Page 33 of For Love and Blood and Fury

Standingon the top rung of a ladder leaning precariously against the side of Zuri’s house, a house that looked like a greenhouse had fused with a cottage, Marisol realized that her comfort with heights had never really been tested.

The ground seemed miles away, the swaying of the ladder making her stomach churn. She gripped the metal sides, her knuckles turning white while she tried to ignore the tremor in her knees.

On the other side of the house, she heard the rhythmic clang of Zuri climbing another ladder. She pictured her fearlessly moving to the top like she regularly summited Everest on the weekends.

Was she scared of anything?Marisol couldn’t imagine what.

When Zuri appeared above the glass structure, she was glistening with sweat. Skin flushed from the sun and exertion, Zuri’s biceps flexed when she flung the plastic blue tarp across the glass roof like she was tossing clean sheets over her bed. Visible muscles were the only sign that she was putting any effort into the task.

The desire not to look weak in front of Zuri was stronger than Marisol’s fear of plummeting to her death. She let go ofthe ladder and reached for the end of the plastic. When they’d covered the entire roof without splattering their guts on the ground, Zuri tossed her a bungee cord to hook to a metal ring fused to the frame.

The question rattled around in Marisol’s head until it finally escaped her lips. “When you did that thing to that guy in the hospital… How did you do it?” She moved down one rung to follow the slope of the roof and catch another bungee cord. “Like, how do you call on your powers—or that’s probably not the right term?” Heat she wanted to blame on the sun beating down on her flooded her skin. “I don’t know?—”

“Bambi, you ask a lot of questions, huh?” Zuri wiped her forehead with her arm. “Let’s finish this so we can get the fuck off these ladders.”

Hiding her disappointment, Marisol nodded. Working in silence, they found an easy rhythm. With her smartwatch out of battery, she couldn’t be sure how long they’d taken to cover the gorgeous glass structure in the ugly blue tarp, but Marisol was happy to be on solid ground and storing the ladders in the cute little red barn.

Instead of going inside, Zuri brought her a glass of delightfully cold water before walking a little ways from the house where a stone bench sat under a shade tree. Marisol followed. Relieved by the water and shade and Zuri’s lack of objection to her sitting down, she relaxed.

“It’s hard to put into words.” Zuri kept her attention trained on the house instead of looking over at her. “It’s like trying to explain breathing. Just saying inhale and exhale doesn’t mean anything to someone without lungs.”

When Zuri closed her eyes, Marisol got the sense that she was channeling magic. That she was trying to put something indescribable into words. “Have you ever tried meditation?”

Marisol nodded when Zuri glanced at her.

“It’s like when they tell you to imagine swallowing a golden ball of light. And you feel the warmth of it as it travels down your throat, your chest, your belly.” Zuri looked at her again, eyes a brown so perfectly brown they were mesmerizing. “It’s kind of like that, but in reverse. Do you know what I mean?”

Marisol wanted more than anything to know what she meant. She closed her eyes, trying to imagine a golden orb gathering energy in her belly and burning a path toward her hands. Straining, she willed something to happen. For anything in her body to respond. But when she looked down at her hands, they were unchanged.

“Why don’t you tell me what you feel when you… do your thing?” Zuri’s tone had more patience laced through it than Marisol expected.

“I don’t really know,” she replied, wishing she had any other answer. “I guess I’ve only ever used it in times of extreme stress. Life or death moments, you know? Until I met Elena, I didn’t even know I was doing it.” Shame was a hard twist in her guts. “She’s the one who saw the… you know.” She gestured vaguely behind herself. “And I guess I brought her back from something because I was afraid she was dying.”

Zuri nodded, but she couldn’t conceal the furrow in her brow. “It’s never good to have any power tied to your emotions. That level of unpredictability is dangerous,” she said, voice soft. “You need to controlit, not the other way around.”

“But how?” Marisol heard the mildly frantic edge to her voice and tried to tamp it down.

“Where’s your family?” Zuri asked after a beat. “These things are inherited. Usually. Now that you know, maybe there’s someone you could talk to?”

Marisol looked away to hide the emotion blurring her vision. She didn’t want to get weepy in front of Zuri. “It’s just me,” she said, words clipped at the ends. “My grandmother raisedme from the moment I was born, but I lost her when I was in nursing school.” She didn’t specify that her mother left the hospital without so much as holding her—a fact she overheard her sobbing grandmother tell a friend when Marisol was little. Her first and most excruciating memory. She’d heard nothing about her father.

Zuri’s expression darkened like storm clouds advancing on a previously clear day. Bracing herself for the barrage of uncomfortable pity, Marisol held her breath. But the minutes passed and the words didn’t come. Zuri just looked at her. Eyes soft and evaluating.

“Did your family ever hand anything down? Books? Notes? It might not look like anything. I once saw a grimoire disguised as a soup cookbook. To everyone but the witch’s bloodline it looked like a regular ass book of recipes. Anything where your history may have been written down?”

The lump in Marisol’s throat spread, making it impossible to swallow. “All I have of my grandmother’s is this.” She reached for the necklace she’d slipped under her tank top.

Zuri leaned in closer, fingers brushing against hers when she slipped them under the medallion. “This has incredible protection energy.” Her touch, a fleeting warmth against her skin, made Marisol wish for more. She wanted to lean into it, to find comfort in the strength she sensed radiating from Zuri, but they were strangers. She couldn’t expect this woman to rub her back while she broke down about the nightmare turn her life had taken.

“It was hers,” Marisol whispered, her voice thick with unshed tears. “My grandmother’s. She said it was her mother’s. That it had been passed down like that for as long as anyone could remember.”

The memory of her grandmother’s warm smile, the scent of cinnamon and cloves that always clung to her clothes, thesound of her voice humming old Cuban songs… It all came rushing back, a bittersweet wave of love and loss and grief that threatened to drown her.

Marisol blinked back tears, her chest aching. All she wanted was a few hours to curl in at her grandmother’s side. To tell her everything that had happened in the last few days and ask her a thousand questions. To feel safe in a way she hadn’t in the years since she’d died.

“I just want to go home,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “I want to go back to my life, to everything I knew.”

But even as she spoke the words, she knew they were a lie. There was no going back. There wasn’t even anything to go back to.

---