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Back Black Magic Sanction Save as PDF
Chapters (42)
  1. Title Page
  2. One
  3. Two
  4. Three
  5. Four
  6. Five
  7. Six
  8. Seven
  9. Eight
  10. Nine
  11. Ten
  12. Eleven
  13. Twelve
  14. Thirteen
  15. Fourteen
  16. Fifteen
  17. Sixteen
  18. Seventeen
  19. Eighteen
  20. Nineteen
  21. Twenty
  22. Twenty-one
  23. Twenty-two
  24. Twenty-three
  25. Twenty-four
  26. Twenty-five
  27. Twenty-six
  28. Twenty-seven
  29. Twenty-eight
  30. Twenty-nine
  31. Thirty
  32. Thirty-one
  33. Thirty-two
  34. Thirty-three
  35. Thirty-four
  36. Thirty-five
  37. Thirty-six
  38. Acknowledgements
  39. Also by Kim Harrison
  40. Copyright
  41. About the Publisher
  42. Cover

Hope mixed with melancholy, and I crossed the room to give him a hug. “Are you ready to go?” I asked him. Matalina wanted him to burn their home.

Jenks’s eyes flicked down to the glass in his hand. “Not yet.”

I took the solstice light out of his hand. “I missed you, Jenks,” I said, giving him a hug and shocking myself when I found wings back there. “Just for that breath of time I thought you were gone. Don’t do that to me again.”

He took a breath, then another. It came ragged, full of his emotion. “I miss her so much,” he said, and suddenly he was holding me tight as he cried angry sobs into my hair. “I miss her so damn much.”

So I held him, my own tears falling anew as we gave comfort to each other. It had been worth it. All the blackness on my soul was worth this. And no one would convince me that this was damning. It couldn’t be.

Twenty-five

Twenty-five

There was a hollow place in my middle that wasn’t from not having eaten all day. The sun was nearing the horizon, and the leaves that hadn’t been burned were stark against the blue and pink of sunset. Almost like an oil, the scent of ash coated me. The heat from Jenks’s stump burning was a gentle warmth this close to the ground instead of the expected inferno.

To one side of me, Pierce stood, his hands clasped before him with a white-knuckled strength, his expression pained from a memory he wouldn’t share. Sunset would be here soon, and he’d ignored all my suggestions to leave. He claimed Al would leave him alone as long as he was “protecting” me. I didn’t need protecting. Okay, maybe I did.

One of Jenks’s returning children had given Pierce a heavier coat, garden stained and looking like it hadn’t been washed since last fall. It went all the way to the ground, and Pierce looked odd with his dirty bare feet peeping out from under it.

Jenks was a tortured presence at my other side as his home burned with Matalina inside it. Tears glittered into dust as they fell from him, a pure silver that gave him an unreal glow, almost as if he were a ghost. Each breath was pained, rising from deep within him, hurting.

His children were in the garden, silent. All but Jax had returned, their grief tempered with the unknown. Never had a pixy tried to live past his or her spouse, and though happy they were together, there was no understanding of what came next—joyful that their father was alive, yet mourning their mother. They were confused, not understanding how they could be both.