She had been real.
How she had been real was another question entirely, but one I hadn’t been about to stick around and quiz her on. I had literally seen her head in a box after my sister cut it off. That was a complicated enough story on its own. We didn’t need a second chapter.
Yet there she’d been standing only a few feet away from me, and her head had been perfectly in place.
Her laughter grew quieter but no less chilling as I ran.
There was one kind of death no one came back from, and that was beheading. Vampires couldn’t heal themselves, werewolves couldn’t, fey couldn’t. I knew of no single being that had the ability to reattach a severed head.
If I’d been a scientist, perhaps my mother’s return would have been exciting. An unexpected opportunity to learn about supernatural reanimation. But as it was, I knew what a monster she’d been in life. There was a reason Secret had lobbed Mercy’s head off in the first place, and it was better for all of us if that bitch had stayed dead and buried.
She wasn’t a ghost. The smell was a big tip-off there, but so were the words she’d spoken. Not the content of them, so much, but the fact she could speak at all. Ghosts had no lungs—they were dead, after all, and had no corporeal parts—so they couldn’t speak.
So, she couldn’t possibly be alive, but she also wasn’t a ghost.
My mind was racing almost as fast as my legs were. I barely noticed the dried branches lashing at my face and bare arms. It might have been early November, but I had planned to be digging, and werewolves tended to run warm at the best of times. I hadn’t needed a sweater.
Now I was being scraped up, and I was covered in a thin sheen of sweat, making the cold air cling to me. I’d had to go deep into the woods on my uncle Callum’s property to find the place my aunt Savannah had put Mercy. No one had wanted to keep her anywhere near the house.
Was this why?
Had they known this was a possibility?
After a few minutes of breathless headlong running, I broke through the denser brush of the woods and hit a small creek that circled the rear of Callum’s property. Under normal circumstances I might have gone a few feet up the shoreline to find the little footbridge. Instead, I didn’t even slow down. I charged through the shallow stream and up the other side, barreling through the old trees that hung heavy with Spanish moss.
As soon as I saw the lights of the compound, I let out a little cry of relief.
Almost there.
A circle of small cabins were built up at the back of Callum’s palatial plantation mansion, each simple building painted a different bright color. Only a handful had lights on—they weren’t always occupied, but rather served as temporary housing to pack werewolves in need—but the lights at the pack bar, The Den, were blazing bright.
I made a beeline for the wood-slat building, the sound of laughter and music rolling like a fog over the lawn towards me.
Then someone grabbed me from behind.
I hadn’t heard anyone coming, hadn’t smelled anything. I’d been so totally focused on getting back to Callum and the other wolves I had barely believed it was possible she might actually be following me.
I screamed, and spun around, fingers curled into the human approximation of claws. Wrenching myself free of my attacker’s hold I swiped at their face, making sharp contact.
“Ow,” a man’s voice said. “Jesus fuck, Genie.”
I froze.
A man’s voice.
Wilder’s voice.
“Oh my God.” I held his chin in my hands, and he jerked away, not surprisingly. A thin line of blood trickled down his cheek from where I’d gouged him below the eye. “I’m so sorry.”
“What the hell?” He touched his cheek gingerly, and looked at the glimmering red liquid on his fingers.
The wound would heal in minutes, but that was really beside the point.
“I’m so sorry,” I repeated.
Being in his presence, in spite of my maiming him, put me at ease in a way I couldn’t articulate. All the tension and terror that had driven me through the woods melted away, leaving me sweaty and trembling, but with a real sense of I’m safe now coursing through me.
Wilder Shaw, my sometimes bodyguard and recently my all-the-time boyfriend, was exactly the kind of man you’d want by your side in a fucked-up scenario like this one.