Page 35 of Blood & Ash

He followed her into the small apartment. The rooms carried her scent more strongly than the shop did, mixed with old books and the lavender soap beside the sink. Del gave him a blanket and disappeared into the bedroom without another word.

Marcus lay on the sofa listening to the building settle. An hour passed before Del’s footsteps crossed the bedroom floor and stopped at the open door. He opened his eyes.

“I keep seeing the hallway,” she said. “Every time I close my eyes.”

Marcus moved his legs to make room. Del sat at the opposite end of the sofa and pulled the blanket over both of them. She didn’t touch him, though her bare foot rested inches from his thigh.

“I keep hearing the second body hit the floor,” he admitted.

They stayed there while morning traffic began on the street below. Neither tried to make the deaths meaningful or promise that the next night would be better. Del eventually fell asleep with her head against the back of the sofa, and Marcus kept watch until her breathing deepened.

Chapter 9

Del unlocked the back door of Nightshade & Nettle at nine in the evening. The shop was dark. She didn’t turn on the overhead light. She lit the oil lamp on the worktable and pulled the coven’s supply ledgers from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet.

The ledgers were leather-bound, three of them, each the size of a dinner plate. She stacked them open on the worktable and weighted the pages with the stone mortar. The ink on the oldest one had faded to something nearly brown, the color of old teeth. She started with the most recent and worked backward.

The back room smelled of dried herbs and the musk of paper that had sat too long in a drawer. Shelves ran floor to ceiling on both walls, packed with labeled ceramic jars of oak gall, iron filings, birch bark, and dried wormwood, each label written in her own hand, the dates going back two years. She had restocked these shelves every Thursday. She had measured each component, sealed each jar and never once asked why the quantities never lasted.

Del ran her finger down the first column of withdrawal dates, component names, and quantities. The handwriting was Rosalind’s, tight and slanted left. Del knew warding-stone recipes by heart. She had been making them since she was sixteen. A standard warding stone used thirty grams of oak gall, maximum. The stone absorbed it in layers. Anything more was waste.

Rosalind had withdrawn one hundred and twenty grams of oak gall in January. One hundred and twenty in February. One-twenty in March. Every month for two years.

Del turned the page. Her finger stopped at the iron filings entry. Warding stones used iron as a binder. Ten grams, sometimes fifteen for a large stone. Rosalind had withdrawn eighty grams. Month after month. The birch bark was worse. Two hundred grams where forty would have covered every stone the coven could possibly need.

She pulled the second ledger. The numbers held. One-twenty, eighty, two hundred. Every month. Every component. She pulled the third ledger, and the pattern was the same, the quantities steady, the handwriting unchanged across two years of Thursdays.

Her finger stopped above an entry dated eight months ago. Oak gall: 120g. Iron filings: 80g. Birch bark: 200g. Valerian root: 210g. The valerian was a sleep component, a calmative, with no place in warding recipes at all. She had ground it anyway because the list said to grind it and she had stopped asking questions somewhere in the second month.

Del picked up a stub of pencil from the worktable drawer. She tore a strip from the margin of an old order form and wrote. Oak gall: 120g. Iron filings: 80g. Birch bark: 200g. Valerian root: 210g. She wrote the date beside each entry. January. February. March. April. Her hand wasn’t steady. The pencil dug into the paper.

The list grew. May. June. July. The quantities never varied. One-twenty, eighty, two hundred, two-ten. Every month for two years. The scrap filled one side. She turned it over and kept writing. August. September. October. November. December. January again. The most recent entry was three weeks old. One-twenty, eighty, two hundred, two-ten. Signed in Rosalind’s hand at the bottom of the column.

Del set the pencil down. She looked at the jars on the shelves. The oak gall jar was three-quarters full. She had restocked it last Thursday. One hundred and twenty grams, measured on the brass scale, poured into the wide-mouthed ceramic she had labeled herself two years ago. The iron filings tin was half-full. The birch bark bundle was tied with twine she had cut herself. The valerian root jar sat on the highest shelf, its contents pale and fibrous under the oil lamp’s light.

She had handed these components over every Thursday for two years. She had ground them and measured them and folded them into paper packets and sealed them with wax from her own hives. She had done it believing they were for warding stones, and she had known the ratios were wrong, and underneath the coven’s vote lay the simpler truth: she had been afraid to push. Afraid of Rosalind’s calm, reasonable voice explaining why the greater good required compliance. Afraid of being the one who broke the circle.

Her throat closed. A tightness under her jaw made it hard to swallow. She pressed her palm against the worktable, the wood grain rough under her fingers. The oil lamp flickered. The shadows of the jars stretched long across the shelves.

Rosalind wasn’t in the shop. Rosalind was at home, probably, or at a coven meeting Del hadn’t been invited to. The thought of confronting her tonight, of walking to Rosalind’s house with the scrap of paper in her hand and the numbers written in her own shaking handwriting, made Del’s chest hurt. She didn’t have the nerve. Not yet. She hated that about herself with a clarity that sat in her sternum like a stone.

She folded the scrap of paper along its creases. She tucked it into the inside pocket of her coat. She closed the ledgers in the wrong order, oldest on top, and stacked them on the filing cabinet instead of putting them away. The oil lamp needed trimming. She left it burning.

Del locked the back door behind her. The key turned stiff in the old lock. She walked down the alley behind Main Street with her hands in her coat pockets and the scrap of paper pressed against her ribs. The night air was cold. Frost had settled on the cobblestones. Her boots rang on the stone and the sound died between the buildings.

She wasn’t running an errand. She was going to the carriage house. She was going to show Marcus Ellery what she had found, and the weight of that decision sat in her chest alongside the hatred, the fear and the numbers written on both sides of a torn piece of paper.

She turned onto Harrow Lane. The carriage house waited at the end of the street; its windows dark except for the single brass lamp burning above the worktable. She could see it from here. It was a yellow square of light in the dark.

Del kept walking.

The carriage-house door was propped open with a brick. Del stepped through into the smell of antiseptic and old wood. Two work lamps were clamped to a shelf above the scarred examination table, their light throwing the room into sharp relief.

Marcus’s counterworking lab occupied the far end. Blood-sample vials stood racked in a wire stand, each one cork-stoppered and labeled in his tight handwriting. A portable centrifuge sat on a folding table beside the old microscope. Handwritten notes were clipped to a board on the wall: formulas, ratios, the sodium thiosulfate and silver nitrate combination that had held for sixty seconds three nights ago. The autoclave hummed against the east wall. The diagnostic unit’s screen was dark.

Marcus stood at the examination table with his back to the door. He was writing in a patient log, his pen moving across the page in that slanting script. He didn’t turn around.

“Del,” he said. Her name was a statement rather than a question.