Page 95 of Crossroads Magic
“It was,” Juda said. “I was aware the whole time. I just wanted it to stop and that was what I had to do to make it stop. But…” He took a deep breath, which escaped him in a billow of steam. “…it will come back. Now Anna is here, it wants to command, to control.”
“Control me?” I breathed, horrified.
“All of us,” Juda said. “It wants to help. It wants us to live. Now Anna is here, it can do that. It all starts with her.”
“Don’t break the circle,” Wim whispered.
I realized my hands had gone slack. Like my jaw. I tightened my grip once more.
Juda turned slowly, looking at everyone. “I don’t want to hear the voice anymore.”
“We’ll find a way to silence it, Juda,” Trevalyan said quickly.
Judah shook his head. “You can’t. Not even you, dear old friend. Even now, it is whispering in my mind, like thoughts I can’t turn off. Coaxing, entreating, threatening. Bellowing, so that I can’t sleep. Now I know it isn’t just my mind, I know it can only be silenced in one way. I look forward to the peace.”
He pulled his hand out of his pocket. Benedict’s knife was in it, the one Juda had used to kill my mother. He raised it to his throat and slashed, the well-worked muscles in his arm driving the blade deep.
Olivia and Ghaliya screamed as the blood sprayed across the white snow. Everyone cried out, words of protest or disbelief, as Juda sank to the snow and grew still.
The hard lump in my throat made it impossible for me to utter a sound. If not for that I would have descended into hysterics. That, and the desperate grip of my daughter’s hand on mine.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
We buried Juda in the field behind the old community hall. It was unhallowed ground, but Trevalyan spoke words over the earth and said the spirits would not mind. I didn’t think Juda would mind, either, for the deer liked to crop the grass there, and the trees surrounded it on two sides. The greenway was right there beside it, too.
As we could not explain to any authority that would let us bury him in a proper cemetery how Judah was nearly two hundred years old but looked like a thirty-year-old man, we’d had to bury him there.
The only identity paper we could find among Juda’s possessions was a worn, faded Persian birth certificate, with hand-written Arabic script in blotchy ink, covered in flourishes.
We added a headstone that Hirom carved out of a piece of teak and put Juda’s name, but no dates.
After the ceremony, which was simply everyone standing around the grave, telling stories about Juda, I found Trevalyan standing at the corner of the crossroad. He was staring at the pink stain on the snow in the middle of the crossroad. We had dumped more snow on it and then shoveled all the snow away when that had not worked. The new snow that had fallen had soaked up the blood that had reached the road beneath. We’d left it there for even more snow to cover.
He glanced at me. “It’s an omen,” he said.
“It’s just blood,” I told him gently and bumped his arm with my elbow. “Don’t get morbid.”
“The Will of the Crossing said bad things—”
“I remember,” I said quickly. “But it also said that now I was here, it could do things.”
“Protect us. Save us,” Trevelyan said.
“A thing that can make a human kill another, just to bring a third human into their sphere of influence does not have our best interests at heart.”
“It might,” Trevalyan said. “It isn’t human, whatever it was. It has a different way of looking at an individual life.”
“This individual human doesn’t find that a comfort,” I told him. “It wants me, whatever it is. That is why I must leave.” It wasn’t the first time I had said it.
“You don’t have to.” Trevalyan’s face crumpled for a second, then he forced his expression to a neutral one. “We…Iwill protect you and Ghaliya. All of us will. You don’t have to go.”
I bent and kissed his cheek. “Thank you, but I won’t ask that of you.”
He hugged me, and held me for a long moment. Then he cleared his throat, brushed himself off, straightened his back and looked around the crossroad. Everyone was taking their time returning home. They were talking, lingering.
“Time for a pipe or two,” Trevalyan declared. He stepped into the crossroads, heading for the cross-corner. He took a bowed path around the bloodstain.
I caught Olivia’s eye. She nodded and finished speaking to Wim. Wim waved to me as he headed for his house.
