Page 29 of Ashes
“Sarah Borello.” His eyes search my face for a flicker of recognition.
“Sarah? My neighbor?”
Luther nods. He’s taken his phone from his pocket. “Sarah told me she knew about your brother—Sam. She said she had information about him and wanted to meet me.” He looks at Mack. “That’s where I was this morning.”
Mack puts his coffee cup down and folds his arms, listening intently.
“She told me a lot.” Luther shakes his head. “Alot.” He hands me the phone. “I recorded it. I didn’t think you’d believe me if I told you myself.”
I take the phone and stare at it. A big red ‘play’ button stares back at me. The recording is fourteen minutes and thirty-three seconds long.
“I told you—you might want to sit down.” Luther gestures to the table.
Without looking at him, I stride past and sit down. Coffee spills over the rim of my mug when I thump it on the tabletop. Tanner, Kole, and Mack come to join me, but Luther remains standing, cradling his coffee. He looks nervous.
I press play.
Sarah’s voice, tinny coming from the phone’s small speakers, fills my ears.
“Twenty-four years ago, I was working as a midwife. I was on a nightshift. It was late. Nearly midnight. It was raining. The kind of rain where you can barely see your hand in front of your face…”
As I listen to Sarah telling her story, the rest of the room disappears. It’s like I’m sitting in a black hole. I can’t hear anything except her voice. I can’tseeanything.
Toward the end of the recording, when Sarah says the name ‘Ragnor Larsen’, Mack inhales sharply and bangs the table with his fist. Kole mutters, “Holy crap,” and Tanner’s eyes widen.
“We’ve been searching for that name for years,” Mack says, but Luther shakes his head and tells him to keep listening.
There’s barely a minute left when Sarah tells Luther the truth; that she was watching me for Ragnor. The entire time we were neighbors, she was spying, waiting for my powers to show themselves so she could report back to the League in exchange for Sam’s location.
“I took her to the bus station. I watched her get on the bus, then I called Ragnor. I told him everything.”Sarah’s voice trembles.
Luther sounds disgusted.“You pretended to be her friend, and you betrayed her.”
“I didn’t know he wanted to hurt her.”
I stand up and pace toward the door, waving my hand for them to stop the recording. “I don’t want to hear anymore. I can’t…”
Reaching over the others, Luther presses stop. “There isn’t much more to hear,” he says darkly. “Shortly after that, we were interrupted by Eve and her werewolf pals.”
“Eve?” Kole sits up straighter in his chair and laces his fingers together. “She was there?”
“Tracked Sarah to the diner. We escaped, obviously, thanks to Sarah’s wand.”
“Wand?” Mack asks.
While Luther launches into something I don’t understand—telling the others that Sarah is anun-elemental witch who must have bought the wand on the black market—Tanner walks over to me. He doesn’t hug me or hold my hand, just stands in front of me, close, so I know he’s there.
My thoughts are racing.
Sarah, one of the few people from Ridgemore who I believed to be my friend, is a liar. She used me. “I don’t understand.” I stride over to Luther and fold my arms in front of my stomach. “Sarah said she wanted to tell you about Sam?”
Luther nodded.
“All this time, she’s been searching for him?”
Again, Luther nods, watching me as I try to slot the pieces together.
“But surely, she’s seen the TV? If she was so close to Sam, why didn’t she recognize that he’s now going by the name of Nico?” I shake my head. “This doesn’t make sense.”