Page 12 of The Rut in the Road

The thing was beyond ostentatious. Black marble, double-wide—for both her and Father—with carvings of columns on either side of the very traditional names, dates, and bullshit “Beloved wife and mother,” “Beloved husband and father” crap.

They both would have appreciated the stupid thing.

She didn’t particularly care what marked the place where their mortal remains were going to molder into dirt and maggots.

Or, more likely, given the cost of the funerary preparations and the ludicrous wake she’d had to sit through, they’d just sit there not decomposing thanks to the copious amount of formaldehyde and other dead-people-pickling chemicals that must have been injected to replace what had passed for blood in her mother’s veins.

It certainly hadn’t been whatever people said was thicker than water.

The bitch.

She shifted her weight in her uncomfortable heeled boots. She’d contemplated wearing hot pink, or yellow, or anything that would cause a scandal for being wildly inappropriate to wear to the funeral, but she’d eventually decided that was childish and had gone with black heeled boots, a long black skirt, and a flowy black top. Understated. Appreciated by her parents’ peers.

‘Appreciated’ was a term she never really wanted to hear again.

Her mother always ‘appreciated’ things. Or didn’t ‘appreciate’ things.

Like her attitude. Her mother didn’t appreciate her attitude a lot.

She hadn’t appreciated her refusal to date the sons of the other stuck-up warlocks they associated with, either.

Some of those sons—and most of the stuck-up warlocks—were at this stupid funeral.

Well, they could all go to hell.

I pulledmy hand back and glanced sideways at my sister. “You really didn’t like our mother much, did you?” I remarked, not really needing to ask the question.

“God, no,” Violette scoffed. “I wasn’t a child to her. To either of them, really. To Mother, I was a status symbol. My grades, my magic, all of it was something she could use as currency in order to raise her status in magical society.” She snorted. “Although I suppose it’s better than how Father saw me.”

“How did he see you?” I asked. She hadn’t been thinking much about him.

“As a brood mare.”

I winced. “I’m sorry.”

She grimaced, then shrugged and smiled at me. “Better than what they did to you,” she remarked. “I at least got to go to school and eat pizza and shit.”

I smiled back at her, odd as it might seem, given the circumstances and the fact that we were standing over our parents’ gravestone. “I would rather have been doing that,” I affirmed. “Although it seems to have mostly worked out for me.”

I was in my last year of online degree, assuming I’d actually be able to finish up by August, which was kind of exciting, although if I were being completely honest, it felt somewhat… anticlimactic. I had no plans to leave Beyond the Veil, and no particular plans todoanything with the Associate’s degree in Arcane Studies that I’d only decided on this fall, although I still had five classes I needed to takeinArcane Studies, so maybe one of those would be inspiring. Two each in the fall and spring, and the last one next summer. Maybe I’d decide to keep going to finish the BA, maybe I wouldn’t. But if I didn’t need to, I didn’t see the point.

At the moment, I was in a class called Arc-Humanity and The Mind, which was focused on the neuroscience and psychology of different Arc skills, and I would take another history class, Witchcraft, Magic, and the History of the US, which I was mostly taking because of Mason. He’d be able to help me with anything I needed help with, especially because our professor had assigned Mason’s first book for the class.

I hadn’t yet mentioned to my professor that I worked for Mason Manning. I wondered what he’d think if I did.

“Earth to Rayn,” my sister said, bumping my shoulder with hers.

“Sorry,” I apologized. “Just thinking.”

“What about?”

I grimaced. “School, actually.”

“You’re, like, almost done, yeah?”

I nodded. “I’ll finish in August, assuming I don’t fail something or… something.”

“Something,” she repeated. “Like another FBI case?”