Page 50 of Blood & Ash

“I’m going to do what I can to undo the damage,” Del said. “And I won’t be coming to you for help doing it.”

Rosalind’s composure held. Her expression didn’t change. But her hands stayed where they had stopped, half-raised toward her sleeve, and the stillness there was complete. She’d been moving her hands for thirty years. She’d smoothed and folded and gestured through every coven meeting Del could remember. Now they didn’t move.

“Delphine,” Rosalind said. Once. Her voice carried that maternal weight one final time.

Del was already turning toward the door. Her boots sounded on the floorboards. The parlor door stood open. The dark shop waited beyond it, shelves of ceramic jars catching what little light reached them from the dying lamp, holding oak gall, iron filings, birch bark, and valerian root, the components she had measured for two years, believing they were for warding stones, believing the vote had been about protection and not compliance.

Her hand found the doorframe. Her fingers pressed into the wood. The grain was rough under her fingertips. She held the pressure. Then she let go.

She walked through the dark shop. Past the worktable where the stone mortar sat with residue still gritty in its bowl. Past the shelves of her own stock, labeled in her own handwriting, dated and measured and sealed. The back door was unlocked. She pushed it open and stepped into the alley.

The night air was cold. Frost had settled on the cobblestones. Her breath came white. The ledger was under her arm, pressed against her ribs, and the weight of it was familiar in a way that hurt.

Main Street was empty. The storefronts were dark. The streetlamps threw pools of yellow light on the sidewalk at irregular intervals, and between them the darkness was complete. Del stood outside her own shop with the ledger under her arm and the cold pressing against her face and nowhere she needed to be.

The absence sat in her chest where the anger had been and made the anger feel small by comparison. She had walked away from the only family she had left in Ashton Grove, and the woman she had walked away from was still sitting in an armchair by a dead hearth explaining why nine mattered more than everyone else, and Del had chosen a side that put her on the outside of that circle for the first time in her life.

She adjusted the ledger under her arm. Her fingers were cold. The street held its emptiness. The night held its cold. She stood where she was because moving meant deciding where to go, and she wasn’t ready to decide.

Del walked without choosing a direction until the clinic lamp appeared at the end of Harrow Lane. The brass glow marked the carriage-house window, constant against the dark. She stopped at the edge of the gravel and considered turning back.

Marcus opened the door before she reached it. He wore shirtsleeves rolled past his elbows, and a pair of wire-framed spectacles sat low on his nose. His gaze dropped to the ledger beneath her arm and returned to her face.

“Rosalind?” he asked.

“Still believes she saved us.” Del entered when he moved aside. “Perhaps she did, if survival is the only measure that counts.”

The clinic had changed since morning. Fresh slides covered the workbench, and three open books crowded the space beside the centrifuge. Marcus closed the door, turned the lock, and took Del’s coat without asking.

“What happened?” he asked.

Del placed the ledger on the table. “Arrow asked for nine true names. Rosalind gave them to him along with the components. She said nine lives were an acceptable price for keeping the rest of the coven safe.”

Marcus removed his spectacles and set them beside the microscope. “Whose names?”

“She wouldn’t tell me. I know mine was one of them.”

His expression changed so quickly that another person might have missed it. Marcus looked toward the locked door, then at the windows as though Arrow might already be standing outside.

“Did she say what the names allow him to do?” he asked.

“A true name creates access. How much depends on the person using it and the strength of the person being used.” Del pressed her fingertips against the ledger cover. “He can track me. Influence some workings. Build a binding if he has enough blood or another personal connection.”

“Can he control you the way he controls Sable?”

“Not yet.”

Marcus’s jaw tightened. “That word is doing too much work.”

“It’s the only honest one I have.”

He crossed to the cabinet and removed a bottle of whiskey. The label had faded, and dust marked the place where it sat among the medical supplies. Marcus poured two fingers into a glass and handed it to her.

“You keep whiskey beside the antiseptic?” Del asked.

“The uses overlap.”

She drank. The burn traveled down her throat. Marcus didn’t pour a glass for himself. He remained near the cabinet with both hands loose at his sides.