Page 72 of Truthfinder’s Promise
Jensen flinched. “I’ll be the first to admit I have done some pretty questionable things at the request of a beautiful woman, but isn’t your mother’s corpse in there?”
“No. I cremated her and tossed the ashes in a dumpster.”
“Isn’t it illegal to dispose of human remains that way?”
“I have no idea. I didn’t look it up. It gives me great joy to think of her ashes languishing in some landfill beneath old lasagna and rotting vegetables. The point is, I’m pretty sure that sarcophagus is the entrance to the repository but the damn lid won’t budge.”
Jensen glanced at it. “Not to be condescending, but have you tried shoving? It’s already come off a little.”
“Yes, I tried shoving. Shoving doesn’t work.”
The sarcophagus lid had moved, though, maybe a centimeter. Not straight to the side, like a person trying to shove it off would move it, but as if the center of the lid had a pin stuck through, and someone had started to rotate it on that pin, like the hand on a clock.
“Are you sure?” Jensen sounded skeptical.
“Would you like to roll up your sleeves and use your big, bad, manly werewolf strength to show me how it’s done?”
He pointed at himself. “Still not a werewolf.”
“You turn into a wolf at will. How does that not make you a werewolf?”
“Unlike fictional werewolves, I don’t howl at the moon, am not allergic to silver, and I’ve never eaten the heart of anything, much less a man.”
“Alright Mr. Not a Werewolf, do you want to use your manly Shifter strength to reveal how I, poor, merely human female that I am, simply lack the requisite strength to move the sarcophagus lid while you will manage it with ease?”
“Not when you put it like that.” But he braced his hands on the lid, dug in and pushed. She felt the tingle of his magic—so different-feeling from Aspect—and his muscles bulged, thick veins popping out along his forearms as he strained.
Predictably, the lid didn’t move.
Meredith popped her hip against the sarcophagus and dramatically fanned herself as he stopped pushing, breathing hard. “Oh, please don’t stop on my account. I was just enjoying the view.”
He straightened. The veins on his forearms had popped out, and it was a remarkably good view. He glared at her. “You could have told me it was magically sealed.”
“Oh, but I don’t know that it is. It could just be an extremely heavy piece of marble. I do suspect that magic achieved all of its current movement.”
“Okay. What did you do to get it to move?”
“I don’t know. It hadn’t moved at all before you came. I was looking for a hint or some kind of hidden lever when you scared me and…” She trailed off, lifting up the hand with her damaged finger. “And I ripped off my fingernail.” She laughed. “Fucking of course. We are talking about something my mother designed, after all.”
“Of course what?”
Meredith nodded at the wall where Jensen had seen Agonia. Below the word were three short sentences inscribed in a looping scrawl. The purpose of life is pain. The pain of life is death. But the cost of death is a life.
“That means something to you?”
Now it did. “If the purpose of life is pain, and the cost of death is a life? Pain moves this door.”
“Okay. How much pain do you think it takes to get us into the repository?”
“Given the inscription? I’d say the amount it would take to kill a person from pain alone.”
Jensen looked at her with something that straddled the divide between trepidation and horror. “Are you telling me that your mother could quantify how much pain it takes to kill someone? Quantify it enough to tie it to a spell?”
To sugarcoat the truth or to just throw it out there? “Yep.” The way he looked at her in response… She pasted on a fake smile. “Rapidly recalculating earlier expressed sentiments about trusting each other and seeing where this relationship goes?”
“Why would I be doing that?”
“Because you’re looking at me like you just realized I issued forth from the womb of a monster. Which, fair, I kind of did. It’s fine if I’m more than you bargained for. I assure you, my laundry list of baggage only has room to grow. In fact—”
