by Sierra Dean
The twenty or so people inside the Franklinton church were dressed in a variety of Sunday bests. A couple men wore short-sleeved button-down white shirts, stained slightly yellow over the years. Not one of them had a shirt that looked younger than me. Two of the men wore plaid flannel, and one had on a cowboy hat. The women were mostly dressed in plain dresses with drab colors, their hair blonde or mousy brown.
Redneck Stepford wives.
Only one woman seemed to deviate. She had blonde hair but wore a loose sweater and jeans. She sat a few rows back from the rest, and her attention was all for someone at the front of the room.
At first I couldn’t see who they were watching, but then a man came into view. I only saw the back of him, but his blond hair and lean build gave him away. Timothy Deerling. His posture exuded the same easy confidence I remembered from the video.
Wilder must have made the connection too because he stiffened next to me like he might bolt towards the church at any moment.
I placed my hand on his forearm and squeezed, just as I had when we first watched the video together. I don’t know if it gave him any comfort, but it stilled him. At least for the time being he wasn’t going anywhere.
Since we couldn’t hear what Timothy was saying, I was forced to watch his gestures and try to get a read on his audience’s reaction. The number of pews in the church could have held a thousand people, yet only twenty were there. That, combined with the early hour, told me these folks must be important to Timothy’s cause. Either he trusted them, or he needed them, but there was a reason they were all there.
None of them looked even remotely special. They were the kind of people who defined the word nondescript. I wondered what it was about them that made them so important to Timothy and his cause.
Something moved next to Timothy, and everyone’s attention shifted at once. My hand involuntarily tightened on Wilder’s arm, so forcefully he flinched. Even knowing I was hurting him I couldn’t let go.
Two men I hadn’t seen before joined Timothy at the front of the church. They stood apart from the audience in appearance, both wearing dark suits. I recognized one of them immediately as the guy who had tried to run me off the road. Now it was my turn to keep my rage in check. Between the men was something that looked, at first glance, to be a big duffel bag. Until it moved on its own and I realized what it actually was.
Hank.
Wilder growled, his whole body drawing taut like the string on a bow before the arrow is loosed. I held firm to him, although I wanted to run at them myself. We didn’t know what was happening, but I was sure it wasn’t good. We were outnumbered and out of our element, and if we barged in now, we might both end up dead, giving Deerling precisely what he wanted.
The two men shoved Hank down onto his knees in front of Timothy. The older Shaw brother looked terrible. Since we’d seen him in the video earlier, his treatment must have gotten significantly worse. His eyes were swollen purple balloons, and he had bloody cuts on both his cheeks. His bottom lip was split and red. His greasy mop of hair looked darker than usual, and though I didn’t want to dwell on it, I realized it must be because his hair was soaked with blood.
Worse, still, in order for him to look this bad they must have been beating him constantly. Werewolves could heal superficial wounds. They must have let him recuperate only to continue the beatings anew.
Nausea churned in my gut, tickling the back of my throat with the threat of vomit.
A woman in the front row clapped her hand over her mouth in disgust, but instead of leaving the room she only moved back two rows.
She wasn’t repulsed by what they’d done to Hank, I realized. She was disgusted to be sitting so close to a werewolf.
I clenched my jaw. In that moment I hated everyone in the church as much as they must hate me. I loathed them for their opinions and their prejudice. I hated everything that building stood for. My anger was a real, tangible thing, and for one sliver of time I wanted nothing more than to raze the Church of Morning to the ground, taking everyone inside with it.
“Genie?”
I barely heard Wilder’s voice. Everything was white noise, except a faint crackling in the back of my mind.
“Genie? Hey. Princess. Snap the fuck out of it.” He grabbed me and shook me, and I wheeled around on him ready to smack him.
“What?” We were both still whispering, but my annoyance was evident.
He pointed at my raised hand.
Red flame licked all the way up from my fingertips to my elbow. My fingernails and the skin around them glowed white-blue, the way super-hot fire might.
I tried to shake the flame off, but it stayed in place, stubborn and unyielding. It didn’t hurt, but the longer it remained, the wider the blue color spread, and I didn’t think it looked particularly good for my skin to be turning blue.
In my previous experiences, I had willed the flame forward, like when I used it against the truck back on the highway. This was different. I hadn’t consciously called my power up. And this flame was more intense than anything I’d managed to conjure up in the past.
Since I hadn’t created the magic intentionally, that meant it had fed off my emotion. It had responded to the intensity of the hatred I’d felt towards those in the church and my desire to watch them burn.
I’d wanted to set fire to my enemy, and my body had given me the weapon I craved.
That was fucking scary.
The sobering realization of what fueled my power was what caused the flame to flicker out. The fire froze in place on my arm, then turned to red ash and blew away into the night. For a few seconds my fingers continued to glow blue until that, too, returned to normal.
“What are you?” Wilder asked, his eyes wide.
I said nothing.
Because I didn’t know what the answer was anymore.
My head felt foggy now that the flame was gone, and I couldn’t quite remember what I’d been thinking about or what we had said right before the incident. It was like my memories were a photo and someone had gone over them with grease, blurring the edges and throwing everything out of focus.
Movement inside the church distracted us, saving me the awkwardness of trying to come up with a reasonable answer for what had just happened. I had no clue where the ability to subconsciously cast had come from. It had felt so natural I was amazed it had never happened before.
That I could remember.
I thought briefly about the charred woman I’d been seeing, and my fingers tingled in response to the thought.
No…there couldn’t be a connection there.
There couldn’t.
I set the horrific notion aside to focus on what was unfolding inside the church.
Hank had been pulled to his feet, though he was too wobbly to stand unsupported. His hands, which had previously been bound, were now free.
What were these people up to?
Timothy beckoned to someone, crooking his fingers out to the attendees like he was inviting them closer. Only one of them got up though. The woman in the sweater and jeans sitting towards the back rose to her feet and came to the front of the church to stand next to him.
None of the others looked directly at her, nor she at them. Her expression was something deeper than stoicism. She was totally checked out. The lights were on, but no one was home. I wished I could see her closer up to tell whether or not she was on something. I’d never seen a sober person appear so empty.
Timothy placed a hand on her shoulder, and in response I felt a chill, as if he’d touched me and not her. She didn’t even flinch.
He leaned in and whispered something to her, and a moment later she removed her shirt, then her pants. She stood next to him in her underwear, and none of the other churchgoers did anything. Most of them were focused anywhere but on her.
I didn’t have to know what was happening to know this wasn’t good.
Timothy pushed the woman in front of Hank, but Hank c
ould barely hold his head up, let alone look at her. What were they playing at here?
One of the men in suits handed Timothy a slim rod, and I recognized it as the cattle prod from the video.
Fuck.
My immediate thought was exactly what I’d been holding Wilder back from this whole time. I wanted to break through the window and pull Hank away from them. I knew it was stupid, but all the same it was what I wanted to do.
Timothy jabbed Hank in the gut with the cattle prod, making Hank’s body jerk and spasm in ways that looked so painful I almost turned away. I owed it to Hank to keep watching. From the corner of my eye I could tell Wilder was equally focused on what was happening inside.
The longer we watched, the less likely I thought it would be for us to follow Cain’s directions of bringing Timothy in alive.
Death was too kind for this prick. I hoped Cain had something cooked up for him that was so depraved it would make the Marquis de Sade blush.
When Hank stopped jerking, things went from bad to worse. An injured werewolf is akin to an animal caught in a trap. The wild part of our brain takes over and we’re less human than we normally are. Hank, who had been sustaining regular beatings and was now free of his shackles, focused his rage on the first thing he saw.
The half-naked woman standing in front of him.
The horrible depths of Timothy’s plan struck me like a closed fist to the face. He wanted to make us hurt. He wanted to show the world werewolves and supernaturals were monsters, not people. That’s precisely what he’d get if he put an easy target in front of a heavily injured wolf.
“We have to stop this.” Panic made my voice sound higher than I’d expected it to. I wasn’t hysterical yet, but if they let Hank do what I thought they were going to, shit was going to hit the fan in an epic way. I felt wholly responsible for this mess, even if there was no way I could have seen it coming.
Just as Hank lunged for the girl, lights snapped on behind us. The mixed scent of gardenia and magnolia had been so suffocating I hadn’t smelled anyone approach. As I turned, a flashlight beam aimed directly in my eyes forced me to lift my hand to protect myself.
“All right, y’all. Show’s over.” The voice was thick with a Southern accent that didn’t belong to Louisiana. More Texas by way of a John Wayne movie.
When the light lowered and I blinked away the bright spots in my vision, I was facing a middle-aged man wearing a beige button-down uniform shirt and a black baseball cap emblazoned with the Louisiana State Sheriff department logo. The cap shielded his eyes from me, but he was chewing on something—gum or tobacco I couldn’t tell—and behind him four deputies were itching to draw their weapons on us.
“This is private property,” he announced, and a thin smile spread across his lips. “And trespassers will be prosecuted.”
“Can’t you see what’s going on?” I shouted, frustrated beyond the point of civility. I pointed towards the church, but when I looked, Hank and the girl were gone. Her clothes remained in a heap on the floor, but she had vanished.
That couldn’t possibly be good.
“All I see is two folks getting arrested,” the sheriff told me. “Now we can do this easy or we can do it hard. Whatever you want.”
I glanced at Wilder.
I could tell he wanted to go the hard way. Ultimately we compromised.
Wilder punched a deputy and got tased.
We got arrested anyway.
Chapter Seventeen
I once watched a movie where someone said only guilty people can sleep in jail.
I would challenge whoever wrote that movie to stay awake for over twenty-four hours and then be offered a cot.
While it might not have been the most comfortable sleep of my life, I’d had worse. I’d slept inside a tree for four years. There weren’t a hell of a lot of places I couldn’t get a little shut-eye. I woke up stiff and groggy, and for a few seconds I didn’t remember where I was, so the surroundings were alarming.
Right.
Jail.
Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I got to my feet and did a quick stretch to work the kinks out of my body. No one else was in the cramped cell with me, not that there would have been room for another person. My solitude made me immediately nervous for Wilder.
The walls were made of concrete, so I wasn’t able to look through into any other areas. There was a toilet on the back wall and the small cot I’d slept on, but nothing else to distinguish the room. It was probably their drunk tank.
I knocked on the tiny window of the door, hoping someone was near enough to hear me. After a few minutes ticked by, a new wave of nerves came over me. Werewolves were not designed for small spaces. I started to feel trapped, and nothing but an open door was going to make me feel any better.
Just as my heart started to beat wildly, a key rattled in the door. I had to resist the urge to make a run for it the second it opened. That was a sure-fire way to ensure I’d be locked in here for another couple days with no sign of sunlight or fresh air.
The door opened, and a young, female deputy stood at the entrance. She was holding a cup of coffee so fresh steam was still rising from it.
“Miss McQueen.”
Since I hadn’t been all that forthcoming with information when they’d brought us in, I supposed they’d found Wilder’s bike and gone through the contents. That’s where I’d left my wallet. Of course they’d fingerprinted us, but I didn’t have a criminal record. I couldn’t speak for Wilder, but something told me the Shaw brothers had a history with the law.
“Where’s my friend?” I asked. “The guy I was brought in with.”
She held the coffee cup out to me, but I shook my head. Taking food from these people was about as smart as Persephone accepting pomegranate seeds from Hades. I wasn’t going to tempt fate with unknown coffee, or anything else. Maybe I was getting paranoid, but if that was the case, it was because a twisted world had given me good reason to be.
“No thank you.” I might not trust them, but I had been raised to be polite.
She sighed as if she’d expected my response, then sipped the coffee herself. Either she actually wanted it, or she was doing it to prove to me they weren’t trying to poison me. I didn’t care which it was, I just wanted to see Wilder.
“Mr. Shaw is being questioned by Sheriff McGraw. You’re up next.”
“Can I see him?”
“He’s being—”
“I don’t mean right now. But before my questioning.”
The deputy—her name tag read Dwyer—rolled her eyes. “We’re a small town, Miss McQueen, but we’re not stupid. No you can’t see your accomplice before questioning.”
“I don’t need to talk to him. I just want to see him.” I was getting frantic now. Between the small room, the fact we’d been arrested on made-up charges, and what we’d witnessed last night, I was worried Wilder was dead and they were hiding it from me for as long as they could.
“Look. Eugenia is it?”
I preferred Miss McQueen, but since she wasn’t part of my pack, she didn’t need to abide by the rules that would apply to subservient wolves. I was accustomed to being treated with some respect, and sometimes it flustered me to have a stranger call me by my given name.
“Genie,” I said. If she was going to be familiar, she might as well call me by a name I liked.
“Okay. Genie. My name is Josie. I know you’re worried about your boyfriend, but he’s fine, I promise.”
I shook my head. “He hit a cop. There’s no way I believe he’s fine.”
“Ah. Yeah. That didn’t help matters. He broke Anderson’s nose. He’s going to face some extra charges, and I won’t lie… They weren’t all that easy on him during booking. But he’s no worse for the wear today.” She shrugged, like I should be relieved Wilder getting beaten by the police hadn’t left any bruises. “We were a little too busy for y’all this morning anyway.”
“Why?”
; She sipped her coffee again, then threw the empty cup into a garbage can near the door. “Waiting on the county coroner to show. Then we arrested an honest-to-God werewolf.” Her eyes went wide. “Been a crazy day.”
My stomach bottomed out. Coroner meant dead body. “The…werewolf. Is that who you needed the coroner for?” My guilt was overwhelming. I’d failed Wilder, but more importantly I’d failed Hank.
Josie stared at me like I’d grown horns. “No. It’s for the woman he killed.” She must have realized she’d said too much because she paused guiltily before speaking again. “I’ll come get you when Sheriff McGraw is ready for you.”
When she left, I went back to the cot and drew my knees up to my chest, staring at the blank wall across from me. She’d given me enough information that, coupled with what Wilder and I had seen happen last night at the church, I formulated a clear idea of what was happening.
I didn’t know if Hank had killed the woman, but I’d seen him lunge at her. Whether he’d finished the job or not, it was the church who had really killed her. They’d driven Hank to the edge of madness and shoved the woman in his path. They might as well have pushed her in front of a speeding train. They’d known what the results would be.
For a second I thought I might be sick, but I couldn’t even get up to go to the toilet. I swallowed the urge and rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand, wiping away any tears that dared sneak out.
Even though I knew none of this was my fault, I still felt the blame of it sitting firmly on my shoulders. The entire point of me coming here against Callum’s wishes was to make things better and prove I was a capable leader.
Now Wilder and I were stuck in the shit heap, and once the sheriff figured out we were werewolves too, the situation would go from bad to worse. Timothy already had a wolf to pin a murder on. Soon he’d be able to add resisting arrest and assaulting an officer to the list.
This was bad.
The doorknob jostled, and the door swung open. Josie stood just outside, and next to her was a tall man with dark hair going gray at the temples. He had two black eyes and a bandage over his nose, but his uniform was impeccably clean.
