Page 92 of The Rut in the Road

“Again?”

I held up my arm, although she couldn’t see the scars through my long sleeves.

“Oh, right! Yikes.” She grimaced. “You really need to stop letting people throw shit at you. Or throw you.”

“I don’t know that I would use the word ‘let,’” I grumbled.

“Fair. Does the arm still bother you?” she asked, nodding toward the limb in question.

“Not usually,” I answered truthfully. “Sometimes it aches when I leave it in one position for too long, or, weirdly, when it storms.” I made a face. “Mason says that the saying about old people knowing when it’s going to rain is based on joint injuries and arthritis reacting to barometric pressure changes, so I guess that’s why.”

“Huh,” she replied. “That’s shitty. Does that mean it’s gonna hurt more in winter?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Although I imagine I’m going to find out in a few months.”

“Well, nothing else that involves stitches, okay, bro?”

“Hopefully not,” I agreed.

“Can I play with Victor while we wait for dinner?”

Vi had insisted on ordering us a ton of Chinese food.

“Of course, if he wants you to play with him,” I told her. “Usually he likes attention.”

She pushed herself up. “You know it’s totally whack that you have an undead pet rat, right?”

I wasn’t actually sure what ‘whack’ meant in this context, but I assumed she thought it was either weird or neat or possibly both. “I suppose,” I answered noncommittally.

“Dude, you raised a rat from the dead! That’s so badass!”

I shrugged. In my understanding of the word, I’d done quite a few more badass things than accidentally resurrect a rat. Killing people with nothing more than magic and willpower, for instance. But I wasn’t going to argue the point. I didn’t think Vi wanted to know that I’d killed our uncle to save her life. Hers and our mother’s, although Vi was definitely the more grateful of the two.

She went over to Victor’s enclosure, although I usually left the lid open, since he didn’t really go anywhere that I didn’t want him to. I’d told him not to go on the kitchen counters, for example, and he seemed to have obeyed. I wasn’t entirely certain what I thought aboutthat, since it meant that either Victor was an uncommonly sentient rat, undead or not, or I was actually able to exert my will over him, which was uncomfortable for different reasons.

Vi coaxed the rat out, encouraging him to climb up and sit on her shoulder, before going over to the collection of boxes and paper towel tubes that I’d amassed in the corner as a means of undead rat enrichment.

I watched as my sister played with my resurrected rat and wondered, not for the first time, how I’d ended up here, doing this, with the people who were a part of my life.

My two best friends were a water witch medium and an earth witch ghoul, because of course all of us at Tranquil Brook had come there because we’d had magic to begin with, so everyone had at least some form of inherent magic, and then there were the group of us who had acquired additionalabilities from the Arcanavirus outbreak. Melissa’s witchcraft was strong, although her medium abilities, which she’d admittedly not wanted to cultivate, were fairly limited, although I supposed my perspective was a bit skewed, given that I worked with an incredibly powerful warlock medium and a pretty strong banisher. But Melissa couldn’t do much more than I could—which mostly amounted to being able to see the dead when they were around. Sam’s witchcraft, on the other hand, was extremely weak, giving him just enough affinity with growing things that he was an uncommonly successful gardener, but not much else.

My boss was a terrifyingly powerful warlock medium who casually provided power for two ghosts who were themselves powerful—Sylvia was a fire witch and Archie a necromancer—and my other boss was a skilled healing witch with a death witch nephew. The least powerful of the three partners in Beyond the Veil was the eastern seaboard’s most-sought-after banisher, which should tell you something about the amount of magic that could be accessed in Beyond the Veil’s offices every day.

As Ward had pointed out to me once, it wasn’t normal for a psychic witch to be the front desk staff. I think he’d intended it as a way to encourage me to spend more time training my magic. And now that I was taking on clients, too, our front desk person was still a warlock. Not as powerful in terms of raw magic as the rest of us, but still. Vi could handle herself if she had to.

And, of course, my boyfriend was a tiger shifter FBI agent.

Not exactly what one might think of as a normal group of people. Although, to that point, as Ward had once laughingly asked me, ‘What’snormalsupposed to be, anyway?’

I supposed it was a good question.

16

She really loved working here.She loved working with her brother, loved the fact that she was working for a warlock who was an actual, honest-to-God decent human being, and loved the fact that she got to help an Arc-Arcanid-run company succeed despite all the political bullshit going on that kept trying to take away their rights.

She also loved the fact?—

“Get in the fucking car.”