He smelled like cheap hotel soap and fresh sweat. The lingering fragrance of motor oil was barely there today.
Wilder glanced back at me, his gaze darting down to my hands, though they weren’t on him anymore. He smirked and gestured to something on the ground ahead, leaving me no opportunity to dwell on the incident. I skirted around him for a better look.
Was that…?
Ahead of us, growing in a wide circle too evenly spaced to be natural, was more magnolia. The white blooms were almost blinding against the otherwise dark green backdrop of the tree leaves. The life of the flowers was already dwindling. The shell-like waxy white petals cupped yellow pollen, the tender edges of each flower starting to brown.
The smell in the air was overpowering. Lemons and honey, reminding me of Lina’s perfume, but turned up to eleven. Even with Wilder right beside me, the soapy scent I’d gotten off him moments earlier was lost to the sugary-sweet fragrance from the blossoms.
I wrinkled my nose, my eyes watering from the wall of perfumed air we’d walked into. The odor was thick, bordering on toxic. This was exactly why werewolves didn’t spritz on CK One on their way out the door every morning. Scent was much more intense to us than it was to humans, and it was the sort of thing we couldn’t turn off. We might be able to ignore our inner wolves, but some of the features weren’t optional.
Once I got over the impact of the magnolia tree border, I realized that’s precisely what it was. A strategically planted hedge. And since we were in the middle of the woods, I didn’t think someone had placed it here for its aesthetic value.
Crouching down, I brushed fallen leaves back off the ground. Purple flowers winked up at me.
“Look at you,” Wilder declared, lowering himself to my level. “Little bit of Nancy Drew in you after all.”
“Does that make you Bess or George?” I rubbed the petals of the wolfsbane and raised my fingers to my mouth, tasting them. I knew what it was, but it felt like a small act of defiance to prove to myself I couldn’t be defeated by their flora.
“Why do I have to be one of the girls?” he asked, sounding fake hurt.
“Because her boyfriend was useless.”
He smirked and helped me to my feet. “Better a useful woman than a useless man, I say. Which one was the flirt?”
“Bess, I think.”
“Then call me Bess.”
His hand paused around my wrist, and I fought to swallow. When I finally got the lump in my throat down, my stomach gurgled. How the hell had I ever managed to date, let alone keep a boyfriend, when I was apparently only capable of acting like an idiot around men?
You’re not an idiot around Cash.
No, and I wasn’t in a position right now to think about why. I slipped my hands out of Wilder’s and was about to speak when something behind him caught my eye. At first, seeing only a flash of movement, I was terrified it might be the spectral woman haunting me. I wondered if I’d be able to ignore her so Wilder wouldn’t think I was batshit crazy.
I wondered if he might be able to see her too.
Then the figure moved, and I let out a small gasp of surprise.
A little girl, her hair strawberry blonde and tangled, stood about ten feet away, clutching a battered teddy bear. She couldn’t have been more than five years old. She was sucking her thumb, but when she noticed me staring, she stopped and pulled her thumb from between her lips with a small, guilty smile.
“Hello.” I waved, hoping not to frighten her.
She looked as though she might put her thumb back in her mouth but thought better of it. Instead she glanced over her shoulder, beyond the magnolia to something I couldn’t see. She seemed to be considering making a run for it.
“Do you live near here?” Wilder stared at me when she didn’t answer, shrugging but clearly at a loss for how to deal with this tiny interloper.
“You can’t be here. You gotta go before they see you,” the girl announced. Her voice was raspy, more like a 1940s lounge singer than a child.
“What?” I took a step back. She’d erased any protective impulses I had towards her with one sentence.
This time when she spoke, her voice was singsong. “No one is supposed to see us, Daddy said. He said if anyone sees us, God will be mad, and he’ll make us move again. Please don’t—”
“Genie,” Wilder’s voice rang out, cutting the girl’s warning short, but I didn’t even get a chance to look at him. He pushed me, and it was probably the only thing that kept the blow from cracking my skull open.
I crumpled to the ground, covering my head in case a second wave of assault came. The last thing I saw was the little girl’s dead-eyed stared as I was dragged away.
Chapter Twenty-Four