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He was fucking lucky he hadn’t died of sepsis or shock.
I texted from the car, not trusting myself to go inside with Taavi there—because I was having a hard enough time compartmentalizing as it was, and if I had to see him live and in dog-form and then go back to the warehouse and face down the hanging corpses of three shifters… I wasn’t going to be able to keep it together.
And I really needed to be able to do that.
When I’d left the site, Little had been outside, taking a couple deep breaths, and I’d given her a sickly smile as I headed to the car and gotten one in return.
Ward rolled his way out to my Charger, and I got out to help him into the passenger seat. He had the decency to wait until I’d loaded his chair in the back and started driving before asking. “Any particular reason you didn’t want to say hello to Taavi?”
“I think the scene is where they took him,” I answered, knowing my words were clipped, but trying to at least not say anything extra offensive.
“Oh, shit.”
I nodded, deliberately keeping my eyes on the road.
“You okay?” Ward asked.
“Nope.” I didn’t have it in me to say any more than that, although I’m sure it made me sound like a dick.
But Ward didn’t say anything else for a few minutes. “What do you need me to do?” he asked, finally.
“Three bodies on site,” I answered, knowing he was probably grimacing at the thought of having to see them, much less touch them. “Possibly more blood.”
“Great.” His tone told me just how not great he thought this was.
I contemplated not saying anything about the horrible creepy feeling I had in the warehouse, but then decided that if it were me, I’d want to know if I were walking into a possibly ghost-filled shitshow. “It gets better,” is what I said out loud.
Ward sighed. “Do I want to know?”
“I think there are dead people. Not—I mean the see-through kind.”
I could feel him looking at me. “You can tell when ghosts are around?” he sounded surprised.
“Kinda?”
He waited.
“Sometimes, like at Tranquil Brook, I feel… weird. Tingly and like—you know the phrase ‘someone walking on your grave’?”
“Yeah.”
“Like that.”
He was quiet for a moment. “So you think there’s more than one around?”
“Probably. I don’t usually notice when it’s just one. Or maybe it’s that they’re upset?” I shrugged. “I don’t know ghosts.”
“We’re going to come back to this, Hart,” he said.
I grimaced. “Not much to come back to,” I muttered. I didn’t really want to keep talking about this. I really preferrednotthinking about whether or not I could tell if there were ghosts in the room. It wasn’t surprising, really, given that elves have an affinity for magic—although now that I thought about it, I wasn’t sure if ghosts really counted as magic. Supernatural, yes, but notmagic, exactly.
Ward, thankfully, let it go. At least for now.
By the time we pulled back into the gravel lot of the warehouse, there were two more CSI vans parked alongside the building.
“How much help do you need on gravel?” I asked, realizing rather belatedly that Ward was going to have a fuck of a time on the pitted uneven ground.
His mildly irritated grey eyes essentially said I was going to have to move the chair inside and then carry him—and he wasn’t particularly happy about it.
