They didn’t hurt it, not yet, Fallon thought as their joined powers poured through her. Only angered it. But they would hurt it. They would.
“And here the light burns through the dark. And no more will the earth carry its mark. By our blood, by our power we cleanse this space.”
The altar broke, crumbled, and the earth they opened swallowed its curling dust.
“So from this day, from this hour, no innocent life can be taken in this place. Hear the voices of we three. As we will, so mote it be.”
And they salted the earth.
“Its power’s less. Not gone,” Tonia said, sniffing the air like a wolf. “Not gone, but less.”
“We need to find out who or what did this. We shouldn’t take her back to New Hope.” His eyes drenched in sorrow now that his wrath had dissolved, Duncan looked at the body. “She’s probably got family around here. We can’t just take her. And I … I want to go to the house, the farmhouse. I want to see it before we go back.”
“So do I. Maybe—maybe it’s stupid, but there might be something in there we could take back to Mom. Just something she could have.”
“I don’t think it’s stupid. It’s loving,” Fallon said. “We need loving after this.”
Something loving, she thought, to take away the sorrow. “We’ll go to the house. And after, we’ll try to find some people. Someone who knows about the girl.”
“And about any DUs in the area,” Duncan added. “It won’t be the last time we come here, so we should get the lay of the land before we come again.”
“Yeah, we should know our battleground.” Fallon looked around, the dead wood, the ice-slicked trees, the salted ground. “It’ll gather again, and someone will find a way to feed it again. But for now, we’re done here.”
Again, she put a hand on Duncan’s arm. “If we can’t find anyone who knows her, we’ll bury her at your family’s farm.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Dark, deserted houses were commonplace in the world Duncan knew. But this one, this rambling house with its time-weathered outbuildings, blank, blind windows, and overgrown land, stood apart from all the rest.
Family had built this with stone, wood, sweat, lived here, slept and woke here, worked the land acre by acre, generation by generation. Until.
“I half expected it to be burned down.” As she felt much the same as her twin, Tonia took his hand. “Or torn down for materials. It just looks like it’s…”
“Waiting,” he finished. “Well, wait’s over.”
As they approached the back door, Fallon gave them a moment, then followed. The spirit animals would guard the body.
He’d expected to find it locked, but the door opened with a long creak. He swore he felt the house itself release a long-held breath. He brought the light, a quiet one, and stepped inside.
In that quiet light, beneath the dust of time, he saw a large, tidy kitchen. Counters cleared, a table with a pottery bowl—bright blue under the dust—centered on it and chairs neatly tucked in. Curious, he opened a cupboard, found stacks of dishes filmed with spiderwebs. In another, glasses.
Tonia opened the refrigerator. Empty, scrubbed clean so the faintest whiff of lemon wafted out with the sour smell of disuse.
“There’s a pantry here—cleaned out,” Fallon said. “No food left to spoil or go to waste.”
“But dishes, glasses, pots, pans, all of that.” Tonia continued to explore. “Someone survived, at least long enough to do all this. To clean, to take the food out.”
“It’s been alone a long time. Waiting a long time.” He could feel it, both the grief and the joy. “They had pride in their home, in the land, in the legacy.”
“You’re the legacy,” Fallon said. “You and Tonia. Hannah, too. This is yours. They left it for you.”
“It’s full of them. The voices.” As they murmured inside him, he moved on, into a dining room. “They’d have had that last dinner here, New Year’s Eve. Mom said they always had a big dinner before the party.”
The room held an old buffet. Candlestands and what he thought must be pieces passed down still stood on it among the dust and cobwebs. A cabinet with dulled glass doors displayed what had been the company dishes, or those for special occasions.
“The six of them that night?” The image of those company dishes carefully set ran clear through Tonia’s inner vision. “Can you see them?”
He could, ghosts around the table, with a sparkle of champagne in glasses, fat pheasants on a platter,