Eternally Devoted (Frostbite #4)

by Stacey Kennedy

  Eternally Devoted

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Eternally Devoted135

  by Stacey Kennedy

  Stacey Kennedy

  www.staceykennedy.com

  Edited by Kerry Vail

  Copy Edited by Theresa Cole

  Cover design by Pj Edwards

  Smashwords Edition

  Manufactured in Canada

  First Edition March 2013

  The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction: Bret Michaels.

  Author Dedication

  For the readers who stayed with Tess & Kipp until they reached their happily ever after!

  Acknowledgments

  As always, huge love to my editor, Kerry, who pushes me to do better and create the best story I can. Your support of me builds me up on those hard days!

  Thanks to my copy editor, Theresa, it was so great working with you.

  To the readers, I cannot put into words how much your support of the Frostbite series has meant to me. Every book has been written with your love of Tess and Kipp in mind!

  ETERNALLY DEVOTED

  Frostbite Book Four

  Stacey Kennedy

  Chapter One

  “Wayde Hagen is, in fact, dead.”

  One minute.

  That’s how long I remained silent after my boss, Max, the police sergeant with the cold case division in Memphis, dropped that one-liner bombshell on me. And with said bombshell, the barn I now stood in seemed far spookier than it was three minutes ago.

  In the pitch black, surrounded by cobwebs and the spiders living within them, I used my flashlight to scan the area in front of me. While I wasn’t alone in the barn and had Gretchen, Dane and Amelia with me, plus Kipp and Caley, it didn’t reassure me much. The sense of looming danger hammered my heart.

  The beam of my flashlight swept across the big wooden planks that made up the barn’s exterior, which also had large spaces between them where murderers could be watching me. I did my best to ignore the large spider off to my right, as well as the gardening tools that someone could use to gut me.

  “Tess.”

  The whistle of the wind sounded right before a cold sliver of air brushed my arm and reminded me why I remained in this freaky barn. I gasped as the flickers of ice rushed through my veins, and finally, I was able to blink out of my apparent stunned state.

  My vision cleared to my ghost boyfriend, Kipp. His eyebrow was arched over his intense blue eye, but the brown eye looked warm. Even as a spirit, Kipp portrayed a healthy amount of testosterone, and he had a body packed full of muscles to back it up. My heart might have stuttered at his chiseled features and at his kissable lips, if that would be an appropriate reaction now, which it wasn’t.

  Besides, that sexy piece of man—ghost—heaven was the reason I wouldn’t run from this scary situation. I needed to find a way to put his soul back into his comatose body. The freaky-as-all-hell-shit would simply have to wait to be acknowledged.

  At my continued silence, Kipp gestured to the phone in my hand. “You need to talk to Max and find out what’s going on?”

  The side of my head throbbed and reminded me I had an awful headache that had plagued me for days. I suspected it was stress related, considering it had grown progressively worse since I’d entered this wretched barn.

  I rubbed my temple to each ease the ache, stared at the concern in Kipp’s eyes, and then said into the phone, “What do you mean, Wayde is dead?”

  “Exactly that,” Max replied in his hard, I-am-a-cop-don’t-mess-with-me voice, as police sirens rang out in the background. “The Wayde you know appears to have taken on someone else’s identity.”

  I hesitated, trying to make sense of that. Wayde had been the first member of the Animus—a secret society of the supernaturally gifted located in White Castle, Louisiana—I had met.

  From what I had learned, Wayde had taken over the role of Grand Master of the group after the murder of the last Grand Master, Alexander. This was where I came in, since no one in the Animus could communicate with the dead. If I helped solve Alexander’s murder, Wayde would give me a spell from the Animus’s private spell book, called the Lux, which would force Kipp’s soul back into his body.

  So, what Max suggested made no sense. Why would Wayde take on someone else’s identity? “Are you sure?”

  “Very sure.” Max exhaled, sounding like white noise through the phone line. “Once we started looking deeper into the lives of those with you at the house, and into Wayde Hagen’s social security number, as well as his birth date, it suddenly became obvious he’s been ghosting.”

  I blinked as that term usually meant something far different to me, and Wayde—or the Wayde I knew—wasn’t dead. Unless he had killed himself in the last day, which was of course plausible, but didn’t make a lick of sense.

  Why would a man with no motive to kill Alexander, since he made me magically bind the promise that I’d help solve Alexander’s murder, have killed himself? “What do you mean by ghosting?”

  The sirens continued to wail through the phone line, and Max raised his voice. “Wayde stole the identity of someone who’s the same age as him and perhaps knew him, which is how he stole it without any detection. As in, he merely jumped into a new life and his real identity died.”

  Part of me wanted to sputter out a thousand questions at this insane theory, but I could only listen in surprise as Max continued, “It appears the real Wayde Hagen must’ve had no family because his death was never reported.”

  I blinked…again. “Then, how do you know he’s dead?”

  Kipp gave me a perplexed look under the beam of my flashlight. I understood and suspected only hearing one side of this conversation made zero sense. Hell, even hearing the whole conversation didn’t help much.

  I focused away from Kipp when Max said, “The real Wayde Hagen was arrested for car theft in his late teens, and we got a hold of a mug shot. We compared his picture to the current Wayde Hagen, and they are not the same person.”

  Max hesitated, maybe waiting for me to say something, which now was impossible since I was stunned stupid, and then he added, “There’s more to tell you. For now, just get somewhere safe. We’re only a couple minutes out.”

  The phone line went dead.

  I gave my head a good hard shake to clear it and now more aware, I remembered the others in the barn with me. I turned to my best friend, Caley, and worried for her. I hated putting her in any sort of danger, especially since it wasn’t my best friend standing in front of me, but the previous Grand Master of the Animus, Alexander. Or his ghost occupying her body, I should say.

  I heaved a sigh, honestly wondering how much more I could take, and placed my cell phone into my pocket. Then I turned to Dane, a member of the Animus who’d recently turned out to be on my side, and asked, ”Do you know where Wayde is now?”

  His eyebrows furrowed over his crystal blue eyes as a few strands of his blond hair fell over his forehead. “Wayde told me he received a phone call from an Animus member.” Dane’s voice was slow and careful, his eyes
even more cautious. “He left last night and he hasn’t returned yet.”

  A dreadful horror rushed over my body in a heat wave. A loud creak in the wood planks, followed by a flutter sounding like bat’s wings, had me glancing around the barn with my flashlight, even if deep down I didn’t want to.

  I’d come into this scary barn in hopes of finding answers for Kipp. This came in the form of a diary by Nettie Glasglow, a woman who had lived in the nineteen hundreds and held the exact gift as I did.

  Wayde hid her diary from me as an advantage to ensure I’d continue to help him, but Alexander had found the book in the barn. And what else was new in my life…finding the diary had only brought more crazy-ass truths I didn’t want to know. The most important fact: it was possible my traveling into the Netherworld—the veil between here and beyond—to locate Kipp only days ago might mean my own death.

  I hoped Nettie’s death was simply a coincidence, and nothing more.

  To hold my sanity together, I went with that theory.

  A mouse scurried in front of my feet. I took a step back and could’ve sworn I moved into a spider web. But after a few fast swipes of my hair, I couldn’t feel anything crawling on me or see a spider web. “That’s it. I’ve had enough. Let’s go.”

  I stepped forward when a cold wisp of air brushed over my arm, and I glanced to Kipp as he muttered, “Light off, Tess.”

  With a deep sigh of total unhappiness, I shut off my flashlight, and once again, a pitch-black night surrounded me. Kipp thought it was safer for us to move around the yard in darkness since a killer wouldn’t easily spot us.

  While it made sense and all, I, honest to God, hated the dark.

  However, the moment I followed Gretchen and the others out of the barn, the sound of sirens blaring through the air made me blissfully happy. The arrival of Kipp’s fellow cops meant safety.

  As we strode through the yard, the large historical plantation that was the home to the Grand Master of the Animus stood out in the dark night with the porch light turned on. If this place hadn’t been hell on earth, since it only complicated my life more, I might be a tad jealous of its beauty.

  A flicker of light came to my left, and I noticed someone that had been bugging me since I arrived in White Castle. Sammy’s hair still looked messy and spiked in complete disorder. He also looked in desperate need of many cheeseburgers to get some meat onto his bones. Of course, that was impossible now, considering he was a ghost.

  He gave me his sweet smile and a wave, but I quickly looked away not to engage him in conversation. It tugged at me to keep ignoring him like I had been. However, now, I needed to be selfish. My focus remained on Kipp’s dire situation, that’s it. Every other ghost would have to take a ticket and wait in line for help.

  We neared the house and red and blue lights lit up the dark sky. It surprised me to see not only one police car tearing down the long gravel driveway, but at least a half a dozen. The local police force, I assumed.

  At the amount of police presence, my heart thumped and skipped a beat. Was the other detail that Max had to tell me about Wayde deadlier than what I assumed? He had seemed almost frantic at first, hadn’t he? He did tell me to get to safety. While I didn’t suspect Wayde was some crazed murderer, maybe I was wrong.

  Oh, god…

  The car squealed to a stop and spit up rocks. Max jumped out of the car and jogged toward me with his gun out of his holster and in his hand, as did the other members of the cold case squad, including the cute blue-eyed Eddie and the muscular blond, Zach, all of whom I loved like family.

  Even if their arrival made me feel protected, dread turned my blood ice cold. Like a mob on the run, a flurry of activity stormed in front of me as cops fanned out. Some police officers went into the house and some headed into the yard, which I assumed was to search for Wayde…or whoever Wayde was.

  When Max finally reached us, a deep crease had formed in his brow over his chocolate colored eyes as he asked, “Have you seen Wayde?”

  I shook my head and felt sick to my stomach at the deep concern etched into his features. “No one has since last—”

  An ear-splitting noise cut me off and had every head, including mine, turning toward the direction of the forest to our left. After which, three things happened simultaneously.

  I recognized the deafening sound as a gunshot.

  Loud masculine yells surrounded me.

  I ate dirt.

  Chapter Two

  After my full-out face plant, I spat out what I hoped was a few pieces of grass and not some type of bug. Loud yells continued to roar all around me and I groaned under the weight pressing me into the moist ground. I noticed a cold body against my back, and a heavier one, too.

  A moment passed that was probably quick, but seemed like too long to be squished into the dirt, and then the weight finally lifted away, as did the coldness. That’s when I realized, not only had Kipp taken me to the ground, since the bite of frost from his body leaving mine hurt like a bitch, but I spotted Max shifting off me, too.

  With that realization, my mind snapped into focus and I recalled what had happened. I lurched to my feet, running my hands over my body. “Oh my god, am I shot?”

  Kipp’s eyes blazed. “Turn around.”

  I spun in a circle, all the while running my hands over my arms, head, chest, and anywhere I could reach. “Is my back bleeding?”

  Kipp sighed. “You’re fine.”

  “You look good, kid,” Max stated, since of course, he wouldn’t hear Kipp’s response.

  I turned to my ghost and noted the relief on his face. Hell, I felt it, too. Then I scanned the others around me, who were all presently picking themselves off the ground. “Is anyone hurt?”

  The answers of, “no,” eased the concern in my chest.

  Max finally rose to his feet and glanced over his shoulder at the dozen or so cops standing by the edge of the forest. “Sounds like the gunshot came from a distance.”

  Zach, who peeled himself off Caley, said, “Yeah.”

  I understood his need to pounce on my best friend, and actually, I was glad he did. Even if Caley wasn’t in that body now, it was his girlfriend’s body. I thought it sweet he protected her, even in her current condition. Especially since he presently looked at her with such a confused expression. Apparently, even he could tell it wasn’t Caley in her body.

  Once everyone was on their feet, Max turned to me. “Where’s Kipp?”

  I gave Gretchen a quick look over to make sure she wasn’t injured and her blue-gray eyes were clear and focused as she smoothed out her cinnamon-colored hair. “Still trapped in the Netherworld.”

  Max gave a firm nod. “All right.”

  He didn’t even flinch in his response, and to the outsider, Max accepted that as truth. But I saw the little arch in his mouth, indicating he knew I had lied to him. I’d already told him, Zach, and Eddie that Kipp had returned to me. Truth was, the ghost business was all very hush-hush when it came to Dane’s wife, Amelia, who happened to be watching our exchange now.

  She didn’t know Kipp was back, and she certainly didn’t know her father, Alexander, was in Caley’s body. Dane wanted his wife out of the trouble, and well, I could understand the need to protect the one you loved.

  Not only had her father been murdered, but he hadn’t peacefully crossed over and the crime against him might never be solved. Until we had a way to solve Alexander’s murder, or help him cross over, I had agreed to keep my mouth shut.

  I looked out to the White Castle PD and noticed they were still talking near the edge of the forest. Max said the gunshot wasn’t a concern, and that was enough for me, but I was curious. “Any idea who made that shot?”

  Zach brushed off his pants, his blue eyes searching mine. “My guess, probably a hunter.”

  Fair enough answer, since even I knew some people enjoyed hunting at a night. Again, it rubbed me wrong. “Yeah, but what’s the coincidence of that—a shitload of cops show up here, and then a gun sh
ot.”

  Kipp’s eyebrow arched. “Is anyone dead?”

  I didn’t show him a response, because of Amelia, but he was right. No one had been shot, and there was only one shot. If it had been aimed at someone here—maybe me—I’d be dead or someone else would.

  “We’re all on edge, Tess,” Max said, waving out to the cops walking the grounds, and not hearing Kipp’s question. “No one has shown violence since you’ve been here, so let’s hope that continues.”

  He hesitated for what I suspected was my further argument. At my silence, since what he said did make sense, he added, “As I was asking before, have you seen Wayde at all?”

  I shook my head. “Negative.”

  Folding my arms, I rubbed them, and hated how chilled I felt now. The dark night didn’t help much, but my comfort came in the form of not only my friends around me—with shiny weapons—but the presence of the White Castle police force, too.

  If Wayde was the killer, which I still didn’t believe because why would Wayde kill his friend and leader, what could he do now? Take out everyone here? I doubted he had the skill, or firepower to succeed. “Do you know who Wayde is?”

  “Not yet,” Max said, and frustration clipped his voice. “Right now, he’s a mystery.”

  Didn’t that bring up a good question?

  To Dane, I asked, “When did Wayde come into the picture with the Animus?” For whatever reason, I thought he’d been around for a long time, just as Dane and Gretchen had. Clearly, I assumed wrong.

  “He joined us over fifteen years ago, I believe,” Dane replied, taking his wife’s hand as she stared up at him with worried eyes. “Alexander had welcomed him without question. Wayde’s level of skill with spells and such was strong, and I didn’t sense any darkness in his aura. Of course, I was a teenager when he came and wasn’t as strong as I am now, but I still don’t sense evil within him.”