Kick The Candle (Knight Games) by Genevieve Jack

little. “Who?” I repeated.
    “My mother. Only, she’s been dead for ten years.”

Chapter 9
Medium

    “Y ou saw your mother’s ghost?” I looked toward the empty space where he’d been staring but couldn’t sense anything. Even when I focused with the part of me that was the witch, the living room was empty. “I don’t see anything. Is she still there?”
    His breath caught, and I noticed his fingers whiten as he caught himself on the countertop, fingers narrowly missing the shards of broken glass. Red wine dripped off the edge of the granite, but he didn’t seem to notice. “No. She’s gone. She just dissipated.” Closing his lids, he released a shaky exhale.
    I squinted in the direction of his sofa. “Are you sure it wasn’t the wine?” When he didn’t answer me, I glanced back in his direction.
    He winced and shook his head. “I’m sure. I just saw the ghost of my dead mother, Grateful. This isn’t a case of the spins.”
    I spread my hands. “I’m a goddess of the dead. If an apparition of your dead mother was really here, shouldn’t I be able to sense her in some way?”
    “You sort souls. She said hers was already sorted. Maybe you can only see those people who haven’t moved on.”
    “I guess, it’s possible, but—”
    “What’s the Book of Flesh and Bone ?” With his elbows replacing his hands on the granite, he bent at the waist until his forehead rested on his fists. He seemed too exhausted to hold his head up, let alone clean up the broken glass.
    I sighed. Why had I unloaded this burden on Logan? And at this hour of the night? He should have been free of all this. Now I owed him an answer. “The first witch was a woman named Isabella Lockhart. In 1698, Reverend Monk and his Puritan parishioners used a spell from the Book of Flesh and Bone , a grimoire or book of magic given to him by a demon in the woods behind Rick’s house. The spell bound Isabella to her body and allowed Monk to burn her at the stake. Her soul survived only because she stored it inside a living host, her caretaker, Rick. But Reverend Monk and every person who had chanted the spell from the book died instantly from using the dark magic. Their blood became a forced sacrifice to Beelzebub and opened the hellmouth in Monk’s Hill Cemetery.”
    “So, it’s the devil’s own grimoire with recipes to control the living and the dead, flesh and bone. Nice. Definitely dangerous in the wrong hands.”
    “For sure.”
    “So where is it now?”
    “I have no idea. As far as I know, it hasn’t been seen since the day Monk used it on me.”
    Logan shivered. “You’d better find it Grateful. What if that’s what Julius wants? Based on your story about Isabella, the book contains some powerful magic. Maybe he wants to control you with it.”
    “But why would Julius give me the money tonight if he intended to hurt me?” I shook my head, folding my hands.
    Logan straightened. “Maybe he thinks you know where the book is. Maybe he thinks if he gets close enough to you, you will lead him to it.” He bent down to dig under his sink, emerging with a dustpan and hand broom.
    I thought about that. “Why would he think I would know where it was? If anyone would know where the Book of Flesh and Bone was today, it would be Rick. He was there the day I died and lived to tell the tale.”
    Positioning the dustpan, Logan methodically swept glass and spilled wine with the far away expression of someone deep in thought. For a moment, I allowed my brain to blank, absorbed in watching his domestic task. I bounced down from the stool and grabbed a rag from the sink, crouching to wipe the spilled red liquid from the floor.
    “Grateful, why am I seeing my dead mother?” Logan stopped sweeping and glared at me with the beginnings of dark circles under his eyes.
    “What? She’s back?”
    “No. Not at the moment. But, before?”
    I shrugged. The rag was saturated so I stood and wrung it out in the sink. The red swirled the