Roxie's POV
I did not scream.
I think a part of me wanted to. The part that was still a little girl who loved her sister. But something colder and stronger rose up first, and I reached out, and I touched the severed hand with two steady fingers.
It was wrong. The moment my skin met it, I knew. It was not cold the way a dead thing is cold. It was not heavy the way flesh is heavy. It felt like touching a picture of a hand, a shape with no weight behind it.
"Stop." Celeste's voice cracked. She yanked the cloth back over the thing, and the hand simply... folded. Came apart. Dissolved into a thin gray smoke that smelled of burnt sugar, and was gone. The ring with it. All of it. A trick of light and herbs and nothing.
"It isn't real," I said. My voice did not shake. I was proud of that. "I
