Shadow Burns: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Preternatural Affairs Book 4) by S.M. Reine

powder, all brown and mottled green.
    Herbs?
    At first, I could only manage to stare at Gertie. She was drenched in blood. I’d just seen her eating what I could only assume was human meat. But she was offering me that bowl, and she wasn’t acting at all threatening.
    My fear waned. “What do you want me to do with this?”
    She kept the bowl uplifted, watching me expectantly.
    Kids. I didn’t get kids. Even dead kids.
    “Don’t take it,” Isobel urged.
    “But I think she’s trying to tell me something.” And it didn’t seem like that something was “I’m going to savor sucking the marrow from your bones,” because I had the feeling I’d already have been dead if that was her plan.
    Isobel whined as I accepted the bowl and sifted the herbs through my fingers. There were several different substances mixed together in there. The faint, earthen smells of dried leaves wafted from it, tangling with my sense of the flowing energies.
    Saffron, pennyroyal, snapdragon.
    Heck, I was even pretty sure there was some fresh grave dirt in there.
    “You want me to cast a spell,” I guessed.
    Gertie offered me a corked glass bottle next. Her fingers left bloody smudges on the outside. The inside was filled with oil, which the label identified as olive, though the color was all wrong.
    A quick sniff told me that it was made from wormwood.
    What could I do with those herbs and this oil?
    And then Gertie answered the question just as silently as she had posed it.
    She offered me a butcher’s knife.
    It looked exactly like the one that Herbert had used to slit his wrists. The blade was a hand-cut fang of iron, with a hilt of stained wood that had been textured for easy gripping. It belonged in a centuries-old kitchen, when families would have passed it down for generations, butchering hundreds of pigs and gutting fish with a single knife.
    Gertie wanted me to anoint it. Oils and herbs. The saffron and pennyroyal might give me some kind of strength specific to killing demons—I’d read about them in Suzy’s Book of Shadows. The snapdragon, I didn’t know, but the wormwood oil would seal it all.
    I had a feeling that it would all come together to allow me to slaughter whatever big and ugly was running the house.
    The only question left was…why? Why did one of the apparitions want to arm me with a weapon?
    “What are you thinking?” Isobel whispered, as though afraid speaking any louder would set Gertie off.
    It was a more difficult question than she realized. I was thinking an awful lot of things. They raced through my head, tumbling over each other, a cacophony of confusion and semi-certainty.
    We’re going to die if I don’t have a weapon.
    This kid isn’t attacking. She can’t be that bad, even if she might be a cannibal ghost.
    Maybe she’s not a cannibal ghost. None of this is real. The kitchen, the vines, whatever—none of this can possibly be real.
    We’re still going to die without a weapon.
    We can’t trust Gertie. This is a bad idea.
    Bad idea or not, I need this weapon .
    “I’m thinking I’m going to anoint this knife,” I said slowly.
    And yeah, I thought it was just as crazy as Isobel obviously did. I just didn’t know what else to do at that point.
    There was a patch of counter where the blood had mostly dried. I set the bowl and the oil on that.
    “Bad idea,” Isobel said. “This is such a bad idea.”
    Gertie hovered at the edge of my vision, watching as I drew a quick circle in the blood. I was already slimy from having touched the counter earlier; I didn’t even have to get any new blood to use as finger paint. Add a little salt from the mysteriously un-bloody shaker next to the stove, and the magic snapped into place.
    The energy from it was barely enough to tickle my sinuses, but that was all right—I just needed a way to contain the energy of all those herbs.
    I set the knife in the center of the circle, then opened myself to the energy in the kitchen.
    Let me tell you, there’s a