Page 22 of The Sisters of Crimson House

“I don’t know why she bothers when she’ll be dead in a year.”

Charley jumped. She hadn’t realized Celeste was on the porch until her voice drifted toward her from the dark, the glowing cherry of her cigarette illuminating razor blade cheekbones.

“How do you know that?” Charley said, immediately regretting how squeaky her voice sounded when asking such a dumb question. This was Celeste’s gift: living in order to know how others would cease to be.

Her reply was another deep drag on her cigarette. Her mother was forever warning her not to pester her aunt with questions, Celeste the black hole, the antimatter to Nicole’s universal love and sunshine. But her mother was not here to stop her.

Celeste chuckled, exhaling a plume of smoke.

“Do you mind if I sit out here?” Charley asked, easing onto one of the weatherbeaten rattan chairs that persisted despite the elements.

“Only if you don’t ask me for a cigarette.”

“It’s not going to kill me, is it?” This got a snort out of Celeste. Charley was pleased. This was one of the only moments she didn’t mind being invisible to the Brydes’ collective radar, her expiration date known only to her.

“I’m still not giving you a cigarette. I am quite certain your mom would kill me over that,” said Celeste. She did not look at her niece but continued to gaze up at the night sky, the stars unusually vivid despite the humidity.

Charley fidgeted in the silence that followed. “That woman inside, the guest mom read?” she tried again. “She’s going to be dead in a year?”

“Well, we’re all going to die, kid.”

“Really?” she complained to her aunt, wishing she took her seriously.

“Sorry. Am I not allowed any fun with this?” Celeste took a drag off her cigarette and exhaled slowly, finally turning to study her niece. “But to answer your question, yes. And it’s a waste of the guest’s and your mother’s time.”

Ice in her veins. That casual yes, like Celeste had just confirmed that the guest was a brunette or a Sagittarius, not on a collision course with death.

“But people pay her to work miracles.”

“I think she’s giving that woman what she paid for.”

“Which is what?” asked Charley, quietly marveling over the attention she was receiving from her notoriously private aunt.

“Reassurance that she matters. That being in a body on this planet at this moment in time mattered to the people who love her, the people who might still love her.”

“So what’s wrong with that?” asked Charley, not following.

“It’s delaying the inevitable. You want my actual opinion? It’s a waste of time and energy.”

“You think Mom is giving her false hope?” She’d never heard anyone question her mother’s abilities. It pissed her off, but there was something else stirring there. Grudging admiration? She spent so much of her time examining the ways she failed to fit into the workings of her perfectly magical family that maybe she hadn’t considered how the rest of them might be perceived.

“She’s doing the job assigned her,” said Celeste mildly.

“Then what exactly do you do?” Charley said, her heart immediately seizing.

Celeste looked at her, her glare a blade that sliced clean to the bone.

Charley hadn’t meant to say that out loud. “I didn’t mean—”

“Mean what you say, Charley. Never apologize for it.” Celeste stood, stubbing out her cigarette on the porch railing. “What do you want to know?”

Celeste moved from the shadows, moonlight revealing a hawklike face. She was beautiful and unsettling in the way a bird of prey could be. Charley swallowed hard. As much as Celeste terrified her sometimes, she was the only one in the family who might truly understand Charley’s plight.

“Why do you never perform during the Spectacular?” she asked, surprised to see that the question made her aunt smile. Or grimace. They both looked the same to Charley.

“I am in service to the grim reaper. That doesn’t exactly make me fun at parties.”

To know when a loved one—or an enemy—would die? She’d never considered until now how Celeste might actually be the most powerful of all the family members. But she was relegated to the shadows because of…manners? Even at a psychic soiree, death was considered a faux pas.