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His gaze dropped to her lips again, glittering with a dark need that answered her own. She thought he might kiss her. He didn’t. He took a single step back, blanking his expression with an enviable ease.
“A week, Khloé.” It was a warning and a promise. And then he was gone.
She blew out a breath. “Well fuckadoodledo.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Hey, wake up.”
Lying on her stomach, Khloé grunted. “Fuck off.” There was an awful draft as the covers were dragged off her body.
“Wake up,” urged Ciaran. “Grams needs your help. Like now.” Just like that, tension zipped through her. Khloé lifted her head. “Help? Why?”
“I don’t have time to explain. Come on, we need to go.”
She edged out of bed and began pulling on clothes. “Give me the bare bones of the situation.”
Facing the wall to give her some privacy, he replied, “Some shit’s gone down with Enoch. It’s just … fucked up.”
Enoch had been a member of their lair since before they were born. She didn’t know him well—he mostly kept to himself. That suited her fine, because something indefinable about him rubbed her demon up the wrong way. “I’m ready. What do you mean by fucked up?”
Ciaran turned to face her and grabbed her hand. “Brace yourself. You’re not gonna like what you see.”
A slight breeze swept over her skin, the world around her flashed white, and then Khloé found herself stood in—ah, hell—a basement. She hated basements. They were dark and creepy and dank. And, God, the stench in this one was foul. Like rot, decay, and old blood.
Hearing two voices behind her, she spun. Her mouth fell open in horror, and she almost jerked back a step. Her inner demon recoiled, just as disgusted.
Oh God, this was wrong. So very, very wrong. Twisted, even.
“Ah, your grandchildren have come to join you, Jolene,” Enoch said, a bitter twist to his mouth. “Isn’t that sweet?”
Jolene didn’t glance their way. Like the two sentinels at her back, Orrin and Mitch, she kept her attention locked on Enoch.
He cut his gaze back to the Prime. “You won’t take my daughter from me,” he told her, his jaw set, his chin high, his chest thrust out—clearly aiming to look as intimidating as possible as he stood between her and the twisted sight behind him.
“You think this is good for Molly?” Jolene challenged, clearly not in the least bit rattled. The woman might be crazy, but she was also a strong, shrewd Prime who could blow shit up with a mere thought, so she had every right to be confident in the face of a threat. “You think it’s fair to her?”
His nostrils flared. “It’s better than her being six feet under the goddamn ground.”
She sighed. “Enoch—”
“Leave,” he bit out. “This isn’t your business.”
Jolene lifted her chin a notch. “Oh, this is very much my business. When you first joined my lair, you made me a promise that you wouldn’t use your main gift without consulting me. You broke that promise.”
Oh, he’d broken it in a spectacular fashion, thought Khloé, as she and her brother flanked Jolene. She could already guess why her grandmother had sent for her, and she wanted to be ready to make her move.
“I haven’t done anyone any harm,” he insisted.
“If the parents of those poor children behind you knew what you’d done, they’d be devastated,” said Jolene. “That means nothing to you?”
“I brought their children back from the dead—they’d be pleased. Grateful.”
Grateful? This guy was warped for sure. The decomposing kids breathed, moved, and sluggishly shuffled around on their little feet within the translucent forcefield that surrounded them. But there was nothing of those kids there. No personality or spirit or life.
With the exception of little Molly, Khloé didn’t recognize any of them, so she could only assume he’d exhumed them from human cemeteries. None appeared to have been dead more than a few years, but there was no way their parents could look at them and fool themselves into believing their kids were “back” from the dead. They were just empty shells.
Although he’d clearly cleaned and redressed them—even going as far as to brush and style their hair, which she couldn’t help but find seriously freaking weird—the sight was still nauseating. Especially with their rotting, pale, sagging flesh and their vacant soulless eyes. And he treated them like they were dolls or something.
“You didn’t resurrect their souls, Enoch,” said Jolene. “You merely took control of their corpses; you use them as puppets. You desecrated their graves and disturbed their rest.”
His mouth tightened. “Molly needed friends.”
“Molly is dead. It’s tragic, but it’s true. That isn’t your child over there. It’s her body. It’s no more than a suit she no longer needs. Her soul has moved on.”
“She talked to me. She knew me—”
“At first, yes, she probably did. But I’ll bet it wasn’t long before she lost whatever echoes of herself were left in that body. It’s an ‘it’ now, not a ‘she.’ Not a living person. Not Molly.”
