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Bryce rolled his eyes and set his empty water glass in the sink. “Let’s not bullshit each other here. I know you know what’s happening, you know that you know what’s happening. I don’t feel like running around in circles convincing you to tell me the truth. I’d like to think that after the situation we witnessed at that sorority house that you and I are, I don’t know. Friends?”
I liked Bryce. And for a cop, he was more willing than most to accept all the weird and wonderful things that went along with the supernatural coexisting with the mundane. He’d helped me when my wolves were in trouble, and he also hadn’t gone screaming for the hills when I’d had to explain that a bunch of girls had literally been eaten by a demonic house.
That put in him pretty high esteem in my books. Even if I thought his personal grooming and car cleanliness were atrocious. I literally ran alongside a pack of humans who turned into animals, so I wasn’t going to call him on keeping too many food wrappers in his passenger seat when I had been known to wake up covered in rabbit blood from time to time.
We all had bad habits.
“Okay,” I said. “But you might want to sit down.”
Wilder gave me a look and a silent head shake, saying he didn’t think it was a particularly smart idea for me to let another human in on this new whirlwind of bullshit we were experiencing. But Bryce had seen the video before we had. He’d told me Deerling was out there, and he’d done it by coming to me, rather than dragging me down to the police station and making a public spectacle of it.
Maybe we really were friends. At least whatever version of that could exist between a cop and a werewolf Alpha in this world.
He obediently took a seat at the table and put his laptop bac
k in the bag he’d brought. Attentively, he folded his hands on the table like an eager schoolboy and waited for me to speak. Man, if only everyone in my life treated me like I was this worthy of respect and attention.
My own brother, for example.
“I don’t have all the answers I’m sure you want, and I genuinely wish I did. So it may seem like I’m keeping things hidden but I promise I’m not.”
“And for the time being, I’ll believe that’s true.” A small smile.
“Fair enough.”
I explained, with as much brevity as possible, my mother’s unexpected return from the grave, her seeming focus on killing me, and the gist of what Santiago had told me about the curse looming over me. I left out the bit about the charred woman on the highway, because that one was just a bit too weird to explain without a lot of additional info. It was one thing for him to accept that the dead were out to get me, but telling the story of a burned body that spoke through a witch… well, that was a lot.
“So, you’re telling me that this witch friend of yours, the one from the house I’m assuming?” He waited for me to nod. “He says there are four of these risen dead you should expect?”
“The voice speaking through him implied that, yes.”
“And so far we have Deerling and your mother?”
I nodded, keeping my face impassive. “And whoever the voice was.” That seemed like a fair compromise, at least he knew we had three of four. No matter how much I tried to rack my brains, I couldn’t fathom who the fourth would be. But if you’d asked me an hour ago I wouldn’t have singled out Deerling as an option either.
I might just need to let myself continue to be unpleasantly surprised. If I needed to make a mental list of everyone who had died in proximity to me, I might be at this a while. And none of the dead targeting me made sense in my mind. I hadn’t killed them myself, so why they had a vendetta to settle against me was as much a mystery as who had put this curse on me in the first place.
“Let me just make sure I have this straight. Someone cursed you—according to a witch—and as a result the dead are rising from their graves to kill you?”
“Seems like.”
“Yeah that about sums it up,” Wilder said.
“Jesus Christ, girl. Are all supes lives like this, or are you special?”
“Oh, this is a McQueen thing, I’m afraid. You should meet my sister.”
“I’m not sure I’d survive meeting another McQueen sister, but thanks.”
I gave him a thin, appreciative smile. “I think it goes without saying that dealing with Deerling is probably well outside the scope of what a police department is prepared to handle. I’m not even sure what they are. They’re not ghosts, they’re not necromanced dead. They’re alive, but also not? I have no idea if it gives them special powers or strength, so don’t ask. I have no idea if killing me will also kill them. I don’t even know if they can be killed because they’re technically already dead. So I have more questions than answers at this point. Best I can tell you is: steer clear of them.”
“You know that’s not an option for us. We still have to serve and protect, that job doesn’t simply go away because we’re up against something we don’t understand.”
I sat down so we were on the same level and I could meet his gaze directly. “People will die if you send them up against these monsters.”
Bryce gave me a sad smile. “People will die if I don’t.”
It was Wilder who spoke then. “Not if we can help it. If you just let us do what needs doing, and don’t try to wrap us up in red tape, we’ll try to make sure no one gets hurt.”
