The End of Magic (The Witches of Echo Park #3)(18)

Her partner, Freddy, was beside himself with worry. He was grieving, too, but he'd put his own feelings aside-as much as one could compartmentalize something so awful-to help Dev battle the morass of depression that was threatening to overwhelm her. No, it was more than depression, it was an unwillingness to keep living.

Her mother and sisters were dead, her daughters gone (in all probability dead, too), and her blood sisters unreachable . . . it all felt pointless. A life not worth living. She knew she should want to live for Freddy. That her partner was still there and alive should have given her will enough to live, but her grief had been so absolute that it was like living in a fog. One that would never lift and that Freddy couldn't penetrate-even though, bless him, he really had tried.

The truth was that Dev felt like all the color had been drained from the world-and she had no interest in living if it meant she had to do it in monochrome.

It had been two days since Dev's bedeviled mother-and her mother's former lover-had brought about the end of the Montrose line. Dev didn't understand how time could continue after a tragedy like that-how life could go on after an emotional earthquake so powerful, it had changed her very brain chemistry. Her whole life, she'd been the mellow one, the laid-back sister, the passive daughter, the indulgent mother . . . but that woman was dead. It felt like she'd been poisoned and burned alive, flayed and dismembered, stabbed and strangled . . . her heart weeping as she'd died a slow and gruesome death, forced to watch everything she'd ever loved taken away from her.

"Dev?"

She was lying in a fetal position on Eleanora's bed, the covers bunched up around her waist, one of the soft down pillows pressed against her cheek, still wet from the last round of tears she'd shed. She felt a hand on the back of her neck, and she flinched at the touch. Freddy instantly pulled his fingers back as if she'd burned him-and maybe the impotent rage she felt had turned her skin into fire.

"Sorry," she murmured, slowly turning her head to look at him. There was a sickly yellow undertone to his dark skin, and his handsome face was pinched with worry. Stress lines spiraled out around his eyes and mouth, creating deep indentations in the flesh.

"It's okay," he said, smiling down at her from his perch on the edge of the bed. "I just wanted to let you know that Arrabelle got in touch. She and Lyse are on their way home now. Should be here in a few hours."

Dev's neck began to ache from holding the awkward position, so she rolled over until she was facing Freddy. Normally, she would've reached out and taken his hand, but she found it almost impossible to touch or be touched by anyone. Even the gentle press of his fingers on her neck made her feel claustrophobic.



       
         
       
        

"Do they know we're at Eleanora's?" she asked, and he shook his head.

"I'll tell them," he said, reaching for his cell phone.

She nodded, but her gaze was already drifting away from his face, her thoughts taking her far away from the pain of her shattered reality.


• • •

They sat at the round oak table, the yellow damask tablecloth pinned beneath their elbows. Three women, one gray and two in the prime of their lives. Three faces she knew almost as well as her own. The room was filled with a hazy smoke that made it hard to see. Dev stepped farther into the room, out of the shadows where she'd been standing, and, abruptly, the smoke cleared and the room came into sharp focus.

"Devandra?" Her mother's voice. From cradle to grave, Melisande Montrose's dulcet tone would be the first and last thing Dev would ever hear. How she knew this, she was unsure, but it was the truth. Her mother had cooed her name when she was born, and when she died, it would be her mother who came to greet her on the other side.

"But you're on the other side already, Devandra," Melisande continued, cocking her head. She had a bowl of soup in front of her-soup Dev had made for them all-but the bowl was different than any Dev had in her kitchen.

You have no kitchen, a little voice said in Dev's head. You have nothing anymore.

She ignored the voice, concentrating on the soup bowl. After a few seconds of intense concentration, she remembered where she'd seen it before. It was an orange ceramic thing that had lived on a shelf in Eleanora's kitchen. She'd never seen the former master of her coven use it for food, but once, a long time ago, she'd heard Eleanora refer to it as "Hessika's scrying bowl."

"Why are you eating out of that bowl?" Dev asked.

She noticed that the pot of soup on the stove was starting to burn. Without thinking, she reached over and turned down the burner of her old O'Keefe and Merritt stove. Inside the pot, the soup-which was not the soup she'd made, but a concoction that resembled bright red borscht-still roiled and bubbled. It seemed not to care that Dev had cut the gas in half, lowering the flame to the point where it was barely a pale blue ring of fire.