Free The Breaker's Promise (YA Urban Fantasy) (Fixed Points Book 2) by Conner Kressley

saw that I wasn’t the only one who yearned for a little clarity. Dahlia sat cross-legged in front of her daughter’s tombstone. I cringed when I saw what she was wearing; a bright white shirt with matching pants and hat. White was the color or mourning, the color of absence; for the Breakers at least. Since Wendy’s death, Dahlia had seesawed in and out of the color. As was custom, she wore nothing but white for weeks after the funeral. The whole compound did. It was only fitting for a seer. Slowly though, bits of color dripped back into her wardrobe; until she was back to normal. Every now and then though, there were times when she’d dipped back into the deep end of her sorrow. Those were the white days, and apparently, this was one of them.
    I froze when I saw her.
    “Don’t bother, I sensed you coming an acre away,” she croaked, still looking at the headstone in front of her. It was so strange, just how precisely the image on the stone looked like Wendy’s face. It had the same mysterious eyes, the same low hanging bangs, the same pursed lips. It was like looking into a granite colored portal to the past.
    “Sorry, I didn’t realize anybody was here,” I stammered.
    “Ha,” she chuckled harshly. “Really? Of all things, that is what you’re sorry about.”  She turned to me. Her eyes her cold, but rimmed with red.
    I set my chin and stared to back away. “Look, I just wanted to pay my respects. I’ll come back another time.” I turned.
    “Why?” Dahlia’s voice sounded over my shoulder. I turned to find her standing up. She looked smaller, much less assuming than her usual. “That’s the piece of all of this that I can’t make fit. She was best I had ever seen; the best anyone had ever seen. She saw everything, so I know she saw how this would end for her. Why did she allow herself to be taken from us?”
    Fresh tears had pooled in her eyes and I realized I was being faced with one of those rare times when Dahlia was more a mother than her people’s matriarch. She was in pain, and she just wanted answers.
    “She said it was her choice,” I said, walking back toward her. That awful day came back to me in flashes of blood, tears, and daylight. “She said she was tired of living her entire life on the outside and that, if she had to die, that it was worth it.” She also told Casper that she loved him and that it wasn’t over for them, but those bits of information wouldn’t do anything to put balm on Dahlia’s wound, so I left them out. “If it makes it any easier, she was at peace. Wendy was happy.”
    Dahlia’s face got hard. Her eyes dried and her body stiffened. “That’s quite a selfish way to look at life, isn’t it?”
    “I don’t think-“
    “And I’ll thank you not to call her Wendy. You’ve done enough by besmirching her tombstone with the moniker. I won’t have you doing the same to her memory.”
    “She chose that name,” I said, suddenly defensive.
    “It was not her choice to make. Just as allowing her life to be cut short was not her choice to make.” She leveled a withering gaze at me, her hand at the dahlia pin on her throat. “I don’t expect you to know what the first thing a Breaker learns is; given how incredibly lacking your upbringing was. Suffice it to say, it is of such importance that we teach it to our children in their cradles. We whisper it in their ears as they drift to sleep in our arms. We tell it to them so often and with such fervor that we mourn if it isn’t their first words.” She stepped closer. “Duty. Comes. First.”
    I balked. She was still walking toward me; advancing even though there was no room left between us. Was she trying to drive me away from Wendy’s grave?
    “But they were my daughter’s first words; my seer daughter, my special daughter. She understood this principle. It was in the fabric of who she was. I know because I put it there. So I had been wracking my brain trying to understand how my daughter, who was so