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“Is that the plan, then?” Santiago asked. “Kill everyone until there’s nothing left haunting you? They’re wights, the dead come to life again. Wights will die when those who raise them die, or when they fulfill their purpose.”
“You said four would come back to haunt
me. We have all four. Three of them can go back from whence they came. And you can, I don’t know, bind them, or do something to keep them from returning.”
“I think whether or not they return is entirely up to you.”
“Trust me when I say I’m going to do my best to work on my guilty conscience so I no longer accidentally raise the dead, okay? Top notch therapy coming up.”
Santiago gave me a look as if he wanted to say more, but instead he kept quiet and nodded. “I can’t guarantee this will work, because I’ve honestly never had to deal with a problem this way. As you well know, the fastest way to undo a curse is to kill the one who cast it. But since we’re in the unusual situation of you having put the curse on yourself, things get murkier. I’ve never seen what the long-term effect of killing a wight is. Usually you kill a couple and then get to the witch, and everything is over and done for sure. Killing a wight and not killing the witch? This is a whole new ballgame, and frankly we’re all in for a hell of a surprise.”
“Yay,” I muttered. Who didn’t love surprises that could kill you?
“And what about him?” Santiago nodded to Lucas.
“What about him? Secret asked.
“We’re just trusting his word that he doesn’t want to kill her?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re doing Witch Boy.” She was just itching to reach for her gun, I could tell. We needed to find a good outlet for all the emotions she was dealing with, and getting rid of Deerling, Morgan, and Mercy might be the trick to help her out of this twitchy foul mood of hers.
A mood I had to admit I was responsible for.
“So we don’t kill the wolf king. Gotcha.” Santiago faked a check mark in the air.
“Does that mean he’ll stay alive?” I knew it wasn’t a question any of us wanted to ask, but I had to know. “Now that I’ve brought him back, is he here to stay, or does he go when the guilt goes?”
“As far as I know, the curse was cast and can’t be undone with just a change of feeling. But if you were to die, then so would he.”
Secret frowned. “Not a big fan of scenarios where one person’s life is controlling someone else’s.”
“You and me both,” I said. “But thankfully I’m not planning on dying any time soon.”
“That’s a relief,” Lucas added. He was trying to smile, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. I had no idea what this must be like for him, and had no clue whatsoever of how to put him at ease.
There were about a million questions that would need to be answered now that Lucas was alive again, but they were all going to have to wait until we put my other three wights in the ground.
“Why is it, you suppose, that Morgan came back so much sooner than the others? She’s been around for the past year, and honestly she hasn’t tried to kill me that whole time. She just sort of shows up to freak me out and give me nightmares, then disappears for a few months.”
“I think I can answer that, actually,” Wilder chimed in.
“Oh this should be good,” Santiago said.
Wilder ignored him and pressed on. “What you saw at La Sorciere’s. You remembered killing her.”
Secret and Lucas exchanged a loaded glance, and it was only then that I realized Secret had never told me what happened in the hotel. She’d explained that Lucas and Morgan had died in the fire, but she had let me believe I was totally innocent of anything that had happened there.
She had been trying to protect me, but as a result I’d let the subconscious memory of what I’d done fester into something dark and evil.
I knew then, reading the guilt on her face, that we were both all too aware that this whole situation could have been avoided if she had told me what I’d done.
I searched my heart, trying to find something like anger or resentment there, but I couldn’t. She did what she thought she had to at the time. I’d been a very, very different person during the siege on New York. I’d been a teenager who barely had control over my powers, and she thought she had to protect me.
I got it.
I just wished things were different.
“Yes, I killed Morgan.”
