Black-Hearted Devil

by Sierra Dean

  “Secret, mom’s alive.” Boom, dropped bomb one.

  “What?”

  “Mom. Mercy. Mercy is alive. She’s here. She burned down the bar and I think she wants to kill me.

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and finally she went, “Huh.”

  “There’s more.”

  “Oh. That was just the opener?”

  “Yeah.”

  A long sigh and I could tell from the change in her breath she was trying to steel herself. I explained about the return of Morgan, and how I knew it was her thanks to what I’d see during my visit to see La Sorciere. I told her Ben had gone with Mercy. I told her just about everything she’d missed this week.

  “There’s more, isn’t there?” she asked. “I can tell you’re avoiding something.”

  It was my turn for the long pause as I chewed my bottom lip.

  “Someone else is back, too.”

  A sharp little inhale on the other end. “Is it Keaty?” The hope in her voice that she couldn’t quite hide damn near broke my heart. Keaty had been Secret’s business partner, but more than that he had probably been the closest thing she’d had in her life to a father.

  “No. I’m sorry.” I waited a beat, and finally just spit it out. “Secret, Lucas is alive.”

  “Holy fucking shitballs.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Secret’s flight from Los Angeles landed about an hour after Wilder, Lucas, Santiago, and I arrived back in New Orleans. We had just enough time to stop at my house, change, and check on Magnolia, before we had to leave to get to the airport. Santiago parted ways with us at the city border, and we decided to leave Lucas at my house with Magnolia.

  I knew Secret would want to see him, but I also thought that first encounter shouldn’t come in the middle of a busy baggage claim area.

  My heart was in my throat the entire time as we parked my car and headed into the terminal. Her flight was on time, meaning she ought to be out any minute. On the phone she hadn’t seemed angry with me for delaying the news about Mercy, but I hadn’t given her much of a chance to let it all sink in. Now that she’d had a couple hours on a plane to think of nothing else, I was terrified she was going to disembark and be furious.

  Instead, the first moment I saw her coming down the escalators, she smiled brightly with genuine excitement and barreled down the stairs, flinging herself at me in a warm embrace.

  Secret was the very definition of petite. She was thin, short, and the only thing that gave her any real heft was the wild mound of curly blonde hair atop her head. She’d pulled it back into her signature ponytail, but it still hung halfway down her back.

  She wore the typical Secret McQueen uniform: dark jeans, yellow blouse—this one with an unexpectedly cheery floral print—and her ubiquitous leather jacket. An overnight bag was slung over one shoulder, and I couldn’t help but notice the glaring absence of a cast.

  “I thought you broke your arm.”

  “I did,” she said.

  “I thought you couldn’t heal yourself anymore.”

  “I can’t.” Wilder had quietly insisted on taking her bag, and she finally relented, handing it over to him. “Like I said on the phone, Tyler is working on something, and I played guinea pig for him.”

  “He’s working on something that can heal broken bones?”

  “It’s a long story, and it’s legit top secret government stuff I can’t talk about. Besides which there are still some kinks to work out. It’s not broken anymore, but I’ll probably be able to feel storms coming from now on.” She shrugged. I couldn’t help but notice she hadn’t mentioned Lucas yet, though her gaze kept drifting away from me and searching the nearby crowds.

  “He’s at my house,” I told her.

  Her eyes cut back to me guiltily, then she nodded. “How… I mean, how is he?”

  “He seems fine. Just as confused as the rest of us, but he knows who he is, he remembers dying, he doesn’t know how he got here. And he’s been asking about you.”

  We left the terminal and headed to the car. Dawn was breaking and I was seriously ready to get some sleep, but I foresaw a long and restless day ahead.

  “Did you tell him about Desmond?”

  “We told him about the pack, and we told him you were married.”

  She let out a sigh of relief so loud it made me feel less stressed. “Honestly, that was the one thing I didn’t really know how to say to him. Like, how do you tell your ex, ‘hey I know you died so I shouldn’t feel bad, but FYI I married your best friend.’”

  “I think we might have finally found the one thing Hallmark doesn’t have a card for,” Wilder announced. Up until then he’d let Secret and I do all the talking, and only now did I realize how insanely rude I’d been. Secret had never actually met Wilder.

  “Secret, this is Wilder Shaw. Wilder, Secret.”

  “So this is the boyfriend?” she asked me. “Boyfriend-slash-bodyguard? Took that watching her body thing a bit too seriously, hey?” She winked at him.

  “Oh my god,” I groaned.

  “Are you two soul-bonded?” she asked me.

  “No.”

  “Ugh, consider yourself lucky, it’s a nightmare.” Soul-bonding was an age-old werewolf connection that helped mates recognize each other. It was more common among the royal classes. When you found your mate you could taste them, like a sudden rush of flavor in your mouth. From what Secret had explained to me, Desmond tasted like lime to her, and she tasted like cotton candy to him. It was weird.

  It also wasn’t a requirement, or even that common anymore.

  Which made it all the weirder that she’d been bonded to not just Desmond, but also Lucas.

  Hence her opinions about how nightmarish it was.

  “We may not be soul-bonded,” Wilder said. “But do I love the hell out of her.”

  “Good man.” Secret patted him on the back. “Is your brother still an asshole?”

  “An asshole, yes, but he seems to have curbed his more homicidal habits.” Wilder kept his eyes on the road. I should have assumed, given her history with Hank, this topic might come up, but I was sort of surprised she would just jump right to it.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have been. Subtlety was never really Secret’s strongest trait.

  We pulled into my driveway, where all the lights inside were gleaming. I could see Magnolia in the kitchen as we got out of the car, fiddling with something on the stove. The sun was almost all the way up now, so I hoped whatever she was making also included a big old pot of coffee.

  I was greeted by the familiar, welcoming scent of fresh ground beans when we got through the front door, and three full cups of coffee were set out on the kitchen table.

  Secret and I both gratefully scooped up our mugs and I gave Magnolia a grateful nod. The whole place smelled of bacon and eggs, and she was busily mixing cheese into the golden-yellow mix on the stovetop. There was enough food here to feed an army, so it might be enough for four hungry werewolves and a human woman who had spent twenty-two years unable to enjoy real food.

  A moment later, Lucas emerged from my bedroom. He had showered since we’d been gone, and his blond hair was still damp. He’d borrowed some clothes from Wilder, and though the pants were on the short side, he looked much less like a man who had recently woken up in a ditch.

  He stopped in the doorway, and Secret froze in place, the cup of coffee lifted halfway to her lips. They stared at each other from across the room, and the mug trembled in her hand.

  “Secret,” he said.

  She set the cup down, and to see the expression on her face was to know the pain in her heart. There was a visible war going on as she clearly debated what to say, whether to go to him, and if she could even trust what she was seeing.

  A tear slid down her cheek, and when she opened her mouth a sound like a trapped wail emerged. She clamped a hand over her mouth and shook her head, as if chastising herself for what she was feeling.

  I felt like we shou
ldn’t be watching this, and yet I couldn’t look away.

  She crossed the room until she was standing in front of him, and this time it was Lucas’s turn to look completely lost. He froze as she lifted her hand to touch his face, and the anguish in his expression was what finally made me look down.

  “Are you real?” she asked him.

  “I think so.”

  Secret pressed her hand to his cheek, and ran her fingers over his eyebrows, his hair, his jaw, even his ears, as if she were trying to find a magic switch that might cause him to disappear. When she finally seemed convinced he wasn’t a figment of our collected imaginations, she took a step back and let out another breath.

  “We’ll need to tell Desmond.”

  “You didn’t tell him yet?” I was surprised. Not only was he her husband, but he’d also taken over the pack after Lucas died. With Lucas back things might get messy all of a sudden. I’d thought for sure she would tell him as soon as I’d hung up the phone with her earlier.

  “I needed to see it for sure.” She glanced over at me. “It’s not that I didn’t believe you, you know. It’s just… one of those things you need to see for yourself.”

  I couldn’t blame her. Hell, he was standing in my living room and I still didn’t believe it.

  “Can we have a minute?” She inclined her head towards Lucas, but the question was obviously meant for me.

  “Yeah, you guys can use my bedroom. It’s about as private as you’re going to get in here.”

  She gave me a nod, then took Lucas into the bedroom where they shut the door. If we wanted to we could have heard them without much difficulty, but the rest of us took a seat at the kitchen table, and while Magnolia served us plates of bacon, eggs, and toast, we talked about what to do next.

  “I think first we deal with Deerling,” Wilder said. “He’s a loose canon and he’s out there killing people. I think we need to put him down before anyone else gets hurt.”

  “Well killing him didn’t seem like it was such a great solution last time,” I countered. “I mean, they’re all back now. And while the whole ‘kill the one who cast the spell’ thing would be my suggestion any other time, I don’t really feel like killing myself.”

  “Who’s to say you can’t kill them again?” Magnolia said. “Sure, they came back once, but that’s because Genie cast the spell. If you kill them a second time, and then don’t bring them back, shouldn’t they stay dead?”

  I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I was always told cutting off someone’s head would kill them permanently, and yet here we are. Two bodies that were burned to nothing, one who was shot in the head, and one beheaded entirely. They’re all up and moving around.”

  “And what’s up with the burned one?” Wilder said. “Morgan? She still looks all burned and mangled. But Lucas died in that same fire and looks like he just got finished auditioning for the next Thor movie.”

  “I don’t know how any of this is even happening, let alone the finer points of how it works.”

  “That’s why I think we try with Deerling first. Not to be a bummer, but no one is going to miss the guy if we kill him a second time. He’s the perfect one to test the theory on and see if he comes back again,” Wilder said.

  “Perfect? How do you figure that? The cops are all over this, do you think they’re just going to let us waltz into town, murder someone, and then tell them it’s okay because he already died once? I think there are laws against that now.”

  “For vampires.”

  “I’m pretty sure they frown on killing anyone, even if it is for a second time,” I protested.

  “Do you have any better suggestions?” It was obvious he was getting annoyed with me, and I wished I had a better alternative.

  “If we kill him, I want to know he’s done for good this time. I think we need Santiago.”

  “Why the hell would we need Santiago?”

  “Because if anyone can keep the dead dead, it’s him.”

  “I’d like to see him keep himself out of your life,” Wilder grumbled.

  “I know, baby.” I did nothing to keep the mocking out of my tone. Yes, I knew he was jealous, yes, I knew he didn’t like me letting Santiago hang around, but at the moment I didn’t need him worried about someone else’s romantic intentions for me. Especially when I’d made it abundantly clear I wasn’t planning to reciprocate them.

  Wilder, getting the point, finally grunted his acceptance and set back to eating his bacon and eggs. A minute later, Secret and Lucas reappeared from the bedroom. Her eyes and cheeks were red from obvious crying, and Lucas looked as if he was just barely keeping his shit together himself.

  Secret had her phone in her hand so I was guessing part of their conversation had involved a call to Desmond.

  “So, what’s the plan?” she asked, as if she didn’t look like someone who had just seen the end of The Notebook for the first time.

  “We’re going to go pick up a witch, then see if we can re-kill an undead werewolf,” Wilder said.

  Secret shared a quick glance with Lucas, then looked at me and smiled.

  “I’ll get my gun.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  My sister was giving Santiago quite the stink-eye.

  She wasn’t the best at hiding her feelings on a good day, and I didn’t think this counted as a good day, in spite of someone she loved being back from the dead. To say her feelings were being worn on her sleeve was an understatement.

  “You’re too pretty,” she announced.

  Santiago, who had been quietly sitting in his armchair trying to avoid her scrutiny, sat more upright and said, “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’re too pretty to be helpful. I don’t trust you. You’re the kind of guy who shows up just to mess up someone’s life.”

  “She would know,” Lucas said quietly.

  Secret pretended not to hear him and leaned forward in her seat, continuing to stare down the handsome witch. “Can you really help us, or is all this just some bullshit ruse to get closer to my sister?”

  I wanted to crawl under a rock and die.

  Wilder, though I imagine he was trying to hide it, was smirking like the cat who got the cream. Finally someone else was calling Santiago out, and he was just lapping it up.

  “Hi, guys, can we focus here? We can’t really expect him to want to help us if we show up at his house and call him names.”

  “Too be fair, she just aggressively complimented me. You McQueen women are complicated. I like it.” Santiago gave her his best panty-melting smile and she snarled at him.

  “Never trust the dark-haired ones,” Lucas told Wilder. “They’re always up to no good.”

  Secret elbowed him in the ribs. Apparently she was past the point of worrying about his safety and right back to being annoyed with him. Old habits die hard. Literally.

  “Focus,” I snapped. “You guys are acting like children, oh my god.”

  “To answer Our Lady of Resting Bitch Face’s question,” Santiago said. “Yes, I can help. And I will, in spite of all this. I offered to help back at the bayou, and I’ll help now.”

  “Still would have been nice if you’d told us what you knew before we went into the swamp. I might have been able to keep my idiot brother from going off half-cocked,” I reminded him.

  “In my experience, if someone is going to do something stupid, they’ll do it no matter how loud the voice of reason is,” Santiago said. For some reason he was looking right at Secret when he said it, which made me think her legend was well known even in witch circles.

  They glared at each other.

  She huffed. “Fine, whatever. Your help would be appreciated and all that. Can we please go kill someone?”

  “Is that the plan, then?” Santiago asked. “Kill everyone until there’s nothing left haunting you? They’re wights, the dead come to life again. Wights will die when those who raise them die, or when they fulfill their purpose.”

  “You said four would come back to haunt
me. We have all four. Three of them can go back from whence they came. And you can, I don’t know, bind them, or do something to keep them from returning.”

  “I think whether or not they return is entirely up to you.”

  “Trust me when I say I’m going to do my best to work on my guilty conscience so I no longer accidentally raise the dead, okay? Top notch therapy coming up.”

  Santiago gave me a look as if he wanted to say more, but instead he kept quiet and nodded. “I can’t guarantee this will work, because I’ve honestly never had to deal with a problem this way. As you well know, the fastest way to undo a curse is to kill the one who cast it. But since we’re in the unusual situation of you having put the curse on yourself, things get murkier. I’ve never seen what the long-term effect of killing a wight is. Usually you kill a couple and then get to the witch, and everything is over and done for sure. Killing a wight and not killing the witch? This is a whole new ballgame, and frankly we’re all in for a hell of a surprise.”

  “Yay,” I muttered. Who didn’t love surprises that could kill you?

  “And what about him?” Santiago nodded to Lucas.

  “What about him? Secret asked.

  “We’re just trusting his word that he doesn’t want to kill her?”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re doing Witch Boy.” She was just itching to reach for her gun, I could tell. We needed to find a good outlet for all the emotions she was dealing with, and getting rid of Deerling, Morgan, and Mercy might be the trick to help her out of this twitchy foul mood of hers.

  A mood I had to admit I was responsible for.

  “So we don’t kill the wolf king. Gotcha.” Santiago faked a check mark in the air.

  “Does that mean he’ll stay alive?” I knew it wasn’t a question any of us wanted to ask, but I had to know. “Now that I’ve brought him back, is he here to stay, or does he go when the guilt goes?”

  “As far as I know, the curse was cast and can’t be undone with just a change of feeling. But if you were to die, then so would he.”

  Secret frowned. “Not a big fan of scenarios where one person’s life is controlling someone else’s.”