bat wouldn’t piss on us if we was on fire,” Moira spat.
Like actually spat. On the floor.
“Don’t say that!” Tierra scolded. “She’s family.”
“And all she done, far as I can tell, is ignore you for her coven of harpies and try to take our powers. Even my life.”
“She’s old and afraid.” Tierra’s words were more convincing than her expression. “She’s let me stay here in her home, and raised me as best she could. In a way, what’s written in this book sort of proves many of her fears valid.”
“But what about us?” Claire asked. “She had to have known there were four.”
“Yeah, what made you special enough to keep?” Moira demanded.
Tierra’s eyes widened, the edges becoming glassy with the hint of moisture. “I-I don’t know. I don’t think it had anything to do with me. But… now that we’re all together, we should probably ask her some questions.”
“Good luck getting the truth out of her,” Moira harrumphed. “I’ll bet she lies like a no-legged dog.”
Their conversation faded into white noise as Aerin ran her manicured fingers over the faded parchment. She might care that she had a hesitant aunt later, but at the moment, she couldn’t tear her gaze from the astonishingly well-drawn sketches in front of her.
The stanzas of spells were carefully scrawled in a script so foreign; she couldn’t even tell where one word began and another ended. It could have been a recipe of some kind.
But the pictures fascinated, confused, and elated her all at once.
In the upper left corner of the left page, a sapling tree grew from roots already deep in the earth. Separated by words, the picture in the upper right of the page showed a staff, roughly the size of the tree, flayed of bark and branch, the wood green and moist, and alive.
In the lower left of the page, was what appeared to be a bunch of hay or straw lashed together at one end in the shape of a bush. Across from it, the bush had been lashed to the staff making a very rudimentary broom.
If that wasn’t self-explanatory, the next page showed the bristles of the broom on fire, or at least, smoking, which lifted the form of a slender woman off the illustrated floor.
That wasn’t what caused Aerin to catch her breath, though. It was the robed figure in the bottom right of the right page. Her hair dusted a dark red, and swirly puffs of magic leaving her mouth as she blew the smoking broom into the night sky.
One word, scrawled in bold blue script meant a damn thing to her on the entire page, right beneath the Druid woman.
Aer.
Slamming the book shut, she drew the notice of her sisters.
“What?” Tierra narrowed her eyes. “What did you find?
For a moment, Aerin began to panic. Her limbs twitched with the sensation she’d so feared since her youth. Weightless. Disembodied.
Falling. Falling. Flailing.
Flying?
The ground coming toward her. The earth threatening to break each one of her tiny bones.
“Nothing,” Aerin wheezed. Her throat constricted and her lungs struggled as she shoved the book at Claire and pushed herself up on wobbly legs. “I just need—” She swiped for her purse, but Tierra got there first.
“Oh, no you don’t! You’ve been sneezing and hacking since we carried you up here. There’s no way I’m letting you smoke.”
“You. Don’t. Understand.” Aerin could feel her capillaries expanding, the oxygen infusing her blood. She couldn’t take it. Not right now. “Please,” she begged around a bout of coughing brought on by her desperation and whatever bug she was fighting off.
“This is for your own good,” Tierra announced, opening her purse and fishing out the pack Aerin so desperately wanted.
A high-pitched squeak echoed through the room, followed by whatever ear-splitting sound Tierra made as a small black body exploded from her tote, and began to chatter and flutter around the woman’s unruly curls.
“Butter my ass and call me a biscuit!” Moira grabbed the poker from the fireplace and took a swipe at Doctor Lecter. “It’s one of them flying rats.”
Where had he come from? How had he—?
“She doesn’t look so well.” Claire’s voice was suddenly far away, like Aerin was listening to it through the thin walls of a shitty New York apartment. The cacophony kept sliding farther and farther away, and suddenly the soft, white rug was rushing up to meet her.
And for the third time that day, Aerin let the darkness claim her.
The fever had broken by the time a bitch of a nicotine