“You remember?” she asked me.
“I do now.”
“Oh, Genie, I’m so sorry.”
I waved off her apology. “There’s nothing you need to be sorry for. I’m sorry for what happened too.” I looked at Lucas. There were all manner of wrongdoings that had gone down that night, and his dying seemed like it was as much my fault as Morgan’s death.
At least I’d been able to undo one thing for the better.
“Right, you killed her, and it was probably doing that that set this whole thing in motion. Your guilt over killing her brought her back before anyone else, but because you didn’t know who she was or what you felt guilty for, the curse just kept growing, touching everyone you felt responsible for.”
I thought about this, and there was a weird kind of logic to it I hadn’t considered before. “So bringing Morgan back was the entire point of the spell, but because I didn’t know what to do with it, things kept getting worse.”
“That still doesn’t explain why Morgan and Lucas seem to just want to hang out, but Deerling and Mercy want to kill her,” Secret added.
“Mercy sort of wants to kill everyone,” I reminded her. “And killing me was the last thing on Deerling’s mind when he died.”
“To be fair, it was sort of the last thing on Mercy’s mind, too,” Lucas pointed out.
I gave a helpless shrug. “I don’t know, guys. I don’t have the answers to this any more than you do.”
“I have an idea,” Wilder said.
We all turned to look at him, and he smiled. “Let’s go kill something and see if it stays dead.”
“I like him,” Secret said. “He’s a keeper.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Two hours and two cars later, we arrived in Franklinton.
It was just as much a dingy hell-hole as it had been when Wilder and I visited it last, with the faintly abandoned vibe of a place that was just on the verge of giving up.
We bypassed the main stretch of town and headed towards the outskirts, where the enormous building that had once housed the Church of Morning stood.
The mammoth complex that might put your average Christian mega-church to shame, loomed like an enormous empty temple against the fading light of day.
My body ached from exhaustion, and I wanted nothing more than to go to bed, but it seemed like the more we got into this the further from sleep I found myself. Hell, I’d settle for twenty quick minutes in the backseat of a car right now, but even that felt like a fever dream.
Wilder parked my Dart next to Santiago’s truck, and we got out, staring up at the behemoth structure as if it might turn into a monster itself and try to devour us.
As we were staring, a third car pulled into the parking lot, and I recognized the rusting exterior immediately. Detective Bryce Perry parked on the opposite side of the Dart and climbed out wearing that fake police smile that told me we were in for it before he even spoke.
“Evening, y’all.” He tipped an imaginary cap at us. “What brings you out this far from town? Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the case I told you about, could it? Because I was under the impression you and I had an agreement about that, Ms. McQueen.”
“Are you following me?” I was honestly shocked. Though he evidently had good reason not to trust me, I sort of thought we had an agreement that he’d let me break the law as long as it was helping people. Like Commissioner Gordon and Batman.
“In spite of your apparent belief that I have nothing better to do with my time than trail you around, no, I’m not following you. I’m here doing an investigation and your little caravan heading right for a crime scene was sort of hard to miss. What are you doing here?”
Lucas looked Bryce up and down and said, “You probably shouldn’t answer that.”
“Who’s this guy?” Bryce asked. “Actually who the hell are all of these people?”
Secret brightened, seeming to recall she had federal authority, and whipped out her badge. “FBI. Special Agent Secret McQueen.” There was a pure kind of mirth in her tone that told me she still hadn’t gotten sick of saying that.
“And you’re here on whose authority, Agent McQueen?” Bryce gave me a look that clearly said he wasn’t buying a single ounce of my bullshit.
“The case involves an undead werewolf, Detective Perry. My branch of the FBI is specialized to deal with precisely this kind of case, and I’m actually surprised I had to find out about it on my own rather than being brought in for a consultation directly. I thought all police understood they were supposed to report things that were out of the ordinary to our department.”