Bewitched (Betwixt & Between #2) - Darynda Jones Page 0,39
would’ve been a wreck as well.
“He’s not a real boy anymore,” the me on the video said, half asleep. “He only finks he is.”
Was I talking about Roane?
“Who, baby?” Ruthie asked.
“The boy who died. He keeps licking me.”
Ruthie stilled on the video.
I stilled in real life.
“Sweetheart, what do you mean? Who keeps licking you?” she asked.
“The boy who finks he’s a boy, but he’s not.”
Ruthie looked back at the chief, who wasn’t the chief quite yet, as he filmed, her face full of concern. “And he licks you?”
I nodded. “He licks my fingers when I’m asleep, because he’s not a boy anymore. He doesn’t remember he’s dead. I keep telling him, but he keeps forgetting.”
Ruthie looked up again. “I’ll have Mark and Kerry keep an eye on her,” she said, referring to my dads. “We can’t put this off. I’ve already cast the spell.”
Houston agreed, and the screen went black.
“That’s it! I am so out of here!” Pushing the laptop toward Nette, I jumped off the bed and sprinted back to my suitcase.
Eight
If I’m ever known as the one who got away,
it will be from an asylum.
-Meme
Five minutes later, the suitcase temporarily forgotten, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, my lungs still stuck in overdrive. “You’re a rock, remember? Nothing fazes you.” Not a lie when I’d said it to Ruthie earlier. Definitely a lie now. “Dead children licking my fingers? No, thank you. No. Nuh-uh. No siree bob.”
Annette stood beside me, Lamaze-ing me through my panic attack.
“I didn’t understand what you meant at first.” Ruthie stood on my other side. “Not until I met a certain young man who could shapeshift into a wolf. Who’d once been a wolf.”
“Roane,” I said his name, calming just a little. The man had two polarizing effects on me. He either soothed my nerves or spiked my adrenaline. Most often it was the latter.
“Think about it,” Ruthie said.
I was thinking about it. A two-ton truck couldn’t stop me from thinking about it. Yes, I’d turned a wolf into a boy. But he’d been alive. “In the video, I said the little boy was dead.”
“True. But I have a theory.” She always had a theory. And, more often than not, it was right.
“I have a theory too,” Annette said.
I looked at her expectantly.
She immediately backtracked. “Oh, no. I want to hear Ruthie’s first. See if mine holds water.”
“Then I shall proceed,” Ruthie said. “From what I’ve been able to gather, to create a living being from something no longer living, you need spirit and flesh.”
“Like when I brought you back from the veil.”
“Yes.”
I drew in a deep breath. “Okay.”
“You did save that boy that night—something I didn’t even consider until you saved me.”
I squinted. “I’m kind of following you.”
“Me neither,” Annette said. “Kind of.”
“I think you unknowingly pulled his soul out of the veil. But that was only half the equation. You needed flesh. You needed a physical mass.”
“The wolf cub?”
“Exactly.” Her gaze held a hint of astonishment, like I was some amazing being she was just getting a glimpse of. Just beginning to understand. “You extracted the boy’s spirit from the veil and used the wolf cub to recreate him.”
“But why didn’t Roane remember who he was? He only remembered being a wolf.”
She crossed her arms. “Trauma.”
“Of course,” Annette said. “Think about what happened to him just before you changed him, Deph.”
It was a horrible story. Roane’s parents were in a violent custody battle. His father, in an unforgivable act of depravity to make his mother pay, to make her regret ever leaving him, killed his own son. By the time my magics found them, Roane the boy was already gone, so the magics turned the wolf into the boy. Or so I thought. Maybe there was more to it than that.
“It makes sense.” Rather astonished myself, I turned and leaned against the sink. “Especially knowing what we know now with you. That pulling a spirit from the other side is possible.”
“There are spirits wandering the Earth veil-free all the time. So why am I flesh as well?”
I chewed a thumbnail for a moment. “I had to use something living to create you.” I could almost see the pride swelling inside her. “But if that’s the case, Ruthie, what are you?”
The grin that lit up her beautiful face had Annette and I both drooling. “Are you sure you can handle it?”
“Yes!” Annette shouted a little too loudly, her excitement echoing off the walls.