Nails, too sharp to be Cash’s, dug into the meat of my arm. I went from zero to wide awake in a split second, sitting bolt upright in bed. The room was dark, darker than it should be even in the thick of night. I blinked, hoping I could chase the blackness back, but I would have been better off having my eyes closed still.
“Cash?”
The hands were gone from my skin, but the dampness of whatever had been dripping on me remained. I touched my fingers to my cheek, and they came away wet. When I sniffed them, I recoiled.
Blood.
“Cash.”
An eerie croaking sound, like a frog but deeper and slower, came from mere inches in front of me. I recoiled into my pillow, scuttling back so I was up against the headboard.
The space in bed beside me was empty. I was alone here with whatever this was, no trace of Cash to give me comfort.
“Wilder.” I hoped he might hear from the next room. If Cash wasn’t here, I wanted someone to help me. I didn’t care who it was.
“No, baby, no no no.” The voice was rough, like a zipper being pulled apart forcefully, metal teeth gnashing. It was harsh and raspy and sent chills through me that made me question my mortality. In those few words I felt hope drain out of my body, as if a phrase alone could compel me to give up on everything.
Anyone standing on a ledge would be talked in jumping without a second thought. That was how much it evoked a dreary despair, making me cold down to my bones.
“Go away,” I pleaded.
“Don’t you missssssss me?” Fingers brushed my face again, and I sucked in another breath, resisting the urge to scream. Tears of panic welled in my eyes, and it was taking all of my willpower not to lose my mind right then.
The voice was female and sounded like my own, or Secret’s, if I was listening to us through a blender. When it dawned on me whose voice it was, I let out a mewl of fear.
“Mom?”
“Ahh, you remember, you remember. You all forget so easily. Your sister.” A snarling noise of disgust followed the mention of Secret. “Your brother. Your father.”
My eyes widened. My father? This was hardly the ideal time to start begging for details, since I wasn’t entirely sure she was real. I might be losing my damned mind, and what good would answers from my own fractured psyche do me? But I’d seen too much in my life to dismiss her presence. I’d assumed this was a nightmare. Now I wasn’t so sure.
It seemed almost too convenient, her showing up at the same time as the charred woman who was following me everywhere.
Unless…
“Have you been following me? I…I’ve seen you.”
Her hand pulled back, but my cheek was still wet. I felt coated in sticky fingerprints, as if she were a child covered in melted chocolate, but the iron-scented tang of blood was everywhere now, totally inescapable. The sheets and I probably looked like a macabre Jackson Pollack painting.
“I am everywhere, but nowhere. You can only see me when I want to be seeeeen.” Her voice was pinpricks all over me. I wanted to throw up in my mouth. I wanted to cover my ears and blot it all out until the mercy of silence remained.
Mercy. What a joke.
Mercy McQueen was sitting right in front of me, and the only reprieve I could imagine was her being gone. Perhaps mercy was the last thing I wanted.
“If you’re not following me, who is?” The common sense part of my brain told me I was insane for engaging her in conversation. Every consonant and vowel out of her mouth pushed me closer to the cusp of an imaginary ledge. Somewhere there was an invisible line between sanity and madness, and I was blithely skipping towards it.
“You were my favorite. You were the daughter she never was. I wanted to keep you.”
I may not have ever met Mercy, but I’d heard my share of stories—none of them good—about what happened to her to make her the way she was. Amelia had sworn that Mercy, though difficult, had been a loving girl once. She’d loved a human boy, and he’d gotten her pregnant. Then that human boy stopped being human. He was turned by a vampire, and when he rose, he attacked Mercy in a fog of vampire hunger. In order to save her from his own attack, he gave her some of his blood.
She’d been nine months pregnant at the time.
Both Mercy and her baby survived, but her child, my sister Secret, was born…wrong. Her werewolf DNA and the vampire blood made her something unique, something impossible, a hybrid of both monsters.
Mercy thought Secret was a freak. She abandoned her baby, and spent the next two decades cultivating the be all end all of grudges against her child. She drove herself mad and blamed Secret for ruining her life. In the end, Mercy’s need for revenge pushed her so far, Secret had no choice but to push back.
No matter how human we pretended to be, in the world of monsters it sometimes came down to kill or be killed.