The morning brings me an empty ground.
Not a single seed this morning, and that is more worrisome than anything else. There have always been the dead.
Things are no longer strange; they are wrong. And wrong means trouble.
I hurry back to the cemetery, spying a wolf lurking around. They don’t come close to town or leave the woods much, except in winter when they are hungry and steal goats or chickens. It seems to saunter away, but still I keep an eye on it as I settle over a grave and press my palms to its dirt.
But no lightning strike comes.
“Illyas?” I say, filling another cup of dirt water and drinking it, ignoring the rich silt that chokes the back of my throat.
Instead of the usual silvery light of death, I see the mottled grey of the border between life and the Waiting Place of death. It’s as if I’m underwater and sunlight is piercing through the water above my head.
But it feels odd here, not only because I never come here, but because my movement is slurred, like the time I drank too much arak when I found out I was pregnant and tried to do away with the child. I got drunk and vomited for two days after, but the child clung to my womb.
Of course, I’m grateful Layala was fierce, even in the womb.
“Illyas!”
He doesn’t hear me or come to me, and I’m stuck sitting on top of a grave, a wolf just feet away from me.
I try again, thinking of Illyas’s face, his smile, his warmth, even in death. But for the first time, death bars my entry into it.
This is worse than trouble; this is danger.
And so is the wolf.