I didn’t appreciate her isn’t-this-obvious? tone. “Doesn’t everyone cry when a loved one dies?”

“Mambos don’t,” she said, using the word she’d called me when she realized I absorbed powers after drinking undead blood. “Not unless they want the person to stay.”

“But he didn’t stay,” I said, anger at Don’s pain sharpening my words. “He died.”

“Yet here he is,” Marie replied with a flick of her fingers toward Don. “A ghost. Or more precisely, your ghost.”

Six

What do you mean, her ghost?”

The same question resounded across my mind, but Tyler asked it first. Maybe I was still too shocked to respond.

“It’s the blood,” Marie replied, nodding at my red-smeared lip. The unearthly echo had left her voice, and she spoke with her normal sweet Southern drawl.

“Blood unlocks the power of the grave. With it, a Mambo can raise Remnants and transform the newly departed into a ghost if the Mambo draws her blood when that person dies.”

I racked my brain to remember the last moments of Don’s life. Had I inadvertently drawn some of my blood, as I’d done now by biting my lip? No, I’d been crying too hard—

Bones’s pitying look coincided with a flash of understanding. Vampire fluids were pink due to the limited water-to-blood ratio in our bodies, but when Don was dying, I’d cried so much that my tears had turned scarlet, staining my blouse and the floor by Don’s bedside where I’d knelt, not leaving even after his heart had stopped beating . . .

“You can turn people into ghosts?” Tyler sounded almost afraid.

Guilt made my voice a croak. “Not anymore.”

Then I met my uncle’s gaze. If I lived to be a thousand, I still wouldn’t forget the anguish I saw there—or the anger.

You did this to me! his expression screamed, and he no longer meant the Remnants’ pitiless assault. That would end, but his suspension between this world and the next wouldn’t. He wasn’t a spirit who’d held on because he still had one final task to accomplish, as we’d been hoping these past several months. No, he was one of the cursed few who could never cross over, and it was because of me. The fact that I hadn’t known what I was doing when it happened was almost moot by comparison.

“I am so sorry.”

The words vibrated from the depth of my emotion. Bones took my hand, his grip conveying both strength and comfort, but I felt neither beneath the crushing weight of my culpability. No apology could fix this, and everyone here knew it.

That’s why my next words weren’t to beg forgiveness and why I also held my tears at bay. Considering what they’d done before, they would only be salt in the wound now. Instead, I dug my fangs into my lower lip, glad at the pain that led to an instant trickle of blood.

“You said not just humans, Don, so what else did Madigan do his genetic experimentations on?”