to eat from this tree either.” He kept his touch gentle. “She must have hoped to earn your trust by offering her knowledge for free.”

“So, the next time I would remember her good turn and do as I was told.”

“That would be my guess, yes.”

“Except her advice got me dead, so… Yeah. No. She’s not going to be my one phone call any time soon.”

“I doubt she has a phone,” he said, perfectly serious, and I did my level best not to laugh even if it would have felt good right about now.

“How do we destroy the tree?” I battled nausea standing so near it. “I’m not leaving it here.”

The oily sickness seizing my guts was familiar, convincing me it had been the cause for my queasiness at the scene of Anunit’s first kill. The first we found, anyway. Maybe the tree had wanted a taste of the rich earth surrounding the god bones. I doubt, with Anunit on patrol, it got one before the Morgans brought it to its current location.

That I could sense it now, and I hadn’t before, meant the ward protecting it had fallen. The only reason I could think for that would be if the Morgans’ sequential deaths had weakened it and then collapsed it.

“Do you remember how you called divine fire down on Patricia?”

“No.” I noticed my sooty hands for the first time. “I don’t…” I shook my head. “There are gaps.”

Gaps large enough to drive a semi through with one of those Home Depot skeletons riding it bronco-style.

“That’s all right.” He tipped my head up to look at him. “We’ll do it together.”

“Yeah,” Josie panted, her voice scratchy as she stumbled from the tree line. “We will.”

“Mary.” I tore away from Kierce and threw myself at her. “Oh, God, Mary.”

“You are badass.” She rubbed her hands up and down my back. “I am so in awe of you right now.”

The smell of her, the familiar touch, anchored me deeper into my skin.

“You’re just saying that because…”I saved your life, “…you lost too much blood.”

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