What the Dead Know (Into Shadow, #4)

by Nghi Vo

Maryse’s skin crawled at being so close to this dead woman, because she was dead, had been dead, would always be dead, and oh, how she smiled.

“What does it say?” she asked anyway. Nina’s mouth worked. “Hate,” she recited blandly, the voice of a woman reporting on a disaster from very far away. “Hate. Hate. Dead. Always dead. Dead forever. Pain. Cold. Cold. River. Cold. Hate. Hate. Hate you. Die. Die. Hate you.”

“I don’t know why he killed her,” Nina said softly. “What reason could he have had?” Maryse didn’t have an answer for her, but she found herself speaking, thinking of the flash of a pink palm in the water, the river women from all along the length of the great Mississippi. “As many reasons as there are women in the water,” she said.

She wondered whether she saw a hand, white this time and calloused by the telegraph’s bar, waving from the waves; whether the woman was thankful, as her sister Nina didn’t want to be. But of course she wasn’t. She was dead, and Maryse had finally learned, after five years as a medium, what the dead spoke of. Hate. Pain. Cold. Dead. Always dead. Dead forever.