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Chapter One
I’m not sure how most people would react when their once-beheaded mother returns from the dead, but I ran.
My mission had been grim but simple: dig up my mother’s head and give it to Beau Cain as payment for services rendered. What I hadn’t counted on was finding her makeshift grave empty.
What I really hadn’t counted on was turning around to find the formerly dead Mercy McQueen standing behind me, head planted firmly on shoulders, telling me what a naughty, naughty girl I’d been.
Frankly: fuck that.
I took off running into the trees, the sound of her laughter crackling like wood in bonfire, echoing in my ears as I tried to put enough distance between us to feel safe again.
How much distance would that be? I wasn’t sure I could run all the way to Australia.
I had some experience with encountering nightmares when I was awake. For over a year the specter of a burned woman had been appearing to me at very inconvenient times, doing her part to convince me I was losing my mind.
Except I knew she was real because I could smell her.
If there was one sense a werewolf learned to trust implicitly, it was their sense of smell. And much like that charred ghost, I’d smelled my mother with such clarity the scent of her was in my nostrils even now.
She had been real.
How she had been real was another question entirely, but one I hadn’t been about to stick around and quiz her on. I had literally seen her head in a box after my sister cut it off. That was a complicated enough story on its own. We didn’t need a second chapter.
Yet there she’d been standing only a few feet away from me, and her head had been perfectly in place.
Her laughter grew quieter but no less chilling as I ran.
There was one kind of death no one came back from, and that was beheading. Vampires couldn’t heal themselves, werewolves couldn’t, fey couldn’t. I knew of no single being that had the ability to reattach a severed head.
If I’d been a scientist, perhaps my mother’s return would have been exciting. An unexpected opportunity to learn about supernatural reanimation. But as it was, I knew what a monster she’d been in life. There was a reason Secret had lobbed Mercy’s head off in the first place, and it was better for all of us if that bitch had stayed dead and buried.
She wasn’t a ghost. The smell was a big tip-off there, but so were the words she’d spoken. Not the content of them, so much, but the fact she could speak at all. Ghosts had no lungs—they were dead, after all, and had no corporeal parts—so they couldn’t speak.
So, she couldn’t possibly be alive, but she also wasn’t a ghost.
My mind was racing almost as fast as my legs were. I barely noticed the dried branches lashing at my face and bare arms. It might have been early November, but I had planned to be digging, and werewolves tended to run warm at the best of times. I hadn’t needed a sweater.
Now I was being scraped up, and I was covered in a thin sheen of sweat, making the cold air cling to me. I’d had to go deep into the woods on my uncle Callum’s property to find the place my aunt Savannah had put Mercy. No one had wanted to keep her anywhere near the house.
Was this why?
Had they known this was a possibility?
After a few minutes of breathless headlong running, I broke through the denser brush of the woods and hit a small creek that circled the rear of Callum’s property. Under normal circumstances I might have gone a few feet up the shoreline to find the little footbridge. Instead, I didn’t even slow down. I charged through the shallow stream and up the other side, barreling through the old trees that hung heavy with Spanish moss.
As soon as I saw the lights of the compound, I let out a little cry of relief.
Almost there.
A circle of small cabins were built up at the back of Callum’s palatial plantation mansion, each simple building painted a different bright color. Only a handful had lights on—they weren’t always occupied, but rather served as temporary housing to pack werewolves in need—but the lights at the pack bar, The Den, were blazing bright.
I made a beeline for the wood-slat building, the sound of laughter and music rolling like a fog over the lawn towards me.
Then someone grabbed me from behind.
I hadn’t heard anyone coming, hadn’t smelled anything. I’d been so totally focused on getting back to Callum and the other wolves I had barely believed it was possible she might actually be following me.
I screamed, and spun around, fingers curled into the human approximation of claws. Wrenching myself free of my attacker’s hold I swiped at their face, making sharp contact.
“Ow,” a man’s voice said. “Jesus fuck, Genie.”
I froze.
A man’s voice.
Wilder’s voice.
“Oh my God.” I held his chin in my hands, and he jerked away, not surprisingly. A thin line of blood trickled down his cheek from where I’d gouged him below the eye. “I’m so sorry.”
“What the hell?” He touched his cheek gingerly, and looked at the glimmering red liquid on his fingers.
The wound would heal in minutes, but that was really beside the point.
“I’m so sorry,” I repeated.
Being in his presence, in spite of my maiming him, put me at ease in a way I couldn’t articulate. All the tension and terror that had driven me through the woods melted away, leaving me sweaty and trembling, but with a real sense of I’m safe now coursing through me.
Wilder Shaw, my sometimes bodyguard and recently my all-the-time boyfriend, was exactly the kind of man you’d want by your side in a fucked-up scenario like this one.
He must have seen something on my face—perhaps the horrifying dread I was feeling—because his annoyance at being attacked quickly dissolved and his hands went to my cheeks, cupping my face.
It wasn’t until that moment that I realized I was crying.
“Genie, what happened?”
Under different circumstances it probably wouldn’t have seemed all that strange for someone to be crying after they returned from their mother’s grave. This was hardly what I would call normal circumstances, however, and Wilder knew full well that my relationship with Mercy hadn’t been a close or loving one.
Plus there was that whole being terrified thing. My heart must have been beating a hundred miles a minute, and he was close enough there was no doubt he could feel it, and that he could smell the fear coming off me.
Werewolf senses made it hard to keep stuff like that hidden.
