Page 155 of Veil of Death and Shadow

“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “We’ve tracked?—”

“Who’s we?”

Fuck, that’s right. She couldn’t see the two reapers currently studying her—one with an expression of absolute distrust, the other with abject boredom.

“Me,” I corrected. “I mean, I reached out to her friend at the market—a guy named Rex. He told her about some ritual that he’d heard about, one that could bring back the dead.” I shot her a look, letting the meaning of those words sink in. “That led me to a vampire at a club, who led me to Claude’s bar.”

“Why would she be at a vampire bar?” she asked, looking for all intents unaffected by the suggestion that her sister was trying to commune with her dead self.

“So, it wasn’t you?” I sank back into the chair, trying to piece it all together. “At least that gives us some information.” Sora was definitely seen last night at Claude’s. “She needed to exchange blood with a vampire, it was part of the ritual.”

She grunted. “And he assumed that it was me there last night?”

I nodded. “He pointed me to House of Wrath.” I studied her, trying to fill the gaps between the Rina in front of me and the Rina I knew. “Said you were high up in the fighting rings. That he kicked you out of the bar.”

“That explains why he flew in here today, lobbing accusations. Fuck.” She sighed, then leaned her elbows on her thighs, head bowed. “I didn’t want her sucked into this shit, that’s why I never?—”

“What happened?” I asked. “How long have you been in Seattle? Why didn’t you find us—” I let out a humorless chuckle. “Well, never mind, you clearly knew where we were. You just chose to let us believe you were dead. All this time. Do you have any idea what Sora’s been through?—”

Her head shot up, her eyes beaming into me with anger. “Do you have any idea whatI’vebeen through?”

I met her stare. “Obviously not, but that’s because I’ve spent the last decade mourning you.”

Though Rina looked a lot stronger, tougher than I remembered her, for the first time I noticed the dark rings beneath her eyes, the fact that every single one of her fingernails was bitten down to the skin, so far that it looked painful.

“Rina,” I let some of the anger, the hurt, bleed away, “what happened to you that night? He—” I bit my lip as the memory of that night lurked in my periphery, fighting to keep everything that came attached with it at bay. “He said you were gone. I—” I could feel the warmth of her blood as I tried to stem the flow, as if she was lying there before me now, an inch away from death. “There was so much blood, we were so certain.”

But the truth of it unfolded before me. It was Blake who’d confirmed that she was dead. And while she certainly looked as if she was, had Sora and I actually checked for a pulse? Or had we been so terrified, so fucking filled with grief, that we believed that monster at his word?

“It was bad.” Her eyes were hard, and it felt more like she was looking through me than at. “Doctors were apparently shocked. I should’ve been dead, but I wasn’t. Cheryl took that as her little miracle, her second chance.”

Cheryl and Joe—our foster parents.

“You stayed.” It felt like I’d been gutted. “With them? All this time?”

“Recovery was a long process. My memory of that night wasn’t great. Cheryl and Joe told me that you and Sora tried to run. That you died in a car accident. They did what they do,” she shrugged, her expression void of emotion, “they fixed things, made it okay. Promised to protect me, assured me your deaths, Blake’s death, weren’t my fault. Then Joe won his election. And Cheryl—she turned all her focus on me. I was her second chance. After her son . . .”

“Are they,” I wet my lips, “are they still here? Part of Wrath?”

Rina snorted. “Fuck no. They used their son’s death, and my miraculous recovery, to usher in their religious awakening. They opened a giant mega church in Oregon, started carting me around. I think she legitimately believed I was a sign from God, a true miracle—the girl who should’ve been dead but wasn’t. A chance to atone for her failures with Blake. And, for a while, I bought into it, too. The attention. The illusion of family.” Her eyes cut to me, but only briefly, like she couldn’t bear to look at me for too long. “That kind of belonging can be addictive when you’ve been starved of it your whole life.”

“What changed?” I asked, after a drawn silence.

“For years, I didn’t think of Sora, or you. I tried to let that part of my life die, like I’d assumed you both had. That it was God's will or whatever. There wasn’t any trace of you on social media, the news, anywhere. I assumed that was because Joe had wiped everything after your deaths, to protect me. But then, after The Undoing, things took a turn.” She traced the edge of her switchblade along the table, lost to her thoughts for a few moments. “All of their faith from before,” she glanced back up at me, “when there was suddenly confirmation of demons and the supernatural—when it started to become clear that they might have lived amongst them in the Before, they started to see my little miracle in a different light.”

“They turned on you,” I said, my voice soft.

She nodded, the corner of her mouth curving into a dark smile. “Thought I was the devil. That I was to blame for ushering in the Apocalypse, that I was the reason they weren’t raptured into the beyond. Joe came after me first,” she shook her head, her expression dark, “and I just lost it. Killed him. Then her. Then I took out a few of the members of their congregation who’d witnessed my rage, who tried to finish what Joe and Cheryl started. I escaped and lived on my own for a while, justfighting day-to-day, trying to survive.” She shrugged. “And then one day, I met a guy. Danvers. He brought me into a group that didn’t shy away from the rage that I harbored. From my aggression. That didn’t try to make me into something that I wasn’t. I found a home here, with the House of Wrath.”

“How long have you known about me, about Sora?” I asked.

She looked up at me, holding my stare for once. “A few years.”

It felt like she’d punched me. “Why didn’t you ever . . .”

“The girl you knew, the girl my sister would have wanted me to be—she was gone.” She closed her knife and leaned closer. “And I didn’t want to become that girl again either. Seemed better to let her stay dead. For you two to go on living your cozy little communal life, none the wiser. I looked in. You were doing well for yourselves. I didn’t want to ruin it.”

My jaw ached from clenching it, from forcing myself to swallow down anger that she’d taken that choice from us all. Now wasn’t the time. Maybe when we found Sora, we could have that conversation.

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