by Sierra Dean
I lowered myself down, feeling a rush when my feet hit the hard wood floor. Just standing was the strangest relief. When I’d been tied up, there was a small part of me, even for the briefest time, that thought this might be the end for me.
There’s nothing quite like being tethered to certain death to make you really really not want to die.
But I also wasn’t going to squander this opportunity to get the information I needed. If this guy was terrified, he might talk to me if only to save himself. If I could keep him scared long enough to find out what Deerling’s plan was, then maybe, maybe this whole ordeal would be worth something.
“Take off your mask.”
His hands trembled, but he didn’t argue. He lifted the mask from his head and dropped it to the floor, but kept his face lowered as if he was afraid to show me who he really was. He should be.
When he raised his head, I growled audibly.
“You.”
Anderson, the jackass deputy whose nose Wilder had broken. Now I was wishing he’d punched his fist right through the guy’s face.
I was also immediately worried about Hank.
Why had I been stupid enough to think the police might be safe people for Wilder’s brother to be with? I already suspected the sheriff was in on it. I should have known there would be no such place as a safe haven in a town supported by lies and hatred. I felt naïve for believing the police force might remain untouched by corruption. I should have known better.
Callum was right not to trust anyone. He’d been right to want to keep me close. There was no protection for us outside the pack. No one had our best interests in mind.
Even the police didn’t think we were people anymore.
I wondered what would have happened to Wilder if we’d left him in jail another night. Or what Anderson would have done if he’d caught him this time.
“What did Deerling do to the woman?” The fire on my arms had begun to snuff itself out. I was hoping it would last longer, but I was getting tired and a headache was building up steam, making my whole head feel swollen. I might as well have been blinking shards of refined glass.
I was going to have one hell of a magic hangover once I slept this off.
“She’s dead.”
Of course she was dead, I already knew that. That’s why they had Hank arrested after all. “Who killed her?”
“What are you talking about? The wolf killed her.” In spite of his shaky voice, he sounded like he was telling the truth. At least the truth as he knew it. I reminded myself Anderson had been with us when the woman died. He might not know what really happened that night.
“How many other wolves does he have locked up?” I glanced down to the dark stain on the floor. “How many did he have?”
“I don’t—”
“Don’t you dare lie to me,” I shouted, the flames streaming up again. My headache moved towards a migraine. If I didn’t get him to talk soon, there was a good chance I might not be able to walk out of here.
The other problem was if there was anyone else outside, they might start to wonder why I was shouting angrily rather than screaming in pain. If it would help, maybe I could make him scream a little. At the right pitch, screaming sounds the same from both sexes. Agony has no gender.
I took a step towards him, and he backed against the wall. If he could have gone right through it, he would.
“Tell me the truth.”
“I can’t be sure. Six, maybe? Ten?”
The hair on my arms rose as the flames flared high. For a moment the pain in my skull was so intense I was blind. I couldn’t see beyond the white haze of light. When I could see again, I had my hand wrapped around his throat, and the smell of burning flesh wafted up to my nostrils. He was trying to pry my hand off him, but he kept burning himself when he touched me.
“St-stop,” he pleaded.
I released him, horrified I’d been able to hurt him without even realizing what I was doing. This wasn’t me. It wasn’t like me to want to kill people, that’s not how my brain worked. I had never been the kind of person who wanted to inflict pain on anyone, yet here I was trying to choke the life out of a stranger.
My hand trembled.
What was I becoming?
When my mother said I was a killer—like my father—had she known something I hadn’t? Who was this person I was turning into? The powers were one thing, something amazing and special. But what was the risk to getting them? If I had to sacrifice my humanity to become a stronger witch, I didn’t want any part in it. I’d rather have no powers at all than to use them against others.
You’d be dead right now if you had no powers.
The voice in my head really needed to make up her mind. Was I supposed to be good or bad? What the hell was I meant to do?
Anderson stared at me, and his gaze briefly darted to the exit behind me. He must have noticed my hesitation. If he was reading it as a sign I was done questioning him, he had another thing coming.
“If you move, I will end you.” I raised my hand, and even though the fire had dwindled to mere sparks, I could see the fear renewed in his eyes. I’d made an impression. I was hoping the threat alone would be enough, because I wasn’t going to slip up again.
What if I didn’t stop myself next time?
Then I really would be the killer my mother had told me I was. And I didn’t want to live up to her expectations.
“There is a big gap between six and ten, Anderson. So you better uncloud your memory really quick. How many people has Deerling held here?”
“They weren’t—”
“If you tell me again how werewolves aren’t people, I might decide I’m bored of this conversation, understand?” It pained me to make these threats, because all I was doing was proving Deerling right. What was I, right now, if not a monster? I was scaring myself.
But if I was nothing more than an animal, I was responding as any animal would. When it came to fight or flight, I was choosing to fight. And by God I would use every weapon in my arsenal to walk away from this alive.
I took a step closer, and he flinched. Sharp stones bit into my feet, and I realized for the first time I was barefoot.
I wanted to ask where my shoes were, but we’d take this one question at a time. “Six or ten?”
“Ten.” He opened one eye a crack to see if I was coming closer. The tension in his body let up slightly when he saw I’d stopped moving.
“What did he do with them?” My toes curled in the stained dirt on the floor. I knew perfectly well what had happened to the people who had been here before me. But I needed to hear confirmation from someone else.
“He k-killed them.”
“He killed them?”
All color drained from Anderson’s cheeks. We both glanced at the big knife on the floor. It might as well have been covered in blood. He couldn’t have looked more guilty if he were wearing a big scarlet M for Murderer on his chest.
Maybe I should put one there.
I blinked the thought away, shaking my head as if I could chase it off by sheer force of will. Instead of advancing, I took two big steps back. I briefly considered picking up the knife but thought better of it.
I didn’t trust myself.
“We killed them,” he admitted. “I killed them. Some of them.” His legs gave out, refusing to hold him upright. After sliding to the floor, he wrapped his arms around his legs and tried to take up as little space as possible. Like maybe if he could compress himself into a ball, I wouldn’t notice he was there.
“How long has he been taking them?”
Silence. Anderson wouldn’t meet my gaze.
There was no way I was going to like the answer to this.
I’d assumed Deerling had been planning to lash out at the werewolf population since we’d been forced into the open. He’d certainly needed time to plan his attack on us and to find members of our pack who would be easy to grab, like Hank.
But what if this wasn’t a new idea?
What if our public exposure was just a convenient excuse for him to bring his hatred out to a wider audience?
“How long?”
“Ten years.”
I blanched. Deerling had been at this for a decade? My skin felt cold, and all the fire faded away. “He hasn’t even been here ten years.” It was like I was so unwilling to believe it, I was offering up reasons for it to be a lie.
“He started in Merrydale, then moved on to Greensburg.”
“So the ten you know about…that was just here?”
Anderson nodded.
“So there were more. In the other cities.” I didn’t phrase it like a question. It wasn’t a question.
If Deerling had been killing werewolves for a decade, this had nothing to do with the church being a hate group. Sure, they were a real entity and a massive problem for us. But this wasn’t about public opinion of werewolves. He’d known we existed long before we were out.
He’d been killing my kind since the world thought we were nothing more than Hollywood horror movie fodder. And if he’d known the whole time, he’d kept the truth to himself for seven years. Timothy Deerling wasn’t a crusader, trying to protect humans from werewolves.
I’d thought he was a psycho from the get go.
Now I knew how right I was.
“Why?” I knew no answer he gave would satisfy me, but I wanted to know what he was telling his people to convince them.
“They’re sacrifices. We kill them to keep the rest of you animals at bay. By purifying the bodies, the demons stay away.”
I was right. The answer did nothing to calm my rage.
I stooped down and picked up the knife, slipping it through the back of my belt.
“One last question.”
Anderson blinked at me, nodding stupidly.
“Where are my fucking shoes?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Outside, the sun was starting to set, casting the area around the cabin in a gloomy purple hue. The trees had been allowed to grow wild around the small structure, and they blotted out what remained of the sunlight.
Using a piece of two-by-four, I wedged the door shut. It wouldn’t keep Anderson trapped there long, but I also suspected he wouldn’t be in a big hurry to come after me.
My head was swimming, a combination of coming down off the magic and something else. Like the early morning outside the church, my brain felt like it had been wrapped in gauze. Everything I’d just experienced was more like a crazy dream fading away at dawn, instead of a real memory. I might need to cut back on the magic once we got out of this town.
Anderson didn’t have my shoes, so I padded barefoot around the perimeter of the cabin, trying to ignore the pain from my feet. When I was a child, I had run through the woods without shoes all the time. I’d been accustomed to it, with thick skin on my soles. Even in the swamp I had learned to adjust to walking through the boggy areas and enjoy the feel of moss and muck between my toes.
Since settling back into human society, though, my feet had gotten delicate. The smallest twigs and rocks made me wince in pain.
A beat-up truck was parked next to the shack, but a quick glance inside showed no signs of keys. I could have gone back in and demanded them from Anderson, but he might have been able to find another weapon in my short absence. The knife had been stored in there, after all. God knew what else he had hidden in his little shop of horrors.
“Fuck.” I slammed the truck door shut.
If I couldn’t take it, I sure as hell wasn’t going to let him. I used my new knife to slash each of the four tires, listening with sick satisfaction as the air hissed out of them.
I’d like to see him follow me now.
I peered through the backseat window to see if there was anything else worth taking. Nada. He clearly hadn’t been expecting to run into any difficulties when he came out here.
He also hadn’t been alone.
There’d been at least three distinctive voices when Wilder and I had been attacked, not counting the little girl. And where was Deerling? We’d come into the woods looking for his car, but I was fairly certain he hadn’t been among those who grabbed us. So where were the others?
Toying with the knife, I decided to keep it in my hand rather than stowing it. Without knowing what I was up against, I would much rather have a weapon easily accessible. Speaking of weapons, I wondered what had become of the gun I’d been carrying when I entered the woods.
It was probably with my shoes somewhere.
A path led away from the cabin, winding into the woods before it twisted out of sight. I heard nothing to suggest any other people were around, but I couldn’t hear anything. No birds, no insects. The only sounds were my anxious short breaths and the wind rustling the leaves overhead.
In the dim light I thought I might be able to take the path and remain undetected, but since I didn’t know what was waiting at the other end, I suspected it might be smarter to hide among the trees. I also had no way to gauge direction. I hadn’t been a Girl Scout, so even if the sun had been high above me, I wouldn’t have been able to guess which way was north. When I’d lived in the swamps of Maurepas, I hadn’t relied on a traditional sense of direction. I knew familiar locations and smells.
None of that was going to help me here. The air was thick with the cloying scent of magnolia, the sun had gone down, and nothing around me looked remarkable at all. Trees and more trees. I could try to find the highway, but unless I heard car sounds, I would be just as likely to get lost as to find my way back to civilization.
Being lost in the woods didn’t frighten me. I was used to alone time, and I could fend for myself against predators. The night would get cool, but not cold enough to be dangerous, since werewolves ran hot at the best of times.
I was more worried about what my absence would mean for everyone else. Cash and Wilder would be worried. They might have even gone to the police by now. It all depended on what Wilder had said when he got back to the motel.
Or had the big idiot tried to play the hero on his own? What if he’d gotten away, only to circle back and try to rescue me?
Sounded like the kind of harebrained stupidity I would expect from myself.
I hoped his sense of self-preservation ran deeper than my own.
Giving the twig-strewn underbrush a baleful look, I trudged into the woods, hissing swears through my teeth. I was either going to walk out of here without further incident, or I was going to hike headlong into more trouble. Either way, as long as I didn’t get strung up again I felt like I was coming out on top.
I wobbled precariously over the uneven terrain. Spots of light danced across my vision, and the migraine swept over me slowly, like waves lapping at the shore. Each time I felt even a moment of relief, a new wave would crest and the pain would come over me again. And again. And again.
These were the kinds of headaches I used to get after my Awakening, when the magic was at odds with the wolf inside me. Most thirteen year olds only had to deal with the unfortunate side effects of puberty and hormones. Instead, I got a werewolf coming-of-age ritual and the sparking to life of my hereditary magic.
Bet no one ever had to deal with that at a bat mitzvah.
Back then the pain had been new and unbearable. It made me unfocused and dangerous. I’d spent years trying to master it and learning to balance the two powers inside me, and as I was finding out this week, I still had a lot of discoveries waiting for me. The return of the magic-induced skull-mangling migraines was like a visit from an unwelcome old acquaintance. In the past I’d been able to lock myself in dark rooms or find quiet spaces in the woods where I could meditate and rest until the pain subsided.
I didn’t think I was going to find my mental calm blue ocean out here.
Tears welled up in my eyes, and the pinpoints of light danced like little fairies across my vision. I had to keep my shit together and get my wits about
me. The last thing I needed was for a headache to be the thing that got me killed.
Here lies Eugenia Miranda McQueen, who died because she didn’t have any Advil.
Fuck that shit.
The one nice thing about my head being torn apart by tiny evil demons was that I no longer noticed the sharp things poking me in the feet. I focused on a tree a few feet away and stumbled towards it like a drunk. When I reached it, I rested my head against the rough bark and closed my eyes, breathing slowly until the wave crested and retreated from shore.
The windows between each new wave were getting shorter, but I still had a good ten or fifteen seconds of agony-free lucidity. Enough to keep myself moving along at a consistent pace.
The voice in my head cheered me along, though the words were nonsensical at this point and sounded for some reason like, “She can’t have gotten far.”
That was hardly a positive outlook.
My hand tightened reflexively on the knife, without me realizing what was happening.
Footsteps hurried down the path towards the cabin, and I dropped low, crouching in the underbrush, holding my breath as if one wrong sip of oxygen would be the thing to give me away.
Squinting through the rising darkness, I made out two people moving away from me who vanished around a bend. I hadn’t been out of the cabin long. Anderson must have had a phone or radio on him I hadn’t checked for.
If they knew I was loose, it would be all the more difficult for me to get away unnoticed. The last time I’d been out here, they’d been able to sneak up on me. I wasn’t going to let that happen twice.
I weighed my options. I could follow the voices and attack them when they weren’t expecting it. But I’d be one against three, and even without a crippling migraine those odds weren’t awesome. I could also track the direction they’d come from. There was a good chance it was mostly unguarded now, and I’d be able to see what sort of Waco-esque compound these crazy faces had in the woods.
Of course, there was the possibility their complex might house several dozen people who would be more than willing to hold me down while they waited for the cavalry to return.
