“How much does this supposed cure cost, exactly?”

“I don’t know. The fee is different for everyone. I’ve heard as low as fifty, as high as two fifty.”

I was pretty sure she didn’t mean only fifty dollars. Fifty thousand was a big number, but we did have it in the bank. I’d put every bit of profit into savings and built up a great nest egg even before my inheritance. We had more than fifty thousand in the bank—a lot more with the addition of the inheritance from my grandparents on my dad’s side. I clutched the edges of my sheets and allowed myself a thin measure of hope. To believe maybe there was a way out of this that didn’t involve a pine box, hearse, off-key choir, and questionable meat platter.

As long as it didn’t involve breaking my moral code, I was willing to listen to the warlock. Who was I kidding? Just interacting with a warlock was enough to send me straight to hell, according to Pastor Wrightway. And yes, that was his name. Rather convenient for a pastor.

“I see it in your eyes, Alena. You know I’m right.”

I settled deeper into the bed. “I’ll talk to him, if for nothing else than to show you that you would be wasting your parents’ money. I’ve seen my share of charlatans, Dahlia. They’d come into the bakery with their miracle tool that would save me time and money, the tool that would do the work of three people and ten machines. The spinning whisker. The fancy chopper. The silly egg cookers. All garbage.” I blew a raspberry.

Dahlia went off on a tangent that I listened to with only half an ear.

“Hey, I asked if you have any siblings?”

Her question sent a shot of pain through me. Five years ago we’d lost my only sibling, and it was a loss I felt daily. Since childhood when I’d been picked on for having crooked teeth and glasses, he’d been my defender and my best friend. There had been no one I trusted more. No one I thought of as often.

I smoothed a hand over the sheet. “I did. A brother named Tad. He . . . he caught the Aegrus virus about five years ago.”

“Shit, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“Your poor parents.”

I bit my lip, wanting to blurt out that they were anything but poor; oh, poop on it. “They think it’s punishment from God. The virus, that is, and since he left the church, they said it was justice.”

“Oh, man.” She sucked in a slow breath. “They’re Firstamentalists, then?”

I didn’t want to correct her that it wasn’t just my parents who’d gone to the Church of the Firsts. I’d attended with them every week since as long as I could remember. My big mistake? Marrying outside the church. Roger had been my one rebellion, and it had gotten me kicked out of the congregation. Since then, the fact that my parents spoke to me at all was a wonder.

Yet the faith was still the way I’d been raised, and I had believed. Even if I wasn’t allowed to attend anymore. There were things I’d grown up with that were so firmly ingrained I couldn’t let them go, even now that I’d turned away from the faith. I didn’t drink, I didn’t swear. But I wore shorts that came above my knees and let my hair go unbraided. I was a real rebel as far as my parents were concerned.

The church forbade anyone from within its congregation to interact and befriend people outside the Walls and was rather strict with the rules. My family had followed the way of the Firstamentalist beliefs for longer than I’d been alive.

Even my grandmother on my mother’s side, my yaya, went to services. Though her attendance was rather erratic and she was likely to spout off when she shouldn’t, she got away with it because of her age. Pastor Wrightway tolerated her since she didn’t really do anything wrong. He said she was crazy. Some days I thought he was right. Most days I just enjoyed the way she saw the world. Yaya had been the one to start my love of baking. She saw me take to it and encouraged me from a young age to pursue my passion.

“That’s why your parents haven’t come to see you?” Dahlia asked. Her parents had tried at least, and they lived on the East Coast. Maybe that was why they hadn’t made it: to save money for her supposed cure?

I cleared my throat. “Yeah. They think they’ll go to hell if they show me compassion, since I obviously deserve to be sick and die.”

“Shit, that’s rough.”

I shrugged. “I knew it would be this way the second I was diagnosed.” Not that knowing the way things would fall out made it any easier. Compassion wasn’t something Firstamentalists understood. One of the reasons, outside of Roger, I pulled away from them. I could believe some things the Firstamentalists taught, but not everything. In other words, I was a mess of contradictions and I knew it.

“I’m tired,” I said.

“Me too.”

Apparently, though, the day wasn’t done with me yet, because it got even stranger when my grandmother pushed her way through my door.

Without a hazmat suit on.

CHAPTER 2

“Yaya!” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing; her wrinkled face and sparkling green eyes were a balm to my aching heart even while her presence terrified me. The last thing I wanted was for her to get sick. If me getting sick weren’t bad enough, to infect my own grandmother, who was the sweetest and probably the sassiest woman I knew, would surely send my soul to hell.

“Yaya, what are you doing here?”

She closed the door behind her and went on her tiptoes to peer out the square piece of glass.