Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (Dead Things Series Book 1) (13 page)

21

TRISTIN

A
s always, chaos ensued. People were fighting over who showers first, who needed to pee, who needed to brush their teeth. Bodies squeezed past each other in the hallway and doors slammed with unnecessary force. Tristin was already dressed and ready to go. She didn’t waste time with makeup just threw on her clothes, pulled her hair into a ponytail and made for the stairs.

She wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but Isa’s voice carried in the sudden quiet of the hallway.

“Allister, I’m doing the best I can.” Tristin assumed she was on the phone. “Of course, I’m keeping an eye out but I can’t be obvious about it.” There was a pause then, “That couldn’t be helped. No-It’s been years. Nobody’s ever-Yes, I get that but it’s delicate. They’re dangerous. You know it’s not that easy. They don’t know they are prisoners.”

Tristin’s mouth felt sour. Had Allister created some kind of temporary prison here in town? The idea made her cringe. Who were they rounding up and how did they not know about it? They patrolled nightly. And what were they doing to them that they didn’t even realize they were prisoners. Quinn was right to hate his dad; there was something so off about him. She knew Isa only associated with Allister because it was necessary but she wished there was another way.

She knew she was being unreasonable. Isa was their alpha. She always did what was good for the pack. She took care of them.

“Yes, I know what I’m doing. Everything is being handled.”

Isa’s cell beeped as the call ended. She thought she was alone until she heard Wren ask, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

There was a groan, “I have literally no idea what I’m doing.”

“Do you think sending the boys to Josephine is a good idea?” Wren questioned.

“I’m not sure; but she sent me that letter a year ago. She said she had a vision. She said in her vision Kai made a terrible mistake and Tristin’s banshee powers returned. She told me when it happened I needed to send word to her. At the time, I wrote it off. I mean, she’s so old. But Kai did screw up and Tristin screamed. Something bad is happening here and clearly, Josephine has some idea what it is. I can’t ignore it, Wren. She knows things.”

“Why not tell Allister then?”

Isa sighed. “Because I don’t trust him, I just don’t.”

“What if he finds out we‘re keeping things from him? Allister works for the Grove, Isa.”

“We work for the Grove, Wren,” Isa hissed back.

Tristin’s breath caught and she slapped a hand over her mouth and made for the stairs. What the hell did that mean? Isa had to answer to the witches’ council but she didn’t work for the Grove. The Grove didn’t really get involved in shifter business. There was an agreement in place. None of this made sense. Why was Isa sending her brother and Rhys on some super-secret mission? Who the hell was Josephine? Why did she care about Tristin’s banshee powers?

There was only one person who could help her with this. She needed to talk to Quinn. Tristin went downstairs and ate breakfast with everybody else, throwing elbows over waffles and bacon like everything was fine. She couldn’t help but look at Isa every few minutes.

Whenever Isa caught her staring, Tristin stuffed another bite of waffle into her mouth and slid her gaze to Quinn. Quinn smiled and winked. She panicked and smiled back. Quinn’s smile faltered, looking at her with a deeply honed suspicion. She stuffed another piece of bacon in her mouth and spent the rest of breakfast, making pictures with the butter and syrup. By the time breakfast ended, she’d eaten her body weight in waffles. She felt sick but she had a plan.

Guilt and bacon burned a hole through her belly as she lay in wait for him at the foot of the staircase, hoping to snag him in his waffle-induced bliss. She knew he’d do it. He’d do anything she asked of him. That was the problem.

When she snagged him by the arm, he jumped a foot.

“What the hell, Dagger?”

“I wanted to talk to you.” He looked at her dubiously. She very rarely initiated conversations with him, or anyone really.

“Um, well if you wanted to talk we just ate breakfast together. You sat less than a foot away from me for over an hour.”

She stared him down.

“Oh,” he said, frowning. “You don’t want to talk to me; you want to talk at me. I should have known when you smiled at me.” He sighed morosely, “Why didn’t you just say so?”

“Let’s go outside.”

His face crumpled and he whined, “No. Not outside. Outside means that you are not only going to ask me to do something horrible but it’s so horrible you don’t want the pack to know about it.”

She shushed him, grabbing his hand and pulling him towards the door. She said nothing when he laced their fingers together. She dragged him all the way to the edge of the property where she knew there was no chance even the wolves could hear.

She stood awkwardly, trying to decide the best way to ask for a favor.

“So, talk,” he told her. She looked down at their entwined fingers. She was going to hell for this. She took a deep breath and told him everything she’d heard. The whole thing. Quinn stared at her blinking owlishly behind his lenses.

“So…?” she asked.

“So…what?”

“So, you don’t think it’s strange Isa saying she works for the Grove?”

“Everybody works for the Grove, Dagger, if they want to stay on their good side.”

Okay, she’d thought the same thing but still, she had other questions. “Okay, then what did she mean by prisoner? Who’s being held prisoner and where? And what does it have to do with me, Kai and Ember? Why are my banshee powers coming back now? Why does this crazy psychic know anything about us? Can any of this save my brother from the Grove?”

She was out of breath by the time she was done and Quinn looked fascinated and, well, a little turned on. “Focus,” she told him, shaking their joined hands to get his attention.

“Oh, I’m focused.”

Tristin rolled her eyes, “Focus on the problem at hand.”

“Which is what exactly?”

“What is Isa up to and can it help save Kai from the Grove?”

He looked sick, “Listen, Dagger, you know I love your…everything, so much, but I’m not investigating our alpha. Not even for you.”

“But what if she knows how to help Kai?”

“Do you think if Isa was worried about Kai and the Grove she wouldn’t do everything to protect him? He’s her favorite, more than Wren, more than her own brother.”

“Nobody is even talking about it. They are all too focused on helping Ember. I need you to focus on helping me help Kai.”

“Help Kai?” Quinn echoed. “How do you propose we do that?”

“Quinn, your father is on the council.” His eyes widened at the mention of his father. “Hell, your father is the council. If anybody would have information about what happens when a reaper actively prevents the death of a collected it would be him. This can’t be the first time this has happened. It just can’t be.”

“My father knows what Kai did. If he had any plans of addressing it, I’m pretty sure he would have done so the night Ember got here. Do you want me to point out that he hasn’t pursued notifying the Grove about what he did? You want me to casually ask my father-my father who hates me-for a favor for my friend, who he also hates?”

Tristin played with Quinn’s fingers. “I didn’t say I wanted you to talk to your dad.”

He pulled his hand back, exasperated. “Then why did you even bring him up?”

Her eyes slid away.

“Tristin, just tell me what you want me to do already.”

“Remember last summer when you hacked into your family’s grimoire?”

Quinn’s mouth fell open, “You mean the time my father disowned me, threw me out of the house for months and threatened to kill me himself if I ever did it again. Yeah, I vaguely recall that.”

“Last time you were trying to break into your dad’s personal records. What we need is more general. We need access to the library.”

“The Grove library?” Quinn asked, “Are you kidding me? Where would we even begin? The Grove holds all records. If I could even get in, which I’m sure I couldn’t, where would we even begin to look?”

She slid her eyes away guiltily. “There has to be information on reapers. If we went in looking for that specifically…”

“Are you kidding me?” he shouted, “Do you remember how difficult it was last time and that was just my family’s personal grimoire. It took me two days and I barely managed to read three pages before my dad shut me down. He increased not only his firewall and encryption and he maxed out the wards too.”

“You are the smartest person I know. If anybody can do-”

“Tristin. Are you listening to yourself? It would take an entire coven of neo-pagan hackers to get past all the enchantments on that database. The Grove has texts dating back over a thousand years.”

“It used to be public record.” she pouted.

“Well there is no way we can hack into that computer. Not unless you have a coven in your back pocket I don’t know about.”

She knew better than to ask if he knew any witches that would be willing to help. He was a traitor as far as they were concerned. He had defected to align himself with shifters and reapers. There was no greater sin in his father’s eyes and his father was the voice of the witch community.

Something occurred to her then. “It used to be a matter of public record.”

He frowned, looking at her like she was crazy, “Yes, I heard you the first time.”

“No, you don’t understand. It was a library. People checked out books, photocopied them. Took home pages to study.”

“Yes, and the Grove ordered all copies destroyed.”

“They ordered all non-witches to destroy their copies. Not every witch could have gone digital. Somebody has to have a copy of whatever text we need.”

“Dagger, that is like looking for needles in a bank vault full of needles, poisoned needles that could turn us into toads. Where would we even start? I can promise you nobody in this town would be stupid enough to leave valuable information lying around.”

“But if I could find somebody and we could get access to the information…could you memorize it?”

He ran his hands through his hair, “If-and that is a big fat freaking if-I was to see the book I would be able to memorize whatever I could read but it’s way too dangerous. They’d have us killed, or worse.”

“What do you think they are going to do to my brother when they find out what he’s done? Or me, for helping him?”

His silence was chilling. Nobody disobeyed the Grove.

“Even if we find somebody who has this information. Do you think they are just going to let us see it? I’m a human and you’re a banshee, we are hardly capable of going up against witches or anything crazy enough to keep forbidden documents in their house.”

“Leave that part up to me.”

“Tristin, you’re being crazy. You are going to waste a lot of time chasing your tail.”

He used her real name, that was never a good sign, “I’d rather put my energy towards saving my brother than watching everybody else fall all over themselves trying to save the reason he’s in danger in the first place.”

He didn’t say anything for a while, “So you need to find another reaper?”

“I need to find somebody who can help us protect my brother, ideally somebody who understands his power. We can’t trust the witches to help.”

“We literally have no idea what we are looking for. This is a terrible plan.”

“It’s the only one we’ve got.”

“Okay,” he told her with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, “But if I die, you better write me the best eulogy ever.”

She punched his arm, “Shut up. Let’s get back before anybody notices we’re gone.”

“I’ll just tell them we were making out.”

“You might want to come up with something they’ll believe.”

“Someday, Tristin Lonergan, you will regret not locking this down when you had the chance.”

She snickered as his strut off was ruined by a poorly placed tree root. She stepped over him as he sprawled in the grass. “I’m sure my devastation will be endless.”

22

KAI

K
ai couldn’t believe he was back in the car again. This time he wasn’t making the four-hour drive to Louisiana. Nope, this time Rhys was dragging him out to the swamps of the Florida Everglades. He hated the Everglades. It took forever to get there.

He couldn’t think of anything worse than Isa trapping him in the car with Rhys for almost eight hours just to visit the land of mosquitos, gators and pythons.

“I
hate
the Everglades,” he told the wolf, his voice gunshot loud in the silence.

Rhys snorted, “Not exactly my dream destination, either,” Kai cut his eyes at him and Rhys shrugged, “What? This wasn’t my idea.”

As the silence stretched on, Kai assumed the wolf had nothing more to say on the matter. Good, it sucked trying to carry on a conversation with somebody who was monosyllabic at best. He leaned the passenger seat back. It wasn’t as if his highness was going to let him drive anyway. Nope, Captain Control Issues never let anybody drive his baby.

He closed his eyes and tried not to think about the fact that Rhys was close enough to feel the heat of his body. Stupid werewolves and their stupid body temperatures. He turned his face towards the window, not thinking about how good the other boy smelled, or the way his shirt stretched too tight across his shoulders. He scrunched his eyes closed and pulled his cap over them to block the strobe of the passing streetlights.

It would be light soon. He was just drifting off when a large finger poked his ribs. “Hey. No sleeping. We need to talk about what we are going to do when we get there.”

Kai blew his breath out through his nose, “Fine,” he said through clenched teeth. He fixed his hat and let his chair rocket back into the upright position hard enough it shook behind him.

“Hey, careful,” Rhys admonished, “This car is a classic.” He stroked the steering wheel like he was soothing a child.

“Yes, my liege.” He told him drolly, flicking his hand in a sort of flamboyant salute.

“You’re such a dick,” the wolf grumbled.

After five minutes of total silence, Kai prompted, “So…are you going to tell me what this mysterious super-secret assignment is? Because for now, all I know is we are heading to the Everglades. The only reason people go there is for a body dump.”

Rhys paused enough for Kai’s heart to start pounding. Oh, God. He could not handle a body dump today.

The wolf must have heard the uptick of his heart. He rolled his eyes at Kai, “Calm down, there’s no body in the trunk. Like I’d put a dead body in this car. That’s what the truck is for. Isa wants us to reach out to the wolves in the Glades. There’s an elder out there who she thinks may have some information about Ember.”

“Why would an elder wolf have knowledge of a kinda-sorta-maybe-if-you-squint-hard-witch?”

Rhys stared at him balefully, “I didn’t say she was an elder wolf.”

“So she’s a…?”

“Witch, really old and really powerful.”

Kai looked at him in disbelief, “There’s a super powerful witch living in wolf territory? Surrounded by her enemies? That’s ballsy.”

Rhys set his jaw, cutting his eyes at him for a moment. His constant sour disposition must be hard on his teeth.

“Like…I…said,” he told him slowly, drawing Kai’s attention back to the conversation at hand, “She’s very old. She has been the pack’s witch for a very long time. She chose to stay with the pack rather than deal with all the…politics that erupted when everything fell apart.”

“So she’s living with the pack?” That was unheard of. He was surprised the higher ups let her get away with it. She must have some kind of mojo if the tree worshipers weren’t getting involved.

“Isa says these wolves have cut themselves off from the world. They revere Ms. Josephine. They aren’t going to want to let us talk to her. If you think the witches are secretive, you haven’t seen the Glades shifters. They are highly suspicious of others, especially non-shifters.” He eyed Kai pointedly.

“Yeah, I get it. Non-shifter here.” He moved in his seat, pressing his hand against the glass of the window, following the drops the condensation made on the outside of the pane. “So, how dangerous is this little mission?”

Rhys contemplated the question before saying, “Not as bad as the succubus this summer but more dangerous than the baby vamps in April.”

“Great.” That succubus had infected a visiting wolf from another pack and mind melted him into almost killing Isa and Rhys. Rhys had ended up with a broken clavicle, a shattered pelvis and a really large dagger shoved through his spleen. Luckily, it was wood and not silver. To date, it was the worst night of Kai’s life. He was pretty sure, it wasn’t Rhys’ best memory either. The baby vamps had put up a fight but they were too new, all bitten, no born. They had eventually left quietly with the pack sustaining only minor injuries.

“If this pack won’t trust me, why did she send me and not Wren or Donovan? Or why not just come herself?”

Rhys looked his way, expression guarded, “You know alphas don’t go into another alpha’s territory without permission. It’s not like we could shoot them a text or an email to let them know she’d like a meeting. Besides, Isa wouldn’t leave the others, not until we know what Ember is. As for why she sent you? That’s easy. To annoy me, obviously.”

Kai’s insides twisted. You’d think he’d be used to the insults by now. “Wow, such a charmer. Sometimes I’m shocked you’re single.”

Rhys nostrils flared, his look going from smug to constipated to expressionless.

Rhys fell silent again so Kai chose to pass the time the usual way, irritating him. “So, Isa sent me out into the middle of the swamp with a guy who finds me annoying. I’m having a hard time thinking you’d have my back.” He did his best to look leery, “I mean, if I’m so annoying maybe you’ll just let one of these wolves solve your little problem once and for all. You’d never have to worry again.”

Rhys gave a longsuffering sigh, like he was onto Kai’s plan but couldn’t help but take the bait, “I just said you annoy me, I didn’t say I wanted you dead.”

“Oh, well, in that case…” he gestured.

“I’ve never not had your back.”

“Maybe you’ve just never had the opportunity to get rid of me.” He had started the conversation to be funny but now he was getting irritated, though he couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. The silence stretched for so long he figured Rhys considered the conversation done.

“I wouldn’t let anything happen to you,” He said it so softly Kai almost missed it.

He knew Rhys heard his heart flip-flop in his chest but he couldn’t help it. It was the nicest thing he’d ever said to him. How pathetic was that? I hate you but I wouldn’t let you be slaughtered by backwoods werewolves. Swoon. How did humans deal with crushes?

“So,” he asked, changing the subject, “What’s the plan? We go in and ask nicely or you go in all ‘grrr, arghh’?” He asked, making his hands into claws and baring his teeth.

Rhys bit his bottom lip and Kai was almost positive he was trying not to laugh.

“Um, I’d say we at least try to ask nicely. Besides, these shifters aren’t-that is, they are slightly…”

“Oh my God, just spit it out? They’re what?” Kai said, exasperated. Rhys flushed.

“Feral, Okay? I’m not sure I could take on more than one at a time.”

“Feral,” Kai’s stomach rolled, “like they don’t wear shoes or have running water or feral like they tend to rip your throat out first and ask questions later?”

Rhys risked a glance his way, “Possibly both.”

Kai stared at him incredulously. “So your sister sent us into the woods alone together to ask invasive questions to a pack of feral wolves on the off chance that an old witch might remember something about Ember? She really hates me now, huh? I mean, she’s always disliked you but now she wants me dead too?”

“I don’t question my sister.”

Kai snorted. “Uh, yeah, you do. All the time.”

“Look, I don’t know why she’s sending us out here. I have no information other than what I told you. She wouldn’t send us out here if she didn’t think we couldn’t handle it. Besides, I do have a gun if it comes to that.”

Kai huffed out a laugh, “Dude, that doesn’t make me feel better. I’ve seen you shoot. You have the aim of a storm trooper.”

The wolf stared at him, “I have no idea what that means but I’m assuming it’s an insult.”

Kai smirked, staring at him for a full minute before the wolf caved and barked, “What?”

“Don’t even pretend you don’t worship Star Wars. I’ve seen that stash of action figures you keep in your closet. If Star Wars was a person, you’d marry it.”

Rhys kept eyes forward but Kai had the pleasure of watching the color flush up his neck to his face. He couldn’t tell if it was embarrassment or fury in the dim haze provided by the passing streetlights. “Stay out of my closet.”

“No problem,” he said, “It’s not like there’s enough room for both of us anyway.”

Rhys’ mouth fell open before he snapped it shut hard enough for his teeth to clack together, “Just go to sleep.” Rhys sniped, reaching for the radio, “I’ll wake you when we get there.”

“Fine,” he sniped back.