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“I’ve seen the letter from my father relating the Council’s decree to Sterling’s mother. The situation was considered so urgent that Mom was there. It was four months after I was born. I probably was there too. She voted reluctant agreement.”
Spring eyed me.
“I swear to you on Mom’s fangs that that is true,” I said softly. “I don’t expect you to do anything, or put yourself in danger, but this isn’t what you think, Spring. None of this is what anyone thinks.”
She snorted, sadly. “Oh, no, it’s definitely not that. It’s not even what you think, little wolf. Now open that. Dawn’s almost here and I can’t get caught.”
I was too tired to move. “Hamid, would you?”
“Ma’am,” Hamid said before he took the parcel from me.
Spring’s blue-green eyes seemed to harden and spark. I let my head sag to my good shoulder and focused on holding her gaze.
“You aren’t sorry, are you. You’ve ruined my life, and you don’t even care,” she said angrily.
“You know I can’t care,” I replied, hating myself.
She turned to Hamid. “How’d you get mixed up in this, outsider?”
“I was hired, ma’am,” he said as he carefully picked the wax seal off the twine.
“Hired. What’d she need you for?”
“Appearances, ma’am,” Hamid said in his most matter-of-fact tone.
“Are you ready to die for her?” Spring lashed into him.
“It’s in the job description, ma’am,” Hamid replied, but with an air of I’d rather not, thanks.
He finished untying the wax-coated twine. As he unfolded the paper and plastic bag inside, my mother’s scent rushed out. I closed my eyes as the rictus of grief shook me.
No time. Had to move before it got any lighter outside.
I recognized the notebooks: rectangular, medium-sized journals with leather covers, well worn and jammed with papers. Mom’s dream journals. There had been more than just two, and they’d all disappeared when she’d died. A few days after her death, when my brain started to think logically, I had rushed through the bedrooms trying to find her journals, her jewelry, anything of hers. But I had been too late. The possessions of the dead had to be destroyed or given away so their soul would be light enough to swim the River that divided the worlds. My father had wasted no time and burned everything of hers, and probably thrown her jewelry into the spring-fed pond.
I’d cried and railed at myself for my selfishness. I would have hoarded everything of hers and weighed her soul down.
The first entry of the top journal was dated about two years before her death. “Dream journals. I guess the last two she kept.”
She’d never shown them to anyone and had kept them all locked in the top drawer of her nightstand.
The three other wrapped items were a string of thirteen blue-green seashells that I had never seen before, and a set of earrings made of gold and fire onyx.
“Oh, I remember these,” I said softly, admiring them. “I told Mom they reminded me of her, but she always wore the gold and lapis.”
“I remember those too,” Spring said fondly.
“Hamid, you collect seashells, right? What are these?”
He studied them for two seconds. “Green limpets, also called half-white limpets. Likely lottia mesoleuca. Very common in warmer southern waters off western Mexico.”
“Have you ever seen these?” I asked Spring. My mother had never mentioned anything like it.
“She had one when she was a kid, she loved it, but I have no idea where those came from,” Spring said.
“They are quite easy to get,” Hamid offered.
Mom had never mentioned blue seashells or limpets. What part of her had I lost? “Here, Spring. She was your sister. You take the limpets.”
