From my little witching jar, I fish out my ring and bone-tooth key necklace and put them on. The other stuff I return to the button tin for safekeeping.
I take a deep breath. Readying myself to face whatever is waiting for me at home.
Because I’d like to know exactly what business Grandmama had with Stone Rutledge.
NINETEEN
Fetch the Bones
Raelean’s windshield wipers work overtime the entire drive home. Once we round the bend to my house, she lets up off the gas as multiple sheriff cars clog our driveway.
“Are you absolutely certain you want to do this...?” Her voice is extra twangy. That cocked eyebrow of hers lecturing me.
There’s a half second where I want to tell her to floor it and get us the hell out of there. But parked alongside the sheriff’s car is a coroner’s van. Raelean eases forward, seeing it, too.
“I’m not so sure this is about you,” she says, stretching her neck to see what the fuss is all about. The backyard comes into view and she stops.
A small backhoe slams its massive digging bucket into the rain-soaked ground behind our house.
“What the hell?” I hop out of her car, apprehension ticking in my chest as I walk up the driveway.
The backhoe’s hydraulic arm swings to the side and dumps the dirt out of the bucket. Then back to the hole for another scoop.
The wrongness of it loosens my knees. The rain, the trees—the world is closing in around me; the air is suffocatingly tight.
Sheets of rain pour off our tin roof as I slip onto the porch. A deathly stillness lies there as the mechanical monster claws at the yard.
I stand silently next to Grandmama and watch the unimaginable—they’re digging up Papaw.
Sheriff Johns hands me some folded papers. I take the official-looking documents and scan the pages.
“Search warrant from the judge,” he says as I read just that. “Read it in its entirety to your grandmother. Let me know if you have any questions.” He crosses his beefy arms, and we keep watching. I pass the papers for Raelean to see.
Digging up the dead feels wrong, unholy even. Especially on a Sunday morning. You lay someone in the ground, you expect them to stay there. But with Papaw, it downright pisses me off. I can feel my jaw locking up as the tension spreads through my body.
I want it to stop.
My feet are swifter than my judgment, and I march right past the sheriff to the porch steps and—Raelean catches ahold of my arm.
“It’s gonna happen,” she says. A lump gets hung in my throat. “Nothing any of us can do now.” I want to tell her she’s wrong, that I can stop all this, right here and now.
But somewhere inside me, I know she’s right. It’s enough that I step back.
I scowl over at my grandmother. As powerful as she claims to be, she can’t stop them, either. Maybe she was never powerful to begin with. Maybe it was just my inflated fear as a child that she warped and manipulated for years. It makes me hate her all the more.
Whatever killed Stone Rutledge, they think Sin Eater Oil played a part. Doesn’t matter to the sheriff that Papaw went septic from the way it built up in his body from years of the death-talking. To them, it looks the same. Two men from very different socioeconomic worlds. The most obvious link...me.
We huddle together in the shelter of the porch as the sky weeps. I’d do anything to go back to that cave with Rook. Crawl up in his arms and pretend this world doesn’t exist. Just him and me, and that tiny piece of happiness we carved out for ourselves.
That backhoe keeps hollowing out my soul—dig, dump.
Dig.
Dump.
Dig—the man operating the backhoe stops mid-scoop and waves an arm at the sheriff.
They’ve hit the pine box. The blood drains from my face in a cold flush.
With the flick of his fingers, Sheriff Johns directs two men already out in the yard with rain slickers and shovels, ready to finish the job.
Seems like, if anyone should be doing the digging, it should be Bone Layer. He put Papaw in the ground, he ought to take him out. I look around, realizing neither he nor the truck are here.
It takes time, but eventually they uncover the pine box, wrap straps around it, and haul it from the earth. The thick pine, coated in a heavy protective layer of shellac and oil, hasn’t degraded too much—Bone knows how to make a proper death box.
An angry burst of thunder cracks, followed by a zipper of lightning across the sky.
Papaw’s not happy about this.
A man jabs a crowbar at the edge of the lid—I gasp and turn my back to it. Like a tree in the storm, my roots are being ripped out from underneath me. Raelean wraps a comforting arm around my shoulders.
My heart is a heavy lump in my chest, dreading the tiniest bit of evidence they might find. That they could use my gift against me. Might now have a reason to send me away for good.
Because I am the Devil’s Seed Child. This town damned me and my soul a long time ago.
Grandmama just stands there in her oversized white dress shirt, dingy from age and farm work since it was once Papaw’s. Her brown skirt a sack with an elastic waistband. An emotionless bag of bones bundled in fabric, that’s what she is. Her heart a cold lifeless rock, unfazed by the depravity of what’s happening here. I turn to face her.
“Do something,” my voice pleads. “Don’t let them take him.”
