by Sierra Dean
The two men shook hands, then the fireman put a business card in Callum’s palm and wandered back around to the front of the house, where all the cars were parked.
Callum handed Amelia the card, then returned to the still steaming pile of rubble. A few other members of the pack were standing nearby, wearing similar shell-shocked expressions to one another. It was hard to believe something like this could happen on our property.
This was where we were supposed to be our safest. If we couldn’t feel protected here, how could we expect to find sanctuary anywhere?
Wilder, who had launched into action immediately last night, pulling people from the burning building, carrying heavy loads of water, doing anything in his power to keep order, was standing a few feet away from Callum and the others, his expression difficult to read.
The bar hadn’t meant much to him, he’d barely had time to take advantage of it, since we so rarely found ourselves at Callum’s compound these days. Yet he’d put his own life on the line to save the property and those who lived here.
His cheeks and forehead were black with soot, and his favorite army-green T-shirt was absolutely ruined.
I got to my feet and moved towards him as a moth might move to a light bulb, drawn with magnetic force to the only person on this property I wanted to be near right now.
I approached him quietly, his whole body so rigid I could feel the tension coming off him in waves. He started slightly when he realized I was standing next to him.
Handing him the cup of coffee Lina had given me, I wrapped the afghan around his shoulder so we were both pressed together inside its warmth. He took a sip from the mug before putting an arm around my waist, leaning the weight of his body against me.
“I must smell terrible.” He sounded exhausted, every word a struggle.
“Nah. You smell like campfire. It’s nice.” It was, admittedly, a weird thing to say while staring at the arson-destroyed remains of a beloved home bar, but sometimes you just needed to say the inappropriate thing.
The truth was, it didn’t matter that Wilder smelled like sweat, and anxiety, and burnt wood. He still smelled like Wilder, and it was a scent I had come to think of as home.
“It was Mercy, you know.” I took the coffee cup when he offered it back to me, finally taking a sip. Lina sure knew how to make a mean cup of chicory coffee. I handed it to him again.
“This?” He nodded to the burned shell in front of us.
“Yeah. I saw her last night again, after we got back to the house. I saw her after the fire.”
“Did you say anything to Callum?”
“Not yet. He’s been a little busy. And I’m still not sure he believes me.”
“I’m not sure I would have believed you six months ago. But damn if spending all this time with you hasn’t taught me that anything is possible.”
“I can’t tell if that’s a compliment or not.”
“Just a fact.” He smiled, and in spite of how tired he clearly was, it lit up his eyes, making his whole face look bright and warm. My stomach did a flip-flop. God, how was it even possible or fair for him to be so bloody beautiful? A man like that should come with a warning. Danger: do not look directly into his eyes if you have a weak heart.
I was almost willing to allow myself a moment of happiness, when I saw my brother Ben tromping across the yard towards us. He was dressed impeccably, in a tidy sweater and jeans, without a trace of ash or soot on him. I hadn’t seen him at all through the night, so he must have been off with one of his many lady friends.
He pulled up to a stop beside us and gave me his best approximation of a withering glare. Too bad I’d stopped being intimidated by my twin several years prior.
Now I saw him for what he was: a man who wanted power, and was willing to step on his own sister to get it. He was pissed that Callum had made me the Alpha of the New Orleans pack. He was pissed that I was with Wilder even though Wilder and Ben had a history, and Ben thought the Shaw brothers were no good. In general, Ben was just pissed, and I seemed to bring out the worst in him these days.
He glowered at the two of us, but when Wilder went to move his hand from my waist to give space, I grabbed hold and held firm. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Wilder wasn’t doing anything wrong. Our relationship wasn’t forbidden, and wasn’t even a bad idea: we were both strong wolves, after all, and most werewolf families would rejoice over the potential for Alpha pups.
Not that I was planning on having Wilder’s babies any time soon.
Yikes, how had babies suddenly factored into this?
“Ben,” I said coolly, trying to regain my composure.
“Eugenia.”
“Genie.” I might let Callum get away with calling me by my proper name, but Ben could get over himself.
He rolled his eyes. “What the hell is all this?” He motioned to the disaster scene smoldering at our feet.
“Someone burned down the bar,” I said.
Ben stared at Wilder, trying to figure out how to pin it on him, thanks to the soot and smell of smoke, I was sure.
“Wilder was here saving people’s lives. What were you up to last night?” I narrowed my eyes meaningfully.
I wasn’t even mad at Ben for not being home. He was a grown adult the same as I was, and he wasn’t required to tether himself to the mansion all the time if there were no major pack activities going on. Honestly, I barely came home myself these days, but that was because I had my own pack to deal with.
A topic I’d be better off avoiding in front of my brother.
“I was out.” He said it in a way that told me he was completely uninterested in discussing this any further. Fine, whatever Ben. Who even cared whose house he’d been shacked up at?
My brother had a sense of self-importance that was entirely too royal for his own good. We might be royalty, but it didn’t mean he had a free pass to act like a shithead, especially not with me.
He and Wilder continue to stare at each other, and I had to admit I was secretly a little proud of Wilder for not backing down under Ben’s cold glare. The two of them would probably end up at each others’ throats in the future, but today would not be that day. I had too much other shit to deal with right now without them getting into a dick measuring contest about who was the tougher Alpha.
I could tell them who was tougher.
Me.
I wasn’t entirely sure what had brought that thought into my mind, but it made me smile to myself, though not enough for anyone else to notice. So much had changed for me in the last year. I’d gone from being a background character in this drama to being a star player, and apparently I wasn’t interested in hiding in the shadows anymore.
I was just as smart, tough, and capable as any of these boneheaded alpha-dogs, and that was the reason Callum had chosen to give me the New Orleans pack. To be honest, I’d doubted his reasons ever since it had happened, but not anymore. He had seen something in me he trusted and respected, and I was finally seeing that same thing in myself.
This newfound confidence, even in the face of the disaster lying around our feet, had me suddenly giddy with purpose and motivation.
Mercy was out there somewhere, plotting God knew what, and probably thinking of a dozen other ways to mess up our happy little world. I wasn’t going to let her. I had no idea why my mother was back from the dead, but I would find out.
And I’d put her back in that goddamn grave myself.
Chapter Four
We stayed as long as we could, helping Callum and the others at the compound clean up most of the sopping wet remains of the bar. It had taken several hours before we were even able to touch the wood safely, but once we felt we could, we hauled it off onto a back lot of the property where it could be burned down to ash at a later date.
I’d also taken Ben aside to explain what had really happened, not wanting to break that new to him in front of Wilder or the others. It might not have sunk in yet, because he really didn’t have much to say about hearing our mo
ther was alive.
By the time the sun started going down, there was almost no sign of what had happened. The smoke-stained buildings had been washed and repainted where necessary, and charred boards had been replaced with new ones. The only indication of what had been was the burnt out area of lawn where the bar had once stood.
If I knew Callum, he would have the entire space re-sodded by the time we were back in St. Francisville in a week or two.
Part of me, the part that had spent much of my childhood and late teens at this house, wanted to stay longer. I felt tethered to the space, and wanted to be near the comforting orbit of Lina in the kitchen, and even near Callum’s surly, booming voice.
This was home, in its own way, but also not. Not anymore.
My real home was with my pack, and that was back in the city. I’d been out here too long already, staying an extra day where there wasn’t an extra day to be had. While I trusted my friend Magnolia to run things in my absence and keep the pack appeased, she wasn’t an Alpha wolf. She didn’t have the genetic makeup to be my proper second in command, because other wolves could sense she was subservient and would eventually walk all over her.
As much as I wanted to give her some elevated pack status, she was more of an assistant than anything else.
She didn’t mind, I knew that. Werewolves grew up understanding their place in the pack, and Mags had always known she’d never ben a power-player. She never aspired to it. But that just made me want to give her more authority.
What she did do remarkably well was keep my schedule in order, field calls and requests from the pack members in the city, and generally just help me maintain the slightest sliver of sanity.
So, I knew I had to go back because my lovely, calm, collected friend had already sent me a dozen texts wondering, politely, when I might be returning. Which meant she was probably being bombarded by every manner of harassing phone call and visit from my wolves.
Wilder, sensing my desire to be on the way, went to get the car as soon as dinner was over without having to be asked. Likewise Callum, who understood the pressures of being a leader, didn’t invite me to stay.
He did, however, pull me aside as I waited for Wilder at the front door.
“If your mother is back, you understand what trouble we’re all in, don’t you?”
There had been a pall of silence over the dinner table that evening as each of us present had thought about this danger to some degree. Ben, Callum, and I knew the truth, whereas the rest of the wolves just knew something was terribly wrong. Wilder, who understood my mother was back, hadn’t been around for her first reign of terror, so while he knew the truth he couldn’t possibly understand what it meant for us.
“She is back,” I told Callum solemnly.
“Do you think…” his voice drifted off and he looked around the foyer, trying to think of the way to say what he was thinking.
I did it for him. “We don’t need to involve her.” The her in this case wasn’t my mother, but rather my sister.
Callum frowned. “Are you sure?”
“Secret has her way of dealing with things, and while I love her dearly, I don’t know that it’s the right move to bring her in on this. For one thing, she’s human now, and what is a human going to do against that?” I pointed out the back door, visible from the foyer, where the charred lawn was easy to see still.
This statement wasn’t fair to Secret at all. My sister, who had once been a genetic anomaly: half-vampire, half-werewolf, now found herself entirely without either of those traits. Human for the first time in her life. That didn’t make her helpless by any means. She spent most of her time working within a special branch of the FBI, striving to improve human and supernatural relations. When she wasn’t doing that she was still off killing rogue monsters that threatened to upend the uneasy peace between the different groups who now co-existed together.
Last I heard she’d been in Bolivia, hunting a vampire who was pretending to have god-like powers.
So yeah, Secret could still handle a single werewolf.
But this particular wolf wasn’t just any stray.
I chewed the inside of my cheek. “We’ll tell her when it’s done, or when we think she and her people might be at risk. But for now, Mercy is here, and she seems to be focused on us. If we bring Secret into the mix don’t you think that will just make things worse?”
There was no one on this earth, as far as I knew, that Mercy hated more than her first-born daughter. She had tried to move heaven and earth to murder Secret, and that was precisely why Secret had been the one to lob her head off all those years ago.
It wouldn’t exactly make the greatest scenario for any of us if we were to reunite mother and daughter.
Callum nodded. “All right, we’ll leave it for now. I’ll have a watch out overnight, and we’ll search the property again in the morning.” An earlier sweep of the woods had yielded no sign of her, but Callum and Ben had both agreed they could smell someone familiar. The empty grave, too, had proved disconcerting for my uncle.
Wilder had parked my Dodge Dart out front and was standing next to the passenger door waiting to let me in.
Callum stopped me, placing his big, warm hand on my shoulder to keep me in place before gently using it to cup my cheek. I was so unaccustomed to physical tenderness from him I jumped slightly before settling into the comfort of the gesture.
“Be careful, Eugenia.”
“Aren’t I always?” I offered him my best smile.
He glanced past me to Wilder, and I wasn’t sure which particular memory of the last year Callum was thinking about, but he frowned, his brows knitting together, and said, “Not as much as I’d like, sometimes.”
Chapter Five
Wilder and I drove down the highway towards New Orleans in relative silence. I tried to turn on the radio at one point, but the incessant chatter of the DJs was too distracting, and I had to turn it off.
I needed time to think.
I considered Callum’s words about calling Secret, and briefly second-guessed my decision to leave her out of it. This was precisely the kind of situation Secret was best equipped to handle. There was no one I knew who could tackle shit hitting the fan with the balls-out bravery of Secret McQueen.
But something told me it wasn’t right to mix her up in this.
For one thing, the Southern packs weren’t her problem anymore. In spite of the fact that she was still a Southern princess in name, she was now an Eastern pack queen by marriage. The East would always take precedence.
And more than that, she was currently working out of Los Angeles, helping the West Coast vampire Tribunal learn to function alongside the city’s government. Six months earlier she had told me it might take a few weeks. Now she wasn’t sure she’d be done by Christmas.
She had enough to deal with without having my problems added to her plate.
And I was old enough and in a position now where I couldn’t just have my big sister jump in and save me when things got too hard.
In the faint twilight, our surroundings on the highway took on an eerie, atmospheric quality that gave me the chills. Everything was cloaked in shadow, with only the slightest suggestion of shape or texture. Outside the swath of light cut by my headlights, it was hard to tell what was what.
Every shadow seemed to be moving, every tree might have a person hiding behind it. My eyes started to play tricks on me, and no matter where I looked I thought I caught a glimpse of Mercy.
Soon I had worked myself up into quite a panic, my pulse racing and a thin film of sweat dampening the back of my t-shirt. It wasn’t like me to get so worked up. I’d been through some genuinely harrowing stuff, even in the past week, and as scary as it could get I normally didn’t let myself get so spooked.
This was different.
The whole situation felt so monumentally out of my control I didn’t even know how to begin to fix it, and I was the kind of person who needed to have a solution available.
D
emon? Cool, there were ceremonies for that.
Werewolf-murdering cult? Yup, I could kill their leader and expose them to the world.
Dead mother back from the grave to exact a horrible revenge on those who had hurt her?
I was drawing a blank.
That’s what really scared me, and that’s the real reason I was so determined to solve this myself. I needed to come up with a solution for this problem and get Mercy back in the ground ASAP before she was able to wreak any more havoc. Only one thing was missing.
A plan.
I hated not knowing what my next step was.
Something on the shoulder of the highway caught my attention for a split second, my gaze leaving the road.
Nothing, just another shadow.
When I looked back to the highway there was a woman standing in the middle of the road.
Wilder slammed on the brakes, so I knew right away I wasn’t imagining her. I
rocked forward in my seat, and though the seatbelt held me safely, Wilder’s arm still shot out protectively to hold me back. Always thinking of me first, before anything else.
If I wasn’t scared shitless, I’d be touched.
Late twilight fog drifted over the road.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his brain still coming to grips with our situation. “Genie, are you okay?” Wilder touched my shoulder, but my attention was still rapt on the road ahead of me.
“You see her, right?” I asked. He obviously had, otherwise he wouldn’t have stopped the car so abruptly, but this was my first time seeing her with someone else present, and I needed an assurance I wasn’t losing my mind.
Wilder’s focus moved from me out onto the road, and he nodded stiffly, giving me the only answer I needed. I wasn’t crazy. There really was someone there.
And not just anyone. Not Mercy either.
This was an altogether different apparition, one that had been following me for over a year now.
While her form was obviously that of a woman, her skin was a charred, burned black, crackled all over like the surface of a riverbed baked in the sun. She didn’t stand straight up, but rather her body was all crooked, broken angles, like a doll who had been reassembled with parts in all the wrong places.