Queen of the Dead

Mina had risked a lot to pass this test, and would she really chance it on me, a stranger, keeping his promise to keep his mouth shut?

Crap. Alona would have seen that coming a mile away. She schemed like this in her sleep…or whatever it was she did now.

Hell, for all I knew, Mina had lied about everything, including the existence of the Order. But she belonged, or wanted to belong, to something. That much was clear. And her conviction about serving the living and not the dead had certainly seemed genuine enough. Then again, maybe I wasn’t the best judge of sincerity at the moment.

Lucky for me, I had one very long walk back to my house to begin sorting out fiction from possible fact.

6 Alona

I was used to seeing Will in all sorts of disarray first thing in the morning. Hair standing up, covers in a tangle, arms flopped wide, eyes half-open, and a grumpy expression. Very grumpy, usually. (He is not a morning person. I had never had that luxury in life — zero-hour gym waits for no woman — and didn’t now, either. I couldn’t have been killed on my way out to lunch?)

This morning, however, was different.

He was laying facedown on the bed, on top of the covers, fully dressed, Chucks still on with fresh grass clippings all over them. In short, nothing like how I’d left him last night.

It was enough to stop me in my tracks, distracting me momentarily from my goal of getting him up and moving immediately.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

He jumped a little, like the sound of my voice had startled him, and then groaned in response without lifting his head.

“What time is it?” he muttered.

I rolled my eyes, even though he couldn’t see me. Like I’d suddenly start showing up at noon. “What time do you think it is?”

He shifted onto his back and raised his hand to block the light coming in the window. “Too early.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. Something had happened. “Did Liesel come here last night? Because I told her—”

“What? Liesel? No.” With an effort, he managed to push himself up into a sitting position. “I’m fine. I just need to wake up.”

“You look like you barely slept.” I might have taken credit for my exemplary make-out skills, except he’d also been wearing fewer clothes the last time I’d seen him.

His pale blue gaze, bloodshot around the edges, met mine. “It’s nothing. Just…I heard a noise outside last night.”

“So you got dressed to go check it out and forgot to get undressed when you came back in?” I asked in disbelief.

“Something like that.” He rubbed his face with his hands.

Wait a minute…“Did Erickson stop by?” I demanded. The strain of tuning out spirits for all the years before I’d come along had given Will a couple of bad habits I hadn’t been able to break him of yet. The first was his tendency to stick his earbuds in whenever he was being pissy and didn’t want to hear what I had to say. The second was his occasional “smoke away your troubles” attitude when his friend Erickson was around, which, thankfully, wasn’t all that often. I mean, whatever, but after watching my mother lose herself in the bottle in an attempt to forget, I was a little leery about seeing someone else, who I might also care about a little bit, showing some of the same tendencies every once in a while.

“No, he’s in California, remember?” Will stood up slowly, like he ached all over, and shuffled to his closet. Why, I don’t know, since half his wardrobe still needed to be put away after its most recent trip through the laundry and stood in piles on his desk, as usual.

I moved around the bed to follow him. “You just seem out of it,” I said with a frown.

“I didn’t sleep well.” He raked a hand through the mostly empty hangers, making a loud, crashing racket. “What’s going on?”

I frowned. Something was still not right here, but I could feel time slipping away from me. I’d already lost all of last night, and every minute that passed, more of my life was being pitched to the foot of the driveway in a Hefty bag, and my dad was growing more and more attached to Gigi’s replacement spawn.

“I need you to talk to my parents,” I said.

He went very still. “What happened? Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. They’re just being dumb, and I want to remind them I used to exist,” was what I intended to say in a very cool, nonchalant voice.

But what came out was, “She threw away my Homecoming Queen sash!” and I could barely squeeze that out over the unexpected lump in my throat. Crap. I’d thought I was past the point of being upset about it…at least in front of someone else.

Will turned around. “She did what?”

That he took it so seriously (though, it might have been more that he didn’t quite understand what I’d said) broke whatever little bit of restraint I had left and tears leaked out…again. Damn it.

He looked alarmed. “It’s okay.” He reached out and laid a hand on my shoulder hesitantly. I leaned into his touch, and he wrapped his arms around me.

He smelled faintly of outside, a little of sweat, and something else, almost like cinnamon but not quite. It made my nose itch like a trapped sneeze. Which was annoying, to say the least. But I wasn’t about to move away from this unexpected bit of comfort.

“Your mom did this? Threw your sash away?” he asked. I could feel his voice in his chest against my cheek. He was evidently still trying to piece together what I’d said to him.

“Well, it wasn’t the whole thing,” I said, trying to catch my breath between sobs. “Just this little scrap that I cut off before I had to give it back. No one gets to keep the sash.” And now even the bit of it I’d had was gone. A fresh wave of tears started.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, stroking my hair, which felt so good it was almost worth losing some — not all, though — of my treasured possessions. “What else?”

“What else did she throw away? Like, everything that wasn’t nailed down.”

“No, I mean, did something else happen?”

I pulled back to look up at him with a frown. “Is that not enough?”

“Yes,” he answered quickly. “Of course. I just thought—”

“My dad is having a baby.” I sniffed. “Not him directly, of course. My step-Mothra.”

“Step-Mothra?” he asked, and I could hear the repressed laugh in his voice.

I nodded against his shirt. “Because she swoops in and destroys everything.”

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “You do know that in some of the movies Mothra is actually kind of the hero, right?”

I jerked away from him. “So not the point.”

“Okay, okay.” He held up his hands in defense. “You’re right.”

Slightly mollified, I allowed him to pull me close again and resume that soothing stroking of my hair. “Gigi is her name. My stepmother, I mean. And she’s pregnant.” The last word escaped like an exhausted sigh.

“I would think that might be a good thing,” Will said cautiously.

“You’d think so, maybe, if Gigi wasn’t this total bitch, and if you didn’t know that my dad always used to tell her he didn’t need more kids because he had me. And now he doesn’t have me anymore.”

“Alona, I’m sure—”

“He took the ultrasound picture and covered up my photo with it.” The words came out in a humiliating rush, and I buried my face against his shoulder so there wasn’t even a chance of meeting his gaze. I didn’t get into the