“I’m sorry.”
A deep chuckle that sounded more like branches being pushed into a woodchipper than it did an actual laugh rumbled through the door. “Please, please, please,” it mocked. “There’s no saving you, filthy creature. You’re mine now.”
I bristled, suddenly flushed with anger. A girl was terrified, without hope or a way to flee, and this monster-faced motherfucker was baiting her, laughing at her.
I’d never met a demon before, but I was already wondering what was the best way to kill one.
The other girl was staring past me, frozen. I grabbed her by the arm, and she went without resistance, following me down the stairs and straight out the door. On the lawn, we all gazed upward, looking at the window to the bedroom I’d just been in. The curtains were motionless, and the whole house was pristine and idyllic.
A redheaded girl sped by on her bicycle. Across the street two shirtless guys were throwing a football back and forth, laughing boisterously. Another young man sat on the steps of the house watching as he sipped a pop. Groups of co-eds walked along the sidewalks, clutching books, wearing Tulane apparel. They glowed with youthful innocence and idealism.
And twelve feet above me a demon was holding three girls captive inside their own house.
Chapter Eight
I’d honestly forgotten all about the dead body and my werewolves in custody.
When Mags called from the police station to give me an update on the legal proceedings, it took me a few seconds to recall what she was talking about.
“Wait, can you repeat that?” I turned down the air conditioning so I could hear her better. Wilder, seeing how shaken up I’d been leaving the sorority house, insisted on driving, and I hadn’t even fought him on it.
“Ben is here,” Magnolia said again, slower this time.
I checked the clock in the dash. It was shortly after ten now. Unless Ben had left St. Francisville at exactly the same time I’d left my house, there was no way he would have gotten to the city by now. Which meant he’d already been in New Orleans.
There was a lot to unpack there.
For one, that meant an Alpha wolf was in my territory without coming to see me first. Huge no-no. It didn’t matter if he was my twin brother. It also meant Ben was hanging out in my territory just waiting for an opportunity to stick his nose in my business.
Which was precisely what he was doing now, if he was at the police station with Emmett and Mason while I was off meddling in human affairs. It didn’t matter that I’d done everything right, by letting Callum know the situation and sending Mags there to oversee things. Ben was making a move anyway.
I wasn’t surprised, which made it hard to be angry. What bothered me more was wondering if Callum knew. Or if he’d sent Ben here to keep an eye on me and intervene if it looked like I couldn’t lead.
Did they have such little faith in me as an Alpha? And if so, why bother making me one in the first place?
“We’re on our way.”
Hanging up before she could say anything else, I scrubbed my hands over my face, glad I hadn’t bothered with eyeshadow or mascara this morning. How had I only been awake three hours when it felt like I’d aged a full decade since my morning coffee?
Wilder, who had heard both sides of my conversation with Mags, automatically piloted us in the direction of the police precinct Detective Perry had mentioned earlier.
Neither of us was too thrilled about the idea of walking into a police station. I could see the apprehension in the tight set of his jaw and the way he gripped the steering wheel with white-knuckled determination.
Not even three months ago, before I’d become Alpha, Wilder and I had found ourselves on the wrong side of the law in a very small, very bad town. For a while it seemed certain neither us, nor his brother Hank, would be leaving Franklinton place alive.
So it wasn’t that we didn’t like the police, it was more that we had a good reason with historical precedence to not want to walk into a police station. I had always been a little apprehensive about law enforcement. Living with Callum as a child had taught me a certain level of distrust for outside authority, and living in the bayou with Memere had shown me there were evils in the world the law had no hope of drowning out.
Sometimes the police were nothing more than a nightlight inside a black hole.
I picke
d up my phone then set it down again, watching the streets of New Orleans streak past. People went about living their lives. Getting on buses, walking their dogs, sipping coffee on patios. Such mundane, unbelievably normal things. How could all of this coexist beside everything I’d seen today?
This world and mine had run parallel to each other for all recorded time. Monsters, magic, and the really nasty stuff staying in a dark shadow of the bright, shiny human reality. Now those shadows were pouring into human society, and like Pandora’s box, once the bad stuff was free, there was no getting it back in.
Yet these people still walked their dogs, and drank their coffee, and waited for the bus.
I wanted that to be a sign of hope, but all I saw was naiveté.