Page 73 of An Amateur Witch's Guide to Murder
Mateo lies awake in one of the previously unused guest rooms of the late Christopher Nystrom’s house. The furnishings are aggressively gold, but there’s a bed, so that’s fine. He’s on his back staring at the ceiling and playing a new game calledIs this normal disassociation because of all the cannibalism or is this a demon thing and I’m never going to feel things properly again? Thescent of freshly mowed grass fills the room, and Mateo sits up in alarm.
Linnéa Nystrom fills the doorway. They haven’t said a word to one another in all of this, her busy with Topher and a dead husband; him busy trying not to think while prone on a bed. Striking gray eyes survey him before settling into a softly inquiring expression. “I hoped we could speak?”
“Sure,” he says, unreasonably concerned that she’s asking politely to yell at him. It just feels like he’s done a lot of stuff a nice mother should be upset about.
She sweeps into the room and perches on the end of his bed. It’s big weird to see that she and Topher have the same fluttery movements. On her it seems enchanting and on Topher like he’s ten seconds from a breakdown of some sort. Mateo’s gaze flicks to the door, and though he can’t see him, he suddenly knows Topher’s right out there, hovering just beyond the doorway. Topher smells like lavender, iron, and a little bit of something sweet. Honey, maybe. Mateo is now deeply aware of how everyone smells.
At least Topher’s presence probably means she isn’t going to snap him in half.
It takes Mateo a distracted moment to realize Linnéa’s hands are being offered to him, palms up. He stares at them in confusion and then slowly puts his hands in hers—which is the right answer from the way she squeezes his warmly in return and doesn’t break them off.
“First, I would like to offer my thanks for your deep friendship to my son,” she says. Mateo can hear a small sound of dismay from the hall. “He’s told me of the ways you have helped him in my absence and my heart is moved.” Extremely dramatic rundown, but okay. “My dear Topher, sister, and Ophelia have told me of your troubles,” she continues, still holding his hands.Just double-hand-holding with someone-you-know’s mom. He’s sweating to find out whattroublesthose are when she says, “I know of your mother.”
“You know my mom?” He nearly yanks his hands away for no reason except that he’s shocked, and it feels difficult to comport himself while touched. “Do you know where she is?”
Long pale fingers squeeze his. “I’m afraid she is the keeper of her comings and goings. We have always been two different winds, she and I, traveling in opposite directions. But we have passed one another in the night. We have spoken. But more to the point, after hearing of your situation, I think that we have spoken of you.”
All the spit in his mouth is suddenly absent, making swallowing difficult. What could his horrible mother possibly have to say to this magical nice lady holding his hands and looking directly at his face in naked concern? “What did she say?”
“She had questions about my existence in this realm. How I came upon a human form.” She keeps a constant pressure on his fingers, like she can keep him calm by holding him still.
This isn’t even anything yet, nothing actually helpful or actionable, but his heart is hammering—it started beating again about a day after dagger removal. “What did you say?”
“For me, it was love.” Like her son, it looks exceptionally devastating to see her strange features wrinkle in misery. It’s only a flash, the love in question only recently dead, and even if Christopher had been a dick, once upon a time he must not have been to her. She takes one of his hands and presses it alarmingly to her bosom. She doesn’t say anything, only waits.
Mateo gets extremely uncomfortable, not least because Topher’s a few yards away. But then he pulls in a hard breath. “You don’t have a heartbeat.”
“This form was Christopher’s ideal in the dreams we shared.” An unwanted look into Christopher’s psyche, for sure. “When he asked me to marry him, I took it. Made it my own. My kind has always existed alongside this world. Because of our love for one another, it was no great thing to come here. These answers weren’t what your mother sought. When I said all of this, she laughed and asked if the same could be done with hate instead of love. With flesh instead of dreams.”
“What did you say?” Mateo asks, and she releases his hand, cups his cheek.
“Yes,” she says. “Emotions and intentions are power. All of them.”
He knows he doesn’t want the answer but asks it anyway. “When was this?”
“Not so long ago. Before my dear Topher, so I suspect before you,” she says it gently, thumbing away a tear he hadn’t known he was shedding.
He’s not upset, exactly, but there’s something breathtakingly demoralizing in hearing that his mother did whatever she did on purpose. It wasn’t an emergency decision—dire straits where she had no other choice. It was a premeditated and conscious action. He shouldn’t be capable of surprise, it’s par for the course with her, but now he knows this thing, and it sure does feel worse.
A theory is forming in his brain—one he doesn’t want to form, but too many things are clicking together. Because a human body shouldn’t be able to maintain a demon possession for so long; an exorcism oughta exorcise the thing that’s not supposed to be in the body; a demon possession doesn’t make a person into a cannibal; and his horrible mother once asked a woman who was actually a creature from another plane of reality, how she got here.
Ignacia Luisa Reyes Borrero trapped a demon inside her son’s body. Except that didn’t mean what he’d always thought it meant.
It didn’t mean she put a demon in the body along with her son’s soul.
It meant she turned a demon into her son.
The one thing she’d tell him about his situation was that he was possessed, and that using magic would make everything worse. But that was a lie. Every single thing his mother told him was a lie. What in the fuck is he supposed to do with any of this?
Something of his internal devastation must show—or it’s the black tears—because she murmurs, “You poor child,” and then engulfs him in her large arms, pulling him into her chest. Mateo’s no hug expert. Aside from Ophelia, he’s not really the hugging type, but if he were to rate the hug on a scale from one to ten, it would be a solid twelve million. It’s a good hug. If he wasn’t fantastically embarrassed to be twenty-three and getting an extremely long hug from someone else’s mom, he’d stay in it a while. But he is, so he pulls away, palming at his cheeks, only barely stopping himself from wiping them on his borrowed shirt. He’s rocking what is basically a belly shirt on him in the form of one of Topher’s nondescript gray tees and he doesn’t want to stain it with demon yuck.
As if sensing his dilemma, Topher steps in, a box of tissues held in front of himself like a shield. He’s out of breath, which means he’d run to get the box. This fucking guy and his nice-ass mom. Mateo doesn’t know what to do with them both in the same room as him while he’s trying to be despondent, but he wants a tissue, so he gives Topher a weak smile.
It’s all Topher needs to approach.
Mother and son share a silent back and forth while Mateo cleans up. It’s a lot of Topher making his eyes too wide and his mom smiling like she has no idea what he’s getting at, but then she turns to Mateo and says, “I didn’t disturb your rest just to distress you. I had hoped to help in some small way. Ophelia mentioned a missing book?”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
