the best, like Joseph. At just the thought of him, Elena’s pulse jumped, her face heating.
“Elena?” Ariel nudged her with an elbow. “So did you talk to her?”
She nodded in response to her sister’s impatient question.
Ariel uttered a little scream of frustration. “So tell me, does she know where Irina is?”
“No, and I actually believe her. She thought Irina had gone into foster care, like you had.”
Ariel had been bounced from home to home because of the curse, because every time she admitted to seeing dead people, her foster parents thought she was crazy and either shipped her off to another family or a psychiatric facility.
Guilt tied Elena’s stomach into knots. Ever since Ariel had found her, she’d struggled to meet her younger sister’s turquoise gaze, not just because of what her grandmother had done but who she was.
Ariel’s brow wrinkled as she narrowed her eyes. Her voice soft, she observed, “There isn’t a lot of love between you and your grandma.”
“You don’t understand.” Elena dreaded explaining, but her sister deserved to know the whole truth, all of the family secrets.
An arm slid around her shoulders as her sister half embraced her, bumping her hip against Elena’s. “I know,” she said.
Ariel couldn’t know everything; she only knew that Thora had been the one to report Myra. Elena pulled away, unable to accept her sister’s affection until she’d told her everything.
“What do you think you know?” she asked Ariel, whose turquoise eyes softened with sympathy.
“I can see that you didn’t have it any easier than I did growing up, maybe even harder,” Ariel commiserated.
“I had my dad,” Elena said, not bothering to claim her grandmother. “He loved me…until he died six months ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Ariel said, lifting her arm again but instead of embracing her sister, she brought it back against her side.
Regret over rebuffing her sister twisted Elena’s stomach, along with the grief she still felt over losing her dad. “He’d been sick a long time.”
Ariel began again, “I’m sorry—”
But Elena waved off her sympathy. She wouldn’t bother Ariel with the details about his health. She had something more relevant to tell her. “His name was Elijah.”
Ariel stopped walking, her long, slim body taut and still. “It was?”
“It’s a family name they kept using even though my father’s ancestors changed their last name years ago, when they first came to America.” That was why Ariel’s search for McGregor descendants who may have resumed the vendetta hadn’t turned up Thora. Or Elena. She’d found Thora only through the complaint sworn out against their mother.
Ariel’s eyes widened, the turquoise the only color in her pale face. “What are you saying?”
From her sister’s reaction, Elena was pretty certain that she’d figured it out. “My grandmother is a descendant of Eli McGregor. She named her son after him.”
“After the man who killed our ancestor, burning her at a stake.” Ariel’s voice cracked with emotion. Their mother had died the same way. Burned.
While Ariel could see her ghost, Elena had witnessed the murder…in a vision. She blinked back tears, saddened that she would never have the chance to see her mother again.
“So you’re a McGregor.” Ariel expelled a shaky breath, stirring the red hair that had fallen across her cheek.
Pride lifted Elena’s chin. “And a Durikken.”
Ariel sighed. “I’ve been trying to find McGregors, trying to figure out which one of them might have resurrected the vendetta.”
“You think I could be the killer?”
Ariel studied her, as if assessing her older sister’s strength. Then she shook her head, tumbling her hair around her shoulders. “No.”
Elena’s pride stung; her sister hadn’t sounded convinced. “Are you sure? After all you really don’t know me. Until just a couple weeks ago we hadn’t seen each other in twenty years.”
A little chuckle sputtered out between Ariel’s lips. “Do you want me to think you’re the killer?”
“No. I want you to really believe that I’m not.”
“You’re right. We haven’t seen each other since we were kids, but I know you, Elena. You’re incapable of murder.” Ariel’s turquoise gaze lifted toward the house.
Elena suspected she didn’t seek her niece’s bedroom window. She’d never invited her sister inside, so Ariel would have no way of knowing which wing was Elena’s and which Thora’s. Elena wanted her sister to have no contact with the bitter old woman. If not for Stacia having been tired from her fitful night, Elena would have taken her along to meet Ariel at the playground where they’d met before.
“What about your grandmother?” Ariel asked.
“Her family changed their name from McGregor because they considered Eli McGregor a madman who should have been punished for what he’d done—”
Bitterness hardened Ariel’s voice when she interrupted, “But the townspeople had revered him for killing a witch.”
“Or feared him,” Elena said. “He was crazy. The vendetta was crazy, and his children changed their name because they wanted no part of it.”
But she couldn’t say the same of Thora, not and believe it. Her grandmother claimed she’d only taken away Myra’s daughters because she was an unfit mother, but Elena had always suspected something other than concern for the children or love of her son had motivated Thora’s actions. Vengeance.
“None of her family wanted anything to do with the vendetta?” Ariel asked.
“My father was her only son.” Perhaps that was why her love for him had bordered on obsessive. Did Elena love Stacia like that, so much that she shut out everyone else? Kirk had excused his absence by claiming that Elena had no room in her life for anyone but her daughter and her father. Not her husband. He might have been right, but Elena hated to think she was more than just physically like her grandmother.
“And your father’s dead,” Ariel concluded, then shook her head. “It’s all so incredible. How’d a McGregor hook up with a Durikken? Coincidence?”
Elena glanced toward the house, not the wing where her daughter slept, hopefully, a dreamless slumber, but toward her grandmother’s wing. She hoped her parents’ meeting had been just a coincidence. She bit her lip, then released it to sigh. “My father was a good man. A loving man. He wouldn’t have sought our mother out to hurt her.”
Ariel’s
