How to Wake an Undead City

by Edwards, Hailey

  Sorrow had turned his lively blue eyes dull, and his wild black hair showed tracks from where he had been pulling his fingers through its jagged length.

  “Yeah.” I locked my gaze on him to keep it from sliding to his left. “The POA is in Savannah.”

  That meant this was my case to solve, the first one I would tackle as lead.

  And Midas was here to bear witness.

  Perfect.

  “Have you met Midas?” Ford twitched his head toward the slightly taller man. “He’s our beta.”

  “We haven’t been introduced.” I dropped my gaze to the victim, using the gruesome tableau to help regulate my pulse. “I’m Hadley Whitaker.”

  “Midas Kinase,” he said, his voice sandpaper rough, not with emotion, though I heard that too, but from an old injury no one so much as whispered about behind his very muscular back. “Are you sure we haven’t met?”

  Predator that he was, he scented my nerves and eased in front of me for a better look.

  The predator in me unfurled in response, creeping across the asphalt beneath him, stretching shadowy fingers under his boots, tapping on individual treads, as if counting all the ways it could kill him.

  “We both live in the city.” I kept my voice bland and focused on the stag logo on his tee. Fine. I was ogling the way his biceps stretched the fabric to its limits. He had packed on serious muscle since the last time I saw him, but he hadn’t been the heir then. His sister, Lethe, had held that title until deciding to break ties with Atlanta and start her own pack in Savannah. Guess her defection had landed him a promotion. “You must have seen me around.”

  The new haircut and style gave my blonde hair a fresh look with short layers and plenty of curls, and the hazel contacts, heavy on the green, plus a few magical augmentations, meant Midas would see only Hadley. Just the law-abiding citizen and enforcer of justice. Not the murdering, maiming, and marauding version of me that our mutual friends would have warned him about.

  “Your scent…” Flaring his nostrils, he parted his lips. “It’s familiar.”

  “I work a kiosk in the mall, and I run the Active Oval in Piedmont Park five days a week.” I held my ground. “You could have picked up my scent anywhere.”

  Crowding me, he ducked his head, attempting to force eye contact, a dominance tactic that didn’t work half as well on necromancers as it did on gwyllgi and did nothing for me. “What was your name again?”

  “Hadley.” I caved to the challenge, and my annoyance, which never failed to land me in hot water, and met his gaze. “Hadley Whitaker.”

  The full force of his shifter magic pooled in his eyes, turning the tranquil aquamarine to vibrant crimson. I should have been terrified. I was terrified. But goddess, I couldn’t glance away after verifying he was every bit as gorgeous up close as I remembered from all the glimpses I had stolen of him through a curtained window.

  Blond hair fell in waves to his broad shoulders and framed a face so beautiful I wanted to reach out and touch it, see if it was real. His jaw was hard, and muscle twitched in his cheek. His mouth was full, perfect. Soft, I bet. But his eyes. That’s what captured and held my attention. The sorrow in them mirrored the remorse in mine, and I understood in that soul-bearing moment that he was dangerous to me on levels I hadn’t conceived of before meeting him in the flesh.

  The one thing I had been warned against doing—instigating a staring match—was exactly what I did while Bishop and Ford looked on in horror.

  Clearly, they expected Midas to strike me down for the offense. I did too. And yet, I kept breathing.

  “I have exceptional control,” he rumbled, “but you’re testing it.”

  Bishop stomped on my instep, and the jolt of pain yanked my attention to him and away from Midas.

  “Fire ant.” Bishop made a production of searching for more on the sidewalk. “Little bastards.”

  “Bastard is right,” I groused at him before redirecting my attention to Midas’s chest to avoid another standoff. “Mr. Kinase, I’m sorry for your loss. I respect your right to be present, but I have a job to do. I would appreciate it if you stepped aside and let me do it.”

  Midas yielded no ground but let me step around him. And if he figured my willingness to do so proved his dominance, well, bless his heart.

  Ditching him and Ford at the barricade, I continued on with Bishop. “That went well.”

  “Yeah,” he said, ignoring my sarcasm. “It did.” He crouched over the body, what remained of it. “The pack isn’t required to cooperate with us. Not when the victim is one of theirs. They could throw their weight around and block us from investigating. Their alpha prefers to handle these matters internally.”

  “There’s no guarantee the person who did this is gwyllgi. That puts the ball back in our court.”

  Though I couldn’t afford to let assumptions cloud my judgment this early in the investigation. I had to get this right, or I lost points with the POA, who would not want to cut his trip short to play pack politics.

  “That’s why I like you.” Bishop chuckled under his breath. “You’re so gosh darn optimistic.”

  “Har har.” I snapped my fingers at the shadow nosing the corpse. “Make yourself useful.”

  The vague outline of me snapped out a salute then made a show of diving in headfirst.

  “Showoff,” I grumbled then caught Bishop staring. “What?”

  “I’m never going to get used to that.”

  “All potentates have wraiths.”

  “That is not a wraith.” His gimlet eyes dared me to lie to him. “It’s so…Peter Pan. Do you remember the part in the cartoon where Wendy captures his shadow one night then sews it back on him the next?”

  “No?”

  “You never watched Peter Pan?” He clucked his tongue. “What kind of childhood did you have?”

  A dull throb spread beneath my left eye, a distant memory of pain, and when I ran my tongue along my teeth, I almost tasted blood in my cheek. I would have spit to clear my mouth if it wouldn’t have contaminated the scene.

  Some girls learned makeup to entice, some learned to claim their spot in the girl hierarchy, but others learned it for more practical purposes. Makeup had never been armor for me, it had been camouflage. I learned how to apply concealer, how to set a proper foundation, so no one, not even my siblings, saw what happened to the family’s spare when the heir misbehaved.

  Goddess forbid we got a speck of dirt on the family name.

  Thinking about how thoroughly I had raked that precious name through the mud before discarding it once and for all, I almost laughed, but freedom from that life had cost me everything.

  Every-damn-thing.

  “A long one,” I rasped, drawing on the good times to erase the bad.

  Motion caught my eye as darkness seeped from the body, giving no warning before it leapt into mine.

  Cold plunged into my chest, wrapping my heart in an icy fist, squeezing a gasp out of me.

  “Play nice, Ambrose,” I snarled under my breath. “Or I’ll put you in time-out.”

  Warmth returned to my torso in a petulant creep, but the biting chill speared my skull in the next second, giving me an epic brain freeze.

  At least, once I thawed out, I had the information I’d requested from him. And since he had more or less behaved, I tossed a piece of candy into the darkness spilling from my soles across the concrete.

  “You’re training your shadow to do tricks.” Bishop watched the candy vanish. “That can’t be healthy.”

  “Nice streaks,” I said sourly. “Who does your hair?”

  “Point taken,” he grumbled then gestured toward the body. “Walk me through it.”

  “The victim is a black female, early twenties.” Squatting for a closer look, I started off easy, with the stats. “Five-nine or five-ten. Maybe one-sixty. Brown hair. Eye color is also brown.” Next came the hard part. “The cause of death is…” I searched my memory for the technical term the POA would have used but came up
empty. A gaping hole started below the victim’s throat and ended at her hips. The soft parts had been devoured, the hard ones gnawed on. “She was eaten.”

  Bishop didn’t dock me, just listened while I tried to keep the fumbling to a minimum.

  “There are claw marks on the body as well as teeth marks.” Bruising where the creature pinned down the victim while it ate made clear which was which. “There are defensive wounds on the forearms and hands.” That stupid taco made its thoughts on the carnage evident, but I wasn’t going to hurl in front of an audience. “She was alive when the creature started feasting.”

  The shadow I cast across her thighs turned its head, interested in something behind me.

  “You keep saying the creature,” Midas rumbled, a dangerous edge to his voice. “Are you implying the killer was one of us?”

  “I’m not implying anything.” I kept my back to him. “No gwyllgi did this.”

  He squatted next to me, our elbows almost brushing, close enough I smelled the soap and sweat on his skin. “How can you tell?”

  “It’s my job,” I said flatly, but Ambrose shook a warning finger, chastising me for taking all the credit. “What I can’t determine—yet—is the killer’s species.” There was no delicate way to ask, but I figured I might as well put him to work if he was going to hover. “Can you identify its scent?”

  “No,” Midas said after a pause that made plain he was deciding if the question insulted him.

  I conducted the rest of my examination in silence, as much to keep my thoughts contained as to give the illusion I knew what the heck I was doing without the POA dictating my every move.

  “I’m done here.” I stood, ready to bluff my way through the pack reps, and Midas rose beside me. “Mr. Kinase, I will keep you and your alpha apprised of any further developments.”

  “No need.”

  “Are you…?” I squared my shoulders, cleared my throat. “Are you taking the case from me?”

  “I thought about it,” he admitted, and I had to swallow a plea to let me have this one chance. “I have a lot of respect for Linus, and he chose you as his potential successor. That means, if you ace your internship and trials, you and I will be crossing paths for the foreseeable future.”

  Relief fluttered through me on butterfly wings. “Thank—”

  “But I can’t allow this investigation to continue without pack oversight.”

  “—you,” I finished dumbly.

  “Ford.” He gestured for him to join us. “You’re with Ms. Whitaker.”

  Surprise flickered in Ford’s eyes, but he smothered it quickly. “Happy to oblige.”

  Bishop, who filled the roll of aide to me when I wasn’t doing the same for Linus, goggled.

  “Looks like it’s you and me against the world, darlin’.” Ford grinned at me. “Let’s give it a swift kick in its axis.”

  A soft laugh escaped me, totally inappropriate given the location, and I caught Midas staring at me, watching my mouth like he expected me to crack up again. Blanking my expression, I angled my chin higher. “Anything else?”

  “Give me your number.”

  The moisture evaporated from my mouth when he captured me in his gaze, but I found enough spit to lubricate my tongue. “Ask me nicely, and I might.”

  “Please,” he said flatly. “Give me your number.”

  Figuring that was as good as I was going to get, I rattled off my digits and waited, but Midas didn’t offer his in return.

  He didn’t say goodbye, either. Just turned on his heel and left me wondering who had won our rematch. Bishop trotted after him, likely hoping to clarify our arrangements, and I left him to it.

  “Women.” Ford blasted out a sigh as I watched Midas go. “Y’all always want what you can’t have.”

  “True.” I reeled my attention back to him. “I want to be home watching TV with a bowl of extra buttery, extra salty popcorn on my lap while I marathon the Robot Space Tentacles trilogy, but it doesn’t look like that’s happening.”

  “You’re a geek.”

  Steel injected my spine. “So?”

  “A huge geek.” He flared his nostrils. “That’s probably what Midas smelled earlier.”

  “And?” Heat prickled my nape. “There’s no law against being a geek.”

  As a matter of fact, Atlanta hosted one of the largest science-fiction and fantasy conventions in the world.

  “You, being a geek, would know.”

  A flicker of shadow coiled near Ford’s boots, but I stomped on it and sent it skittering.

  “Fire ant,” I mumbled when his brows winged higher. “Little bastards.”

  The rest of the on-site work fell to the cleaners who documented each paranormal crime scene in photos and video, collected blood and tissue samples, then made it all disappear before humans caught wind of a disturbance. There wasn’t much I could do until they finished and uploaded their findings into the database, so I was done here.

  “Come on, Lee.” He reached in his pocket. “Can I call you Lee?”

  “Sure.” The almost familiar ring of the nickname made me smile. “Where are we going?”

  “It’s nearly dawn.” He squinted at the sky. “I’m driving you home.”

  “Necromancers don’t have sun allergies like vampires do.”

  “I know.” He jingled his keys. “But if we hurry, you can still catch Robot Space Tentacles Encircle the Earth.”

  “Ah.” I nodded sagely. “I thought I caught a whiff, but I wasn’t sure.”

  “This isn’t the start of a wet-dog joke, is it?” He pointed out a jacked-up white pickup truck, a gleaming off-roader without a speck of dirt marring its glossy wheels, one I would need a boost or a ladder to climb in. “I’ll warn you now, I’ve heard ’em all, and not a one made me laugh.”

  “No.” I made a show of sniffing him. “Geek.” I wiggled my nose. “You reek of it.”

  Grinning when he hooted with laughter, I headed for his truck, shadow—for now—obediently in tow.

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  About the Author

  USA Today best-selling author Hailey Edwards writes about questionable applications of otherwise perfectly good magic, the transformative power of love, the family you choose for yourself, and blowing stuff up. Not necessarily all at once. That could get messy.

  www.HaileyEdwards.net

  Also by Hailey Edwards

  The Foundling

  Bayou Born #1

  Bone Driven #2

  Death Knell #3

  Rise Against #4

  End Game #5

  The Beginner’s Guide to Necromancy

  How to Save an Undead Life #1

  How to Claim an Undead Soul #2

  How to Break an Undead Heart #3

  How to Dance an Undead Waltz #4

  How to Live an Undead Lie #5

  How to Wake an Undead City #6

  The Potentate of Atlanta

  Shadow of Doubt #1

  Black Dog Series

  Dog with a Bone #1

  Dog Days of Summer #1.5

  Heir of the Dog #2

  Lie Down with Dogs #3

  Old Dog, New Tricks #4

  Black Dog Series Novellas

  Stone-Cold
Fox

  Gemini Series

  Dead in the Water #1

  Head Above Water #2

  Hell or High Water #3

  Gemini Series Novellas

  Fish Out of Water

  Lorimar Pack Series

  Promise the Moon #1

  Wolf at the Door #2

  Over the Moon #3

  Araneae Nation

  A Heart of Ice #.5

  A Hint of Frost #1

  A Feast of Souls #2

  A Cast of Shadows #2.5

  A Time of Dying #3

  A Kiss of Venom #3.5

  A Breath of Winter #4

  A Veil of Secrets #5

  Daughters of Askara

  Everlong #1

  Evermine #2

  Eversworn #3

  Wicked Kin

  Soul Weaver #1