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“Did you go home?” Byron used the same soft, coaxing tone he reserved for panicked werewolves.
“First,” she swallowed hard. “First, there was a child. That was the beginning of the end. I knew that I was carrying a monster, that everything I’d ever been taught would come true. It was wrong of me to unleash it on the world. If I brought it home, they would kill it, but I couldn’t bring myself to…” She shuddered, her intense gaze full of the horrors of her past. “He loved it, you see, doted on it for those weeks after I gave birth. I couldn’t leave the baby with him, couldn’t bring it home, so I ran in the night, gave it up, and went home where I belonged. I never even said goodbye.”
“It,” Niall said through clenched teeth. “It? She’s a wonderful, beautiful girl who risks her health to help people. You tossed her aside as if she were nothing.” His look of disgust even made me feel terrible. “Fine, your loss, but don’t refer to her as if she’s nothing. You know nothing about her.”
She stared at him as though he were speaking an unknowable language. I watched her, trying to find Margo in her face, but the more I looked, the less I saw.
“Where is her father now?” Ryan asked, too loud in the sudden silence.
The woman’s cheeks grew pinched, and her breaths came out in gasps.
Byron moved to her, slowly reaching out to press a hand on her shoulder. At the last second, she moved out of the way, as she had with Niall, avoiding touch. The way she had been taught. For an instant, I pitied her.
She took a moment to calm down then said through gritted teeth, “I never saw him alive again. He died soon after I returned home.”
“Murdered,” Ryan stated.
She didn’t deny it, only stared at the ground. “We both deserved to be punished for what we did. Nobody else knew about the child, so I left it…her… behind because I thought…” She released a shaky exhalation. “I thought she would be safe from them, safe from herself. She couldn’t grow up to be a monster if she was never aware in the first place, if we didn’t poison her with our history.” She raised her head, meeting Niall’s eyes. “Why is she ill?”
“Ever since she was a little girl, she’s been drawn to death. She sleepwalks, and wherever she goes, she finds death.” He leaned against the wall, looking thoroughly exhausted. “At first, it was cemeteries after a funeral, then more. She began taking medication that seemed to help. She stopped sleepwalking, but her doctor took her off her pills, and everything began happening again, only it became more extreme.”
She held her breath. “Extreme?”
“There was a spirit and multiple murders,” Byron explained. “That seemed to unlock something in her. One of the werewolves tried to teach her control, and now she protects people from death, except it hurts her.”
She looked horrified. “There’s less time than I thought.”
“You know what’s wrong with her,” Ryan said. “You can tell us how to stop it.”
She licked her chapped lower lip. “She’s a half-breed, forbidden for a reason. She’s dangerous and unpredictable. Stealing death. Upsetting balance. She’s taking death away from its intended victims, but to do that, she has to take it within herself. It’s slowly killing her. Even I would need time to recover, but her father was mundane. There’s no way her body can handle that.”
“Mundane,” Niall whispered. “How do we stop it?”
“Make her stop stealing death!” She glanced over her shoulder, more agitated by the second. “I must leave.”
“She can’t control it,” I said. “Not really. It happens, and she leads us to the danger, and we stop it.”
“She’s the cause,” she whispered. “But you’re making it worse. I have to go.”
“Come with us,” I pleaded. “Teach her what you know, how to stop it, how to control it, anything! We can’t watch her die. I can’t.”
“I can’t leave.” She looked horrified. “Not again. Bad things happen when I break the rules. Haven’t you been listening?”
“You saved her once,” Byron said. “She needs you again. We leave in two days. That should give you time to prepare. If you’re going to come with us, then meet us here at dawn in two days. Do you understand?”
“If I can’t…” A grim look replaced her fear. “You must tell her to shut down these feelings, to ignore death, to keep well away from it so that it cannot touch her. We live in seclusion to avoid the temptation, and she would do well to emulate that.”
She turned and fled before I could stop her. I made to follow.
“Let her go,” Byron said. “She’s already terrified.”
Niall turned on him. “What was that nonsense about two days?”
“I had to give her a deadline,” the alpha said nonchalantly. “Or she would have dithered for weeks. She’s too scared to be given more time to think about it. She might make an impulsive decision with a deadline.”
“What now?” I was irritated by the deadline, too. “What do we do next?”
“We wait,” Byron said, ignoring my tone.
