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The anger ignites. “Excuseme?”
“Something is wrong with this summoning. We keep hearing Anton, but he’s just throwing out random sound bites. No matter how hard I focus on him, something is wrong. Whose ashes are in that box?”
My vision clouds red with rage. He is accusing me of tampering with my husband’s mortal remains to keep milking… What am I milking? What would be the point of all this?
My rage freezes.
What would be the point indeed.
He’s accusing me of something so heinous, I’ll forget everything else.
Thatis the point.
My jaw clenches, and I need to force myself to get words out. “There is a foot in that furnace, Dr. Cirillo. You stand here accusing me of staging it, but you haven’t made a move to prove that.”
If Cirillo hasn’t been eager to prove the foot is fake, does that meanheplanted it?
I start to step toward the furnace. Then I stop.
“I need something to hold it,” I say. “If it is fake, I’m not leaving fingerprints.”
“For fuck’s sake.” Cirillo strides toward the open door, reaches in, and grabs the shoe. He yanks it, hard, and it comes off in his hand, and he staggers back.
“Nice try,” I say. “Let me guess. The fake foot is stuck, and you need me to run upstairs and get something to help pull it out. No, now you’ll need both meandShania to go upstairs, though I’m not sure how you’ll convince us of that.”
The look he shoots at me is so full of hate that my insides stutter. My first thought is:What have I done to him?My second thought?I know what I’ve done.
By insisting on a legal agreement, I’ve called his bluff, and that’s where his focus is. On the bitch who is trying to ruin his shot at a book deal.
There’s a foot hanging out of that furnace, and he’s decided I put it there because he’s too incensed to realize that makes no fucking sense.
And now I’m doing the same thing. There is a foot hanging in that furnace, but I’m ignoring the implication because I’ve bought into his narrative. Someone must have put a fake foot in there. Anything else is…
“Davos?” I say, my voice breathy as he turns back to the furnace. “I… I don’t think—”
He’s already at the door, leaning in to grab that foot and show me that he’s right and I’m wrong, and I probably did this whole thing forattention because that’s what people like me do. Tragic widows. The chronically ill. We get a taste of attention, and we want more.
He grabs the foot, and then staggers back with a strangled shriek, and with that noise, I know what has happened. He grabbed the foot, expecting plastic, and touched flesh. Cold flesh.
Jin.
I shove past Cirillo, clawing and scrabbling to get to that furnace.
Keith said Jin hasn’t shown up and I can’t get ahold of him, and when he left this morning, he was wearing running shoes and—
There is a sound in the furnace. A slow, sliding sound. Before I can get to the furnace, something falls from its depths.
The first thing I see is blood. Clothing and skin bathed in blood, and I’m slammed back twenty-two years, turning over Heather and seeing what had been done to her.
The images crash together into a single picture, a body splayed with the chest sliced open from throat to sternum, intestines spilling out.
I squeeze my eyes shut for a split second before I hear Shania screaming and realize she’s been screaming all along.
I force my eyes open. I see a hand. I see a knife clutched in the hand, and I see Patrice lying on the forest floor, reaching for a bloody knife—
Stop! Stop!
I let out a snarl of frustration and shake away the memory, but when I open my eyes, that is what I do see. A hand clutching a knife. A pale white hand that is not Jin’s.
