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“No. Who are all your friends? They smell like dogs.”
Desmond gave a slight smirk, and I saw Wilder’s expression change to one of disgust and hostility but I held up my hand and gently shook my head. Secret scrubbed her hands over her face and looked as if she’d aged ten years since we arrived.
“Dad, we talked about this. You can’t say that stuff around werewolves.”
“Oh. Right.” He looked at us. “Sorry.”
Desmond, evidently already accustomed to this, just shrugged and did his best not to laugh. Typically calling a werewolf a dog was considered one of the most grave insults you could level at us, but it was pretty hard to be mad at a teenage vampire with brain damage.
“Why were you asking about Mercy?” he said to Secret. “She’s dead.”
“She was dead.”
“Oh. Okay.”
I glanced over at her trying to get a read on what she was feeling from her expression, but the only thing I could say for certain was that she was as exhausted by this roundabout conversation as the rest of us. Probably more so since she had to deal with it on the regular.
“We think she might come here for you.”
Sutherland nodded, then moved towards the table where he’d put the teapot and poured some into one of the mugs, holding it out for me. “Here you go.”
I took it from him. “Thanks.”
“I hope you like mint.”
“I do.”
“Good. Good. Mint is so nice. Why do you think Mercy would come here? It’s been a very long time.”
“We think she wants to hurt the people who matter to me, since she can’t get to me directly.”
“That’s not very nice.”
“Well, Mercy isn’t very nice,” I replied.
“She used to be.”
Those four words crushed me in a way I hadn’t realized I might still be able to feel. I’d spent so long thinking of this version of Mercy as the only one. The mean, spiteful, killer version. The woman who would come back from the dead to kill me just because she knew it would hurt Secret.
I had only known this dark version of her, and it had erased any notion I had of the woman she might have been before everything went dark. She’d been a girl once, who loved the man standing in front of me, and whose entire life had been ripped to shreds in an instant.
Maybe you just don’t come back from something like that the same.
Maybe she really had been a person worth knowing and loving, once upon a time.
I wish I’d had a chance to meet that woman, because by the time she’d had me and Ben, any remaining vestiges of Mercy being a good person were long, long gone, and they sure as hell weren’t coming back now.
Still, it broke my heart to imagine she might have once loved things unconditionally, and she could have had such a different life if things hadn’t taken the turn they did.
I looked at Secret, the very person Mercy blamed for all the things that had gone wrong in her life, and I knew even then I was still on my sister’s side.
I would follow her down into the pits of hell and not feel the slightest pang of pity when we put Mercy back in the grave a second time.
Mother or not, I knew she had to go.
I was about to take a sip of my tea when the living room light and TV both went out.
Through the darkness, Sutherland said, “I suspect that’s her, then.”
