Shadow Unit 15 Read Free Page A

fine."
    "You're boring today," Saito complains. "Can't even get you past worried about your team monster. I could do that. Be on your team. I have a knack for interviews. I can really get down deep."
    "You're never getting out of this room, Jason."
    "And you're not the deal I bargained for. Give me Dallas. Chicken in the bread pan, picking out dough ... No," Saito says, and jerks backward against his chair in frustration. "Give me Hafidha Gates."
    "She's fine," Brady repeats.
    "Have you stayed at the office while she was in the field? Have you let her out of your sight yet?"
    "She's been in the field without me there." That's a mistake. Defensive.
    "Ooh. There's something," Saito says. "Give me that."
    "It's nothing."
    "Liar." Saito sits up, settles back. "She did something that makes your spine crawl. Give it to me. It'll do."
    Leesburg, VA
    Her shroud wasn't even finished yet.
    Ash had started it right after seeing an episode of Six Feet Under with a green burial. People thought it was morbid and creepy. "Way too goth, even for you," Jessica had said, while Ash searched for undyed linen cloth and researched plant dyes for the silk floss she'd dye herself. But you understood. Death is a part of life, and abstract at nineteen.
    Ash hadn't abandoned it as a teenage fancy. She cut the linen, stitched it by hand, dyed the thread with berries and leaves and bark, stitched pictures and words and signs. She took it out on each of the sabbats and on her birthday to stitch on it. If she only got a little done, she'd shrug, smile, and put it back in its box to wait for the next time. There's enough time left when you're nineteen, when you're twenty-four, when you're not even married yet, when you're only twenty-six.
    But it wasn't finished. The needle had still been threaded through a line of madder-dyed silk; at the spring equinox she'd been stitching a glyph she'd designed herself that meant gentleness. You don't know how it was supposed to finish, and so you pushed the needle through in a simple running chain to write the date of her death, and to mark the approximate places where her heart, kidneys, and eyes would have been—what the transplant people took, before they disconnected her from the machines. The sun, the scales, the ram's head. This was your job: Even though you didn't believe anymore, you knew the signs and symbols, you knew her meaning.
    You couldn't bear to help wash her body, or to braid her long, long hair into the crown she liked the most. Couldn't bear to look at the bruises and the fractures that would never heal, the sutures from the transplants raised and ugly on her skin. No one minded that you couldn't. And so you sat in the room outside and stitched the last clumsy marks that weren't enough. Someone always came to touch your shoulder to see how you were doing, if you needed anything. Ash's brother, Connor, came to help you pack herbs in the pockets of the shroud, and Ash's mother, Sandra—that name was awkward on your tongue, she'd always been Mrs. Campbell—walked you to your car parked under the magnolias and gave you one more hug before you went home to sleep before the ceremony.
     
    *
     
    They arrange to fetch you in the car hired for the family. No one wears black. Ash would have hated it. Most wear green, her favorite colour—you're wearing a deep loden green shawl around your shoulders, fastened with her favorite shawl pin—a copper lance and a knotwork ring. Connor takes your hand to help you out of the car and holds it as you walk. You squeeze it because that's what you're supposed to do. Because it's supposed to feel comforting.
    You leave your shoes outside the place marked as the entrance to the circle, and walk the spiral, turning inward. Ashley's mother respected her religion the way your parents wouldn't have, back when you believed it, too. She had talked to the people in Ashley's circle, and let them do everything the way they thought Ash would want it. Your bare feet grow cold as