Page 44 of Midnight Auto Parts

“The good news is—” Matty stepped into my line of sight, jolting me. The look on his face made me consider rushing back to finish hearing what Ankou had to say. “Josie was playing housewife at Carter’s and missed this fiasco.” He walked closer, looming over me. “The bad news is, I was here for the whole thing. You slept for nine hours, Mary, and I couldn’t breach your dreams to check on you. All I could do was sit here and wait for you to wake up so I could yell at you.”

An oneiros barred from my dreams? Had Ankou learned a new trick? “I’m sorry?—”

“Nope.” He mashed a finger to my lips. “You don’t get to talk yet.” He waited until I offered a meek nod. “You never bar yourdreams to me. Even the gross ones I wouldn’t force my worst enemy to sit through. If you planned to change that, you would have warned me so I wouldn’t panic. But you didn’t warn me.”

“Mary—”

“Still talking.” He glared at me. “There’s something wrong with you. I can sense it. Josie can too. You haven’t been the same since Kierce carried you out of that train shed with grill marks on you. But we let it go. We gave you space. We gave you time.” He glowered. “What have you given us? A heart attack.”

“I was wrong…” I squinched my eyes, waiting for him to shush me again, but apparently I had been given the floor, “…not to explain things to you and Josie sooner.” I sank back into Kierce’s arms, taking comfort from knowing he could fill in any blanks I left empty. “I’m ready, now, as I’ll ever be.” I wet my lips. “But I would prefer to only say this once.” I inhaled deeply. “Can you get Josie here before I lose my nerve?”

“Already on her way.”

“Okay.” I withdrew from Kierce. “Good.” I smacked my lips. “I need to drink a gallon of water and take a shower before she gets here.”

“Keep the door cracked, so we can hear if you try to escape out the window,” Matty grumbled, tapping a foot. “We both know I’m not afraid of dragging you in here naked to face the firing squad.”

A peculiar look crossed Kierce’s face, but Matty just shrugged at his expression.

“Part of the psychological trauma of having siblings is you’re bound to see them naked at some point.” Matty massaged his temples. “There’s not enough therapy in the world to heal some memories.”

That explanation didn’t appear to answer Kierce’s unspoken question, so I tried my luck.

“Josie, being a dryad, was a nudist as a child.” I snorted at the reminder of her youthful shenanigans. “She could strip so fast, it was like magic. She would be talking to you one minute and thenbam. Naked as the day she was born.”

“We spent a lot of hours wrestling her into clothes before the sisters caught her.” Matty turned somber. “The punishment was…” He shook his head. “Josie couldn’t help it. She came into her powers young and had no one to teach her. She took what plants told her as gospel. Including when they shared stories the oldest trees recalled about nymphs, who danced naked under the moonlight and seduced men. God only knows what other ideas they put in her head.”

“She was too young to grasp the difference between nymphs and dryads.”

“Frankie and I were kids too. We didn’t have the answers.” He shared a pained glance with me. “All we knew for certain was, the sisters would punish Josie if they glimpsed her ‘wicked heathen’ wildness.” A shudder rippled through his limbs. “Which meant we both became expert-level naked-sister wranglers.”

Thankfully, she grew out of the worst of it before her preteen years.

“Frankie hasn’t told me much,” Kierce hedged, “about your time as children.”

A creeping dread swept through me at the reminder. “Nothing to tell, really.”

“Mary,” Matty scolded me. “You know that’s not true.”

Tales of our childhood at St. Mary’s Home for Children earned me pity from Harrow. Pride came later. But that first slap of shock across his face was the expression that stuck in my memories. I didn’t want that to be the case with Kierce. I didn’t want a matched set of sympathies to bookend my mind.

“You were raised by the Perchten.” Kierce found a wrinkle on the fitted sheet of particular interest then began smoothing it with his fingertips. “The handmaidens of Frau Perchta.”

“What?”Matty and I screeched together.

We had known the sisters were somethingother. Something terrible. But we never found a name for them.

“How do you know that?” I twisted away from Kierce to goggle at him. “Even we didn’t know that.”

“A spirit told me. Years ago. Decades most likely. I didn’t track time well then.” He dipped his chin lower. “She visited St. Mary’s nightly to watch over her son.”

“Where did you bump into this spirit?” Matty demanded. “Why not tell us this sooner?”

“My god sent me to investigate a string of suspected murders. The victims were all young children. Their souls burned so brightly he couldn’t help but notice the influx. I located St. Mary’s, spoke to what spirits I could find, then confronted the creatures.” He risked a glance at me. “I didn’t mention it, because Frankie hasn’t entrusted that part of her history to me. I didn’t want to obligate her to share.”

“Good answer,” Matty mumbled then his eyes sharpened on Kierce. “Did you see her then?”

“Frankie?” Kierce lingered on my features, as if reassuring himself of his answer. “No.”

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