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“Be careful, Eugenia.”
“Aren’t I always?” I offered him my best smile.
He glanced past me to Wilder, and I wasn’t sure which particular memory of the last year Callum was thinking about, but he frowned, his brows knitting together, and said, “Not as much as I’d like, sometimes.”
Chapter Five
Wilder and I drove down the highway towards New Orleans in relative silence. I tried to turn on the radio at one point, but the incessant chatter of the DJs was too distracting, and I had to turn it off.
I needed time to think.
I considered Callum’s words about calling Secret, and briefly second-guessed my decision to leave her out of it. This was precisely the kind of situation Secret was best equipped to handle. There was no one I knew who could tackle shit hitting the fan with the balls-out bravery of Secret McQueen.
But something told me it wasn’t right to mix her up in this.
For one thing, the Southern packs weren’t her problem anymore. In spite of the fact that she was still a Southern princess in name, she was now an Eastern pack queen by marriage. The East would always take precedence.
And more than that, she was currently working out of Los Angeles, helping the West Coast vampire Tribunal learn to function alongside the city’s government. Six months earlier she had told me it might take a few weeks. Now she wasn’t sure she’d be done by Christmas.
She had enough to deal with without having my problems added to her plate.
And I was old enough and in a position now where I couldn’t just have my big sister jump in and save me when things got too hard.
In the faint twilight, our surroundings on the highway took on an eerie, atmospheric quality that gave me the chills. Everything was cloaked in shadow, with only the slightest suggestion of shape or texture. Outside the swath of light cut by my headlights, it was hard to tell what was what.
Every shadow seemed to be moving, every tree might have a person hiding behind it. My eyes started to play tricks on me, and no matter where I looked I thought I caught a glimpse of Mercy.
Soon I had worked myself up into quite a panic, my pulse racing and a thin film of sweat dampening the back of my t-shirt. It wasn’t like me to get so worked up. I’d been through some genuinely harrowing stuff, even in the past week, and as scary as it could get I normally didn’t let myself get so spooked.
This was different.
The whole situation felt so monumentally out of my control I didn’t even know how to begin to fix it, and I was the kind of person who needed to have a solution available.
D
emon? Cool, there were ceremonies for that.
Werewolf-murdering cult? Yup, I could kill their leader and expose them to the world.
Dead mother back from the grave to exact a horrible revenge on those who had hurt her?
I was drawing a blank.
That’s what really scared me, and that’s the real reason I was so determined to solve this myself. I needed to come up with a solution for this problem and get Mercy back in the ground ASAP before she was able to wreak any more havoc. Only one thing was missing.
A plan.
I hated not knowing what my next step was.
Something on the shoulder of the highway caught my attention for a split second, my gaze leaving the road.
Nothing, just another shadow.
When I looked back to the highway there was a woman standing in the middle of the road.
Wilder slammed on the brakes, so I knew right away I wasn’t imagining her. I
rocked forward in my seat, and though the seatbelt held me safely, Wilder’s arm still shot out protectively to hold me back. Always thinking of me first, before anything else.
