Page 28 of Born Wicked

Officer Jacobs looks truly sorry as she meets his eyes. “I’m sorry. Since she was a Jane Doe and there was no one to collect the body, the crematory would have disposed of what was left.”

Thrown away.

My mother, Ingrid Erickson, curse weaver, and love of Jon’s life, was thrown away after they burned her body.

Tears instantly well in my eyes. My throat closes up. The world tilts a little as my head spins.

“I’m so sorry,” Officer Jacobs offers again.

I spin, blinking hard.

She’s gone.

She’s really, really gone. Dust brushed into a waste bin, thrown into a landfill over two decades ago.

I step to the door and push it open. Numbly, I walk down the hall, and I’m vaguely aware of Jon following me out. I’m blinded by the sun as I step out, and as the first sob rips past my lips, I pull my sunglasses back down, and don’t even check for traffic as I cross the street, back to the car.

I suck in a gasp as soon as I’m in the seat and the door is closed. Huge, fat tears cascade down my cheeks, and my entire body shakes.

Jon slips into the driver’s side. His tears slip down his face silently. But even though he has to be experiencing grief in this moment, too, he leans across the center console and wraps his arms around me, pulling my face into the side of his neck.

Sob after sob rips out of me.

For twenty-nine years, I’d longed for the mother who died. And then for two months, I had hope that I could bring her back. That a miracle might happen. That against all the odds and years of time, I could get her back.

But that hope is dead now. There are no ashes to collect. There are no bones to dig up. There isn’t even an empty patch of grass to stand over and grieve.

My mother isn’t coming back.

Sometimes things don’t work out. In this new supernatural life I live, it’s easy to feel like anything can happen. I have power over death. So, I truly believed that I would get my mother back.

But not everything works out like we hope for.

Sometimes the dark, hard things, stay hard.

“I’m so sorry,” I sob into Jon’s neck. “I’m so sorry.”

He doesn’t say anything. As he holds me, his entire body is quaking. I feel his quiet tears land on my cheek. He’s had twenty-nine years to process what he knew was the most likely outcome of her disappearance. He didn’t know that there was a chance of her coming back from the dead.

Jon’s grief is different than mine.

But no less valid.

So, in a tiny rental car, in a town I hate, we both utterly fall apart, holding onto each other for dear life.

CHAPTERNINE

There areno words for how the next eighteen hours feel.

Anger. Pain. Sadness.

Ingrid has been dead for twenty-nine years, but I go through the entire grief cycle after Jon and I get the news about her being cremated.

The rest of the day is numb shock. And it feels kind of lonely. Since I never told Jon about the necromancer and my hope to bring my mother back, I’m going through an entirely different kind of grief than he is.

I’m used to things being taken away from me in my life. But this? This felt like a deeper stab in the gut.

We drive back to the airport just as silently as we’d driven to town. We go to the counter and change our flights to one that leaves in two hours. Each lost in our own thoughts and pain, we wait silently at the gate. We load on the plane.