Ashwini lifted the lid off the box.
30
Felicity’s box held an impossibly small amount for an entire life.
A pretty gold chain with a heart-shaped locket sat inside a decorative wooden box with a blue velvet lining. Opening the locket, Ashwini saw pictures of a man and woman who looked to be in their fifties or early sixties. “Probably her grandparents.”
There were three more photos. The one of Seth with Felicity, both of them laughing and waving foam fingers in the air with one hand, the other closed around hot dogs bursting with all the fixings. Felicity was beaming at the camera, Seth at her. “She knew,” Ashwini said, running a thumb over the red of the frame to brush away a fleck of dust. “She couldn’t look at this photograph and not know how he felt about her.”
Janvier picked up the second-to-last photograph, its frame sparkly pink. “This one, too, holds those who loved her.” He turned it to show her an image of Felicity with Carys, Sina, and Aaliyah, the four women laughingly holding up pretty-colored drinks at a bar. Felicity was wearing a body-hugging white dress and had a silky-looking scarf of sunny yellow around her neck, purple butterflies on the fabric. She looked young and pretty and happy.
The last photograph was of the older couple in the locket again. Ashwini traced the tractor in the background, took in the endless turned earth, caught the glint of a shovel in the corner of the frame, the sun lines that marked the faces of the two smiling people who looked out of the image. “She was a country girl.”
Janvier’s eyes became chips of malachite, hard and icy. “One who came to the city to make a better life for herself, find a man who’d offer her the security she craved.”
“Except she found a predator instead.” It was too common a story, the predators as often human as immortal, but that didn’t mean each and every victim didn’t deserve justice.
Her resolve firm, Ashwini returned to the contents of the box. A small figurine of a cat chasing a ball, chipped in one corner, a white teapot with pretty blue flowers, and a pen from a chain hotel sat on top of a shoe box filled with stubs and papers. Setting the shoe box aside for the moment, Ashwini and Janvier went through the rest.
It wasn’t much. More inexpensive ornaments that had meant something to Felicity, but that she’d been too embarrassed to bring into her new “home.” Given what Ashwini knew of Felicity’s nature by now, she was certain the shame and embarrassment had been fostered in her by another.
The woman who’d been cheerful and hopeful and bouncy as a bunny, the woman who’d had every intention of inviting her working-girl friends to tea in her Vampire Quarter house, wouldn’t have felt it herself without outside pressure.
“That’s it,” Janvier said after removing two books from the box.
There were no notations on the dog-eared pages, no scraps of paper hidden within.
“Shoe box,” she said, hoping against hope that Felicity had left them a thread to tug, a trail to follow.
“She didn’t keep a proper grocery list.” Ashwini showed Janvier how Felicity had scribbled herself a reminder to buy milk around a recipe she’d ripped out of a magazine. “But she was compulsive about her finances.” Those documents were neatly bound by a rubber band.
“When you are poor,” Janvier said, “you never forget the value of money, non?”
Ashwini ran her finger under the rubber band. “I was never poor, except for the time I was on my own.” She’d always remember the day she ran from Banli House, racing from the terror of it in flimsy slippers not meant for gravel and tarmac. The soles of her feet had been bloodied lumps of meat afterward, tiny stones embedded into her flesh.
The pain hadn’t mattered. She’d found the lonely dark of the road, waved a truck to a stop, and taken her life in her hands when she’d jumped into the cab. Better, she’d thought in her panicked and angry state, to die in freedom at the hands of a maniac truck driver than end up insane in the prison of Banli.
As it was, the driver hadn’t been a maniac. He’d just been a lonely man who wanted some conversation on the road and who hadn’t seen any reason not to give her a ride to her grandma’s home out of state. Of course, Ashwini didn’t have a grandparent out of state, but it had been as good a story as any.
“On your own at fifteen, cher,” Janvier said gently. “I think you understand the meaning of poor.”
Ashwini thought of how she’d begged her way into a dishwashing job at the diner where the trucker had dropped her off, her wages paid in meals. She’d slept rough in the woods nearby, moved on after a bare three days, afraid she hadn’t run far enough. By then, she’d scoped out the drivers who patronized the diner, deliberately using her ability for the first time in her life to separate the good from the bad. And the good ones took her far enough away that she’d finally felt safe.
“The funny thing is,” she said, her eyes on the shoe box, “I ran in the opposite direction to Felicity.”
“A rural area?”
Ashwini nodded. “I’d seen a documentary, knew the big fruit orchards always needed fruit pickers.” She’d timed her escape for summer, conscious she’d never make it in winter without the right gear. “I turned up and worked hard and lived in a barn or two to save money for winter. I snuck in after everyone else went home, snuck out before the farmers woke up.”
“Will you tell me how you came to the Guild?” Janvier asked, his voice dark music that seduced and coaxed and made her feel alive.