by Deanna Chase
Elise’s eyes narrowed. “The witches that helped you—what coven did they come from?”
“The Half Moon Coven. They’re based in California.” She waved in a vaguely westerly direction. “Two of my wolves, Bekah and Levi—their dad was with that coven. They hooked us up with some of their friends, and they did all the wards here. Why do you ask?”
She had been worrying that James had placed the wards, but his coven was from Boulder. If the wards were strong enough to keep someone like Elise out, then maybe it could stand up to James and a murderous cult, too.
Lincoln wasn’t going to love the idea of staying with a group of werewolves, but it seemed like the safest place in the area.
“Do you have any spare cabins?” Elise asked.
Rylie blushed a little when she smiled. “Of course. Like my aunt says, there’s always room for friends.”
Surprise jolted through Elise. Friends?
“Hey!”
Rylie and Elise turned. Abel stood at the top of the path, waving at them to catch their attention.
“What’s up?” Rylie asked, setting down the shovel.
“Trevin called,” Abel said. “Father Armstrong is home.”
The clouds began to thin dangerously, so Elise decided to join Seth in the pickup instead of taking the motorcycle. Being confined to the roads made her feel helplessly slow in comparison to the werewolves sprinting alongside the truck.
“What are you, anyway?” Seth asked, shooting Elise looks out of the corner of his eye as he steered over the twisting mountain road. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
Elise massaged her forehead, trying to stave off a developing headache. The clouds were patchy enough that she had to pull a jacket over herself to shield her skin from errant sunlight. “I don’t know. What are you, Seth?”
He laughed. “I’m just some guy.”
James wouldn’t have had any interest in “just some guy.” And, for that matter, “just some guy” wouldn’t be the only human in a pack of werewolves. There was something there, something beyond his kopis nature that Elise wasn’t seeing.
“So you’re an ordinary demon hunter,” Elise said.
“Werewolf hunter, actually,” he said. She gave him a questioning look. “That’s my specialty. Werewolves. Grew up killing them. Dad was the expert.”
That was why his name was familiar. “You’re Lucian Wilder’s son? The guy who wrote the manual on werewolf hunting?”
Seth seemed to be as fond of having his father’s memory invoked as Elise was to talk about her own father. He focused hard on the road. “My dad’s accomplishments don’t define me. Like I said—I’m just some guy.”
Wolves flashed through the trees ahead of them. He accelerated to keep up.
“Doesn’t tell me what you are, though,” he added.
Elise ignored him.
Rylie and Abel, both in their wolf forms, darted behind Father Armstrong’s mobile home as soon as Seth pulled up in front of it. If Elise hadn’t known they were there, she wouldn’t have been able to see them. Aside from the gentle buzz of werewolf energy tickling at the back of her skull, they were invisible.
“Where’s this Trevin?” Elise asked.
Seth jerked his chin toward the forest as he pulled his rifle off of the rack, slipping shells into it. “Gray wolf. That way.” If Trevin really was there, then he was equally as impossible to see as the Alphas.
“How can you tell?” Elise asked.
“You learn to see them after a while,” he said.
She couldn’t see the wolves, but she could see motion inside Father Armstrong’s mobile home. She stretched her senses out and tasted two heartbeats inside, both of them young and hale. They were standing near the place the Bible had been in the living room. Rylie stealing it must have tripped some kind of alarm.
Seth unlocked his door, but Elise grabbed his arm.
“Wait,” she said. “Not yet.”
He gripped the rifle tightly. “But he’s right there. We can get him now.”
She didn’t want to get Father Armstrong now. She wanted to get every single person responsible for those ruined bodies in the morgue. And, maybe more importantly, she wanted to find the person responsible for Lucinde Ramirez.
“Pull the truck off that way,” Elise said, indicating a copse of trees. “I want to see where Father Armstrong goes when he leaves.”
Seth did as she asked. They sat under the shade of the trees for several silent minutes, and Elise never saw a single flick of a werewolf tail, even though she sensed that they were somewhere beyond her line of sight.
Father Armstrong emerged from the mobile home fifteen minutes later. Elise was disappointed to realize that it was a man at his side. She had been hoping that it would be the coroner, Dr. Stephanie Armstrong.
“Who is that?” Seth asked. “I think I recognize him.”
Elise narrowed her eyes, watching the man move through the sunlight. He was brown-haired with tan skin, an average build. She thought that she recognized him, too. Maybe he had a common face—she hadn’t exactly become familiar with many citizens of Northgate in the three days she had spent in town.
The men walked from the mobile home to Father Armstrong’s sedan, oblivious to the fact that they were being watched. Father Armstrong looked angry. He kept gesturing, pumping his fists, cheeks flushed with blood. He wasn’t wearing a cassock anymore. He could have been anybody off of the street in his jeans and blue t-shirt. Elise was tempted to roll down the pickup’s window to listen to the conversation, but she didn’t want to lose what little protection the glass provided from the sun.
They got into the car, started the engine.
“Follow them,” Elise said.
They waited a few seconds before following the sedan onto the road. Seth kept a couple of car lengths behind them as Father Armstrong drove through Northgate without stopping, then took a road higher into the mountains.
Elise craned around to watch the road behind them, searching for any sign of Rylie and Abel on the heavily-forested shoulders. “They’re there,” Seth said.
“I don’t see them.”
He gave her a half-smile. “You wouldn’t.”
Traffic thinned as they took increasingly deserted roads, and Seth had to fall back to keep the priest from realizing that he was being followed. But he let the sedan get too much of a lead. They lost sight of Father Armstrong around a curve, and when they reached a straight part of the road, it was empty.
Father Armstrong was gone.
“Shit,” Seth said. “Where did he go?”
“Turn back,” Elise said. He flipped a u-turn and backtracked slower than before. A turnoff was concealed within the shrubbery on the curve. “That way.”
Seth decelerated, guiding the truck over the bumpy shoulder and onto a dirt road that cut through the mountain. The trees were thick. Elise dropped the jacket from her legs.
After a few minutes, the road opened into a small clearing between the trees. A cabin stood snugly against the face of the mountain, with a decorative well out front and a well-tended garden along the side. There was even an above-ground swimming pool surrounded by a deck.
“Doesn’t exactly scream ‘evil cult,’” Seth said.
Elise had to agree. If not for the list and the weird Bible, she might have thought that Father Armstrong was just trying to go on a fishing trip.
But he wasn’t carrying a tackle box when he emerged from the car again. He had pulled a bag out of the back seat of the sedan, and it was leaking blood. The scent of it made Elise’s nostrils flare. There was meat in the bag. It wasn’t packaged as if it had come from a butcher’s shop.
Elise’s heart skipped. The bodies had been found with missing parts.
She needed to get that bag before he could hide the evidence.
“I’m going in,” she said, opening the door.
But the wolves beat her to it.
Abel and Rylie erupted from the trees, pounding across the clea
ring. Twin streaks of lightning tackled Father Armstrong and his accomplice before either of them noticed that they weren’t alone.
The accomplice struggled under Rylie, kicking her away, and freed himself. She snarled as he broke into a run, hauling ass back toward the road.
Rylie looked torn—stay with Father Armstrong, or chase his friend?
“Get him,” Elise urged. “Go!”
The Alpha didn’t need to be told twice. She gave chase, disappearing into the trees.
Abel stood over Father Armstrong, nosing around the bag of meat without actually getting into it. He had one heavy paw on the priest’s chest. But it didn’t seem to be necessary. The man wasn’t moving.
Elise stretched out her senses.
No heartbeat.
“Shove over,” Seth said, nudging Abel with his knee.
The wolf backed off, and Seth checked Father Armstrong for a pulse. It was only a formality. Elise could already tell that he was dead. “What happened?” Elise asked.
Seth slipped a hand underneath the priest’s head. His fingers emerged bloody. “Hit a rock, looks like,” he said. “Accident.”
Elise kneeled at his side and pulled the meat out of the bag, grimacing at the texture in her fingers. It looked like any cut of steak she could get at a grocery store. Could have been pork, maybe.
She dropped the meat back into the bag and licked her bloody forefinger. “It’s not human,” Elise said.
Abel had just killed the priest over a slab of pig.
Great.
The black wolf’s body rearranged, losing its fur. Abel stood, naked and human, and gaped at the unmoving priest. “I didn’t… He wasn’t… I jumped on him, is all.”
Seth grabbed clothes out of the pickup and tossed them at his brother. “Get dressed.”
“Fuck,” Abel said with heat. He jerked a pair of jeans over his hips and belted them.
“He was probably with the cult anyway,” Seth said, resting a hand on Abel’s shoulder. The bigger man looked pale and shaking. Almost like he might faint.
Abel shoved his brother off and paced into the trees.
Rylie raced back into the clearing, sides heaving with exertion. She stepped behind the truck and changed even faster than Abel had. When she emerged again, she was already dressed. “I lost him,” she said. “His smell totally disappeared by the road. Someone must have picked him up.”
And if his first stop was the sheriff’s office, they would be well and truly fucked.
Rylie frowned. “Where’s Abel?”
Seth jerked his thumb at the trees. Rylie gave Elise an apologetic look, then chased the other Alpha.
Elise threw Father Armstrong over her shoulder and stood. “I’m moving him inside,” she said. “I want a look around.”
“Should we do that? Mess with a crime scene?” Seth asked in a whisper, as if trying to keep Abel from hearing him.
Her plans were much worse than disturbing the crime scene. Elise planned to swallow Father Armstrong’s body. No cadaver, no evidence.
The inside of the cabin was as nice as the outside. The living room walls were covered in shelves, which held dozens of antique, leather-bound books. Ceramic vases held potted plants, and the air smelled like damp soil and cleaning chemicals. The glass coffee table glistened, as if recently washed.
Elise dropped Father Armstrong on a couch in front of a brick fireplace.
“Get into the kitchen,” Elise told Seth when he followed her inside. “And shut all the doors. I don’t want to get confused and swallow the wrong person.”
He paled. “Swallow?”
“Close the doors.”
Seth did as she ordered, locking Abel and Rylie outside before retreating into the kitchen. Elise drew the curtains.
Once she was alone, she lit a cigarette and sucked deep. The smoke settled her nerves.
She was going to go incorporeal for the first time since her exorcism. Elise had to do it sooner or later—she couldn’t remain in her human form all the time.
But what if she flung herself back into Hell and didn’t return?
Elise took a long drag, letting the smoke curl out of her nostrils. It was going to be fine. She only needed to disappear long enough to make the body disappear.
She dropped the cigarette in one of the potted plants, pushed her doubts away, and relaxed.
Elise released her skin.
She filled the room with her presence, blacking out the indirect light and flooding every corner until there was no air left. She traced the shape of the couches, the coffee table, the wine racks, the antlers on the mantle.
Then she settled on Father Armstrong.
His body was cooling rapidly, quickly becoming unpalatable. If Elise had possessed a stomach in that form, she would have been nauseated by the idea of eating something without a beating heart, flowing blood, a mind filled with sparkling neurons.
She didn’t want to eat the dead—especially not when there was a perfectly appealing heartbeat the next room over.
Can’t eat Seth. Concentrate.
Elise contracted over Father Armstrong, condensed, and swallowed.
When she popped back into her corporeal form, there was no body on the couch. The only indication that he had been there was a smear of blood on the arm rest. A decorative throw pillow had also gone missing.
Elise picked a blue thread out of her teeth.
“Crap,” she said, spitting it into the waste basket.
The back of her mouth tasted sticky, like she had eaten a heavy meal and it was trying to come back up. She was suddenly, desperately thirsty.
She pushed into the kitchen.
“Father Armstrong?” Seth asked, peering over her shoulder.
“Gone,” Elise said. “Don’t ask. Water?”
He handed her a glass from one of the cabinets. “You need to see what I found while you were…busy,” he said as she filled it in the sink and knocked back a good twelve ounces in one guzzle.
She set the glass on the counter with a sigh. “A Jacuzzi?”
Seth grimaced. “A basement.”
Rylie and Abel were quietly grim as they followed Seth into the basement. Elise drifted behind them, rubbing her aching stomach.
Abel’s mind was wracked with guilt, twisted and tormented. But his guilt vanished the instant that he saw the giant, bloody pentagram painted on the basement wall.
The cabin above was the kind of place that people would pay hundreds of dollars a night to vacation, but the basement looked more like a dungeon. It was bigger than the cabin itself, probably carved into the mountain, and cavernously dark. They couldn’t see into the far end of the room—only the wall with the pentagram.
Elise pressed her hand to the bloody symbol. Through the barrier of the warding ring, she could feel the burn of power, hot enough to scorch her palm.
If she tilted her head the right way, she could see lines of magic streaming through the walls, into the earth, and funneling toward…something else, something beyond the perimeter of the cabin. But what?
“What is this place?” Rylie asked, hand over her nose, as if trying to block out smells.
Elise dropped her hand. The table beside her held large jars of colorful fluid. “Looks like an embalming room,” she said, lifting one of the lids to sniff at its mouth. She pulled a face. It reeked of formaldehyde.
Seth flipped a switch, and the lights came on. Elise immediately regretted being able to see.
She had been in autopsy rooms before, but nothing quite like this basement. It was a medical facility twisted by nightmares, a hellish pit of scalpels and jars of bone fragments. There was no hospital with candles placed around the floor at equidistant points. The iron cages on the left-hand wall, big enough to hold seated adults, weren’t typical hospital fixtures, either.
The stainless steel tables had been wiped clean, and their glistening surfaces seemed like an insult to the horror of the rest of the room—the crust of blood staining the concrete floors, the
barrel of discarded gristle, the dripping brown pentagram painted on the wall. A trio of tables were aligned parallel to each other in the center of the room, waiting to receive bodies.
Elise edged along the wall, taking in the sight of what had to be some kind of ritual space, though she had never known a witch that was quite so…gruesome. Even the necromancer she had once faced preferred a homier setting; her ingredients had been kept in Tupperware, with clean floors and a dining room table for the sacrifice. The industrial nature of the room only made the gore that much worse.
She held her breath as she peered into another plastic barrel. The glistening black mass at the bottom seethed with maggots.
Rylie clapped her hands over her mouth. Her eyes watered. She kind of squealed as she stifled a scream. Her Alpha toughness didn’t seem to extend to bloody symbols inscribed on the walls of a torture pit.
She let Abel fold her into his arms, burying her face against his chest.
A low growl tore Elise’s attention away from Rylie.
Chains rattled. Claws scrabbled against concrete.
“What is it?” Seth asked, lifting the rifle to his shoulder as he circled around the tables, taking the left while Elise took the right.
She jerked a silver throwing knife from her boot.
The light didn’t quite reach the far end of the room, which was shadowed by another row of cages. Elise’s night vision was superior, so she realized what she was seeing in the back of the room before Seth did.
It was a huge, four-legged creature, with a box-shaped head and jaws that would have made a shark proud. Splayed paws dug into the ground as it strained against a chain, which had dug a bloody furrow into its neck. A ratlike tail thrashed from side to side. It was big enough to be a small werewolf, or some kind of imp from Hell, but Elise quickly realized that it was nothing quite so exotic.
“The pit bull,” she said, heart sinking. The dog growled in response.
They had found the pit bull that had been chewing on cadavers post-mortem. It was certainly big enough to fool the average person into thinking its bite was a werewolf’s, although it was still only half of Rylie’s size.
“This is where it happened, isn’t it?” Rylie asked in a tiny voice. “This is where everyone got sacrificed.”
