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9
ADDIE
Back in the small mountain town, Maddox prowled around on all fours. While that sounded funny—and I liked to imagine human Maddox sniffing the sidewalk on his hands and knees—he’d shifted to his wolf form. Putting the collar around his neck had felt oddly intimate again.
To be honest, I’d been fairly rough about the whole process, too. I’d yanked him close and slapped the collar around his neck, all while ignoring the pale pink blush that’d reached his cheeks.
I paused as a realization hit me.
Narrowing my eyes at the wolf searching for a scent trail, I asked, “Why did we put the collar on before…you know?”
Maddox didn’t lift his head. He didn’t even acknowledge my question. I had half a mind to pull him to a halt, but he quickly caught a scent.
His tail snapped up. Ears perked, Maddox shoved his nose to the ground and frantically began sniffing. With a sharp tug, he yanked me down the street. I had to jog to keep up.
My heart flipped with worry. Would we walk in on another ghost? There still weren’t many spirits around. In a place that had once been overwhelming, it was now oddly quiet. I couldn’t even call it a ghost town, because that would imply that there were even ghosts.
Maddox’s scent trail led us to the edge of town where the houses were few and far between. The trees were thick, but no bird song greeted us. It was eerily quiet. Not even the brush dared to rustle in the wind.
A shiver raced down my spine. At first, I thought it was death come to greet me and lead me in the right direction. I quickly realized that it was fear. There was nothing here. I reached out with my arcana only to find a massive amount of…nothing.
Maddox’s leash slipped out of my hand while I rocked from confusion. There should have been the soft churning sensation of rotting things beneath my feet. All things died and returned to the earth. I’d always been able to feel that. Hell, I’d even used that to my advantage a few times.
Yet, there was nothing here. It was as if I’d stepped into a deathless void. It pressed against my chest and made my heart hammer. Thoughts racing, I couldn’t capture one and follow it through to an end. The jumbled cacophony of sound inside my skull roared louder and louder until Maddox barked.
The world rushed back into focus. Sound filtered back in, though I noted there was still no birdsong to be heard anywhere. On shaky feet, I followed Maddox into the nearby ditch. Leaving the road behind made me miss hiking until I saw what Maddox was pointing to.
“Oh,” was all I could manage.
He stood over a hand. The delicate salon-perfect nails and dainty diamond ring told me that it’d likely belonged to a woman. My stomach flipped. Had we found a part of the woman that had been haunting us?
Another question struck me like a wayward bus.
I looked Maddox in the eye. “How can that be here if I can’t feel anything dead?”
I couldn’t sense it. According to my arcana, there was nothing dead around me for miles. Yet, the dismembered hand in front of me proved that wrong. I couldn’t tell what was going on.
Was I malfunctioning? Or was there something wrong with death, itself? I didn’t know how to tell the two apart. I’d been so immersed in my own arcana and what it allowed me to do for so long that I didn’t know where the line between myself and death really was.
In his wolf form, Maddox sat and tilted his head curiously. He looked me up and down before glancing over to the hand. The way he wrinkled his nose told me that it clearly smelled of death.
“What’s going on?” I asked under my breath.
Hel’s words returned to me. She’d warned me that the world as I knew it was corrupting because of Maddox’s presence. She’d made it sound like Maddox’s hunger was the problem, though. He didn’t have to feed off the world around him if I was around. This couldn’t be because of him.
Could it?
Instead of thinking too hard, I climbed the short hill back up to the road so I could figure out where we were. If they’d figured out the locations of the mystery emergency calls, then maybe we could use that to see if this was, in fact, one of the missing callers.
There were no immediate street signs, so I pulled out my phone and opened the GPS app. Zooming in on my location revealed the road name. I flicked around the screen in search of a nearby cul-de-sac that could belong to the ghost woman. I expected it to be nearby, but the closest residential area was five miles away, on the other side of town.
Either that woman had been out for a ten-mile run to here and back, or whoever was responsible had dragged her out here for a reason.
A thought occurred to me. It made my stomach dip. Maddox sidled up to me and pressed his body to my thigh. I paused my search, finger hovering over the screen. He couldn’t see what I was doing but searching for his address to see how close it was felt like a betrayal.
So, I tucked the phone back into my pocket and asked Maddox what our next move would be. While he went into the woods to shift forms, I glanced around. We were in the more rural part of town. Having stayed with Maddox for the past few nights, I knew he lived in a similar area.
I wanted to trust him. I really did. If he wouldn’t accept help from the others, did that mean he was really okay on his own? Or was he trying to hide just how screwed he really was? I looked back as he emerged, disheveled, from the woods.
