by C. M. Owens
“You don’t have any information I need,” the cold, unaffected voice of the scarred psycho replies. “This is just for fun. This is for her.”
Chapter 4
ZEE
“You taste so good,” she whispers against me.
“What’s your name?” I ask the dark-haired goddess, ignoring Josh as he tries to call for me.
The girl in my arms smiles against my neck. “Sylvia.”
She slides her tongue against my skin, and I start wondering what the hell has gone so good that I deserve a night like this.
My hands slide up her jean-clad ass, and I slip my fingers into the tops of her pockets, pulling her closer. “Don’t you want to know my name?” I ask her, groaning when she sucks against my neck a little harder, grazing the skin with her teeth.
“It doesn’t matter what your name is,” she whispers. “After tonight, all I’ll call you is Mine.”
“It’s up here,” Roslyn says, snapping me out of my thoughts while she sniffs the air. That’s right. She got us to come meet her because she smelled too much blood, and we’re supposed to be working. Not getting lost in useless, bitter memories. “If I can smell it this easily without my wolf, then they’re probably dead.”
I don’t smell anything, and blood is definitely something I can smell. Thad clutches her hand as we walk normally, trying not to draw attention to ourselves.
Dice stays in stride with me as we follow Roslyn’s keen nose, and she stops in front of one of the oldest houses in Pine Shore.
“Witch blood,” she says, looking around to make sure no one is within earshot. “At least two. Light user and dark user.”
“I can’t smell anything,” Thad says, glancing questioningly at me.
“No. Nothing.”
“It’s a spell. No sounds or smells will escape,” Roslyn says while tilting her head, slowly walking up the steps. “But there’s no protection spell. Which means it died with the host, most likely. No witch would own a home and not put up a protection spell. And I can sniff through spells like that, by the way.”
“Fuck,” Dice groans. “If they died with a protection spell, then that means it was an anointed kill. I guess Wendy’s family is finally here to find out why she’s missing. Fuckity fuck fuck.”
A chill slides up my spine. An entire family of anointed killers? Just what we fucking need. We have enough on our plate at the moment.
“Jenny would have told me if her family was coming to town,” Roslyn says dismissively, slowly inspecting the doorknob before pushing it open. “Her memories of that night are still gone, and she’s enjoying my house. I’ve kept contact with her since Karma agrees she doesn’t see the anointed in her.”
“Some anointed are very fucking immune to all of our special skills,” I remind her. “Chaz and I have been reading up on them.”
Roslyn tightens her lips. “She lived with me for a while, Zee. She never saw me as a threat. We’ve hung out numerous times since I turned full immortal. She looks at me with the same eyes she saw me with back then. She’s not anointed. It doesn’t settle in every person in a bloodline. I’ve learned that much.”
Cracking my neck to the side, I follow her in. We all do. The second we’re across the threshold, the smell of blood assaults me, and hunger hits hard. Witch blood… A lot of it. Roslyn was right.
The marks on my arms seem to burn, daring me to taste the forbidden as it runs out of the still-warm bodies. This is a fresh kill.
“Holy shit,” Thad says under his breath, stepping over the first unknown male. “It looks like he was squeezed to death from the inside. That’s not an anointed kill, but it is one seriously powerful kill.”
One body is face down and bleeding out, and one is hunched lifelessly in a chair with his chin almost resting on his chest. He looks like he suffered for longer, considering the numerous, non-fatal gashes all over his body.
His blue suit is drenched in blood, hanging off him in tatters from the torture. Apparently he had information someone wanted.
“Hashtag, clean up on aisle four,” Dice states dryly, moving into the room.
“How would they have gotten in unless they were trusted?” Roslyn asks, ignoring Dice’s comment as she leans over to investigate the first body. “This would definitely cause some trust issues if anyone lived.”
The scent of the blood is almost overwhelming. To know witch blood, you’re supposed to have tasted it before. I’ve never had witch blood, so how the hell can I tell the difference on just a breath? What did that sick fucker do to me?
Dice’s sharp intake of breath slices through my own straying thoughts, and I turn around as he lifts the head of the second victim for all of us to see.
“Is that who I think it is?” I ask, confused.
“Hashtag, the dead man walking is officially dead. So which one of us killed him?”
It’s no secret that we’ve all been plotting the death of Liam since the day Alyssa was forced to let him walk. He broke no damning fey laws, but he almost destroyed Ella. As queen, Alyssa had to lead by example by showing mercy instead of unjustifiable death.
“We’ve all been letting the dust settle before killing him,” Thad growls. “Chaz sent him to rot inside a friend’s dungeon not too long ago, just wondering if anyone would notice him missing. We knew he’d escaped, but we didn’t expect him to be so close.”
“The last thing we need is his death tied to us right now,” I groan. “Alyssa is having problems keeping people in line as it is. More and more are taking matters into their own hands instead of trusting her. There will be anarchy soon. Not to mention chaos. The council has lost all credibility since the release of all the slave-ring prisoners was done without warning the communities. They think we’re just doing whatever we want and to hell with the consequences.”
Liam barely looks like he’s been dead for longer than a few minutes, but the blood around him looks like it’s been getting spilled for hours at different intervals.
Dice snaps a picture and starts texting. “Might as well find out if it was one of us or if Liam had someone else that hated him as much as we do.”
His phone is immediately bogged down with numerous messages, and I prop against the wall, trying to slow my breathing and hide the fact I’m struggling to be in here without drinking. It shouldn’t be this hard.
“Don’t tell Ella yet,” Thad says idly, still studying Liam’s shredded body.
“Wasn’t gonna,” Dice says, distracted. “Looks like she’s the only one not accounted for, though. Everyone else says their hands are clean.”
He puts his phone away, and he frowns. Just as I’m about to speak, a faint whimper catches my ears.
Roslyn’s head snaps up with Thad’s, and the three of us exchange a look. They heard it, too. Thad holds his finger over his lips, and he walks silently down the hallway.
Everyone follows except for Dice, who is still talking to an empty room, unaware we’ve left him behind.
The problem with all the freshly spilled blood is that it has been masking another scent I’m struggling with… One that I wouldn’t have even considered being here.
But it’s like I’m being punched in the face with it the second I walk into a dark room. Thad flips on the light just as Roslyn flings open the closet doors with nothing more than a flick of her wrist.
And there she is. Wide-eyed and terrified as she gazes into my eyes, wearing the same surprise I feel, it’s her. Another whimper escapes the woman clinging to her, and Dice walks in behind us, as everyone stares in absolute silence.
“You,” my temptress whispers hoarsely, seeming rather composed next to the crying wreck beside her.
“You,” I say back, still shocked and confused.
“I take it you two know each other?” Thad asks, but my eyes are locked on the terrified green ones that won’t leave my gaze.
Before I can answer, Dice asks a question I didn’t even consider. “Don’t suppose you two are the ones who carved up those
lads in there, are you?”
The writer doubles over, retching loud and brutally, and the stench immediately helps to eclipse all the more delicious smells amongst us. It’s sick that I want to thank her for having a weak stomach.
My temptress hisses out a breath and grabs the other woman’s hair, holding it behind her, as the woman continues to purge the contents of her stomach.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Dice says, wrinkling his nose in disgust.
“If they’re not the killers, then we have some witnesses to solve the mystery,” Thad says with a shrug. “Let’s take this back to Gage’s house before someone sees us here.”
Chapter 5
LEAH
“She’s nothing but a freak,” Henry Leonard taunts, laughing at me. “She needs be locked up like her mother.”
They laugh as I struggle against the flagpole, wishing the tears would come. I’d rather look weak than strong right now, because the inability to cry makes them think I can handle more.
Laughs ring out as the school lets out, and everyone points and stares. No one helps. Some take pictures. Others video me.
Everyone laughs. Everyone laughs. Everyone laughs.
“Freak! Freak! Freak!” Tommy Leonard chants, stirring up the rest of the crowd as the chant gets adopted.
In nothing but my underwear and my shame, I’m forced to watch in horror as they all look at me with mocking laughter and giddy eyes. Freak is painted across my stomach, and I’m forced to stand here and endure, tied in place.
In that moment, I’m happy I’m incapable of tears. Now I wouldn’t want them to have the satisfaction of seeing me cry.
That unbidden memory gets pushed away, and I take in what’s going on. Or try to.
My mother was insane—locked up for the ten years before she died. My father is a mystery, since he died when I was little and no one ever spoke of him. My aunt raised me to believe that there are logical answers to everything.
Me? I’m going insane trying to find a logical answer to the big ass fucking mystery of what I just saw, because there’s no way I saw what I think I did. Marilyn is rocking back and forth, mumbling incoherent nonsense, possibly suffering major shock.
Zee is real, and his name is apparently really Zee, since everyone is calling him that. It’s a crazy coincidence that he’s the one who found us in that closet, but I wouldn’t have known what to do if it had been anyone else instead of him.
Now, we’re in some dude’s cabin, while a group of them quietly discuss the details of what I recounted. I expected them to slap a straightjacket on me the second I dished out all the crazy, but they didn’t seem the least bit fazed by the impossible details I laid out.
Magic can’t be real. This can’t be real. There’s no way.
“Wake up, Leah,” I whisper to myself.
Marilyn whimpers and buries her face in her hands, still rocking. If she’s this traumatized, then the crazy has to be legit.
Zee is watching me, even though I think he’s listening to everyone else. He seems pissed off that I’m here, but it’s not like I asked to be brought here. However, I have asked to go home. Numerous times.
“She needs to be wiped. Obviously she can’t handle what she saw,” the one they call Chaz says, eyeing Marilyn like she’s annoying him.
“She just watched two people be murdered in an unexplainable, brutal way. Well, one. We just had to hear the second one be tortured to death,” I snarl, rubbing Marilyn’s back while she continues to stay in shock and rock.
“You seem just fine,” Zee says in an accusatory tone that I really don’t appreciate.
What’s his damn problem?
“I’m not fine, but I’m not broken like her. Maybe I’m in denial or something, but I’ve always been weird, so it’s not surprising. Can I please take her home? Or are we still being held captive? I thought you were going to call the police.”
Why the hell hasn’t anyone called the cops by now? I’m sick of telling them the story the police need to hear.
“The cops won’t be of any use,” a blonde says as she walks in.
All the men go stiff, and the other blonde named Kimber goes to meet her half way.
“It’s a murder. Why won’t they be of some use?” I ask, but my question gets overrode by another guy when he asks her something else too low for me to hear.
“All of it,” she says with a shrug. “Don’t act so surprised. You can’t keep something like this a secret from me. Besides, I deserve to know. I’m the one most affected by this.”
“I’m having it cleaned up,” the one in leather says. I think his name is Ice? Weird name.
“Dice, have them burn the blood, too. No evidence left behind,” Chaz says.
Okay, so not Ice but Dice. Even weirder. And I thought… Whoa! What?
“You’re burning the evidence?” I shriek.
“We have to,” Zee says, still watching me like he’s close to killing me. That has me admittedly on edge, since these people don’t seem completely sane or moral.
“What did the guy look like that did this?” the new blonde girl asks.
“We’ve already asked that, Ella. She—”
“No one asked me that,” I interrupt, looking at… What was his name? Gale? Gabe?
“I thought we did,” he says, frowning. “Okay, so did you get a look at him?”
“She’d be dead if she had,” Zee says dismissively.
“I saw him very clearly, but I don’t know him.” They all look at me like they’re waiting for me to have some huge revelation that could tell them who did it. “I’ll save the description for the cops.”
Zee rolls his eyes, and Dice groans. “Someone spell her. We need the info. No time for explanations.”
Spell me?
My throat bobs when I swallow the knot, and the G-name dude walks toward me like he’s about to do something.
“Okay!” I shout, leaning closer to Marilyn like I can somehow protect her. “Okay,” I say, a little quieter. Fuck the cops. I just want this to be over. “The guy was tall, decently tanned… Like all of you.” Curiously, they all have almost the exact same tan. Weird. “He wasn’t wearing anything remarkable, but he did have one easy-to-distinguish feature. There were a few scars on his face, and a couple of them were long.”
I swear the temperature in the room drops fifteen degrees, and all eyes widen on me like they’re waiting for me to tell them I’m joking or something. It only makes me a little more afraid.
“And he had silver eyes,” I go on, knowing how crazy that in itself sounds. “They actually glowed a little.”
Zee curses before slamming his fist through a wall—literally through it. Completely. Like it goes in and something crashes on the other side because he pokes a hole in it. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Chaz narrows his eyes on me, as though he’s suddenly suspicious for some reason. If magic is actually real, I wish I could zap us home and lock the doors. Our real home. Far away from this psychotic town.
“Why would Slade do this?” Kimber asks, as the other girl with blonde hair scrunches her brow in confusion.
“Because he wants the council looming over us, questioning Alyssa’s reign. He needs us distracted,” the G-name guy says. “Fuck.”
“How could he possibly know?” Ella asks in a rasp tone.
This is just confusing me. If Marilyn wasn’t so out of it, I would sneak us out of here. If I could carry her on my own—
“Better question,” Chaz says, still staring at me in a way that has my skin crawling. “Why would Slade let you live? There’s no way he didn’t realize he had an audience. His hearing is beyond anything we have, and his ability to sense another’s presence is uncanny.”
Slade? I assume that’s Scarface’s name.
“You’re asking me? I saw him disappear, and we followed the guy he was following because we’re stupid and curious. You’re welcome to fucking check us out, but you will let us go. Or Marilyn’s family will defi
nitely come looking for her if she doesn’t check—”
“They’re clean,” Dice says, confusing me as he steps toward Chaz. “I did a background on both of them when they were sniffing around Zee’s club.”
Chaz’s jaw ticks, and Zee narrows his eyes on me.
“Coincidental you sniff around my place, seduce me, then end up at a murder scene that looks bad on us. Don’t you think?” Zee asks. “And you don’t seem the least bit shaken.”
Shaken? I’m not shaken enough for him?
“Fuck you,” I snap, trying to stand, but finding my legs uncooperative. I’m fucking shaking all over. I think I’m plenty fucking shaken.
And fuck is my new favorite word at the moment. I only say it when I’m really fucking shaken.
“Asshole,” I mumble, still struggling to stand.
“I’ll hack the video feeds from all the surrounding spots and check out her story,” a black-haired girl says as she walks away.
A girl with longer dark hair is just staring at me. “If you make her bleed, I’ll see if I know her blood,” she finally says, and I swallow really damn hard after hearing that.
“You’d know her face if you knew her blood,” the guy named Thad tells her, kissing her like she didn’t just ask for my blood.
I’m in a house full of sociopaths. How did this happen?
And to think I was chasing one of these guys—trying to cyber stalk him.
My therapist will need therapy after hearing all this.
“Not so. Sometimes they fed me blood from unknowns to have it in me just in case. I didn’t always get sent on retrieval for all the samples I tasted.”
If a thought-bubble formed over my head, it would say, “Dafuq?”
“I’m not sure what brand of crazy this is, nor do I care. I’ve studied a lot of occults with Marilyn, so I get that you all have a herd mentality and you follow one alpha. I’m not trying to disrupt your society. I just want to get us out of here alive. So tell me how to make that happen. I swear we won’t say anything to anyone. If you don’t believe it, then research her more. You’ll see she’s never once given up the names of her sources, and she’s written about a lot of illegal activity in the past.”