Two
“Shut the fuck up!”
Why is this bitch still haunting me? “I’m losing my damn mind. I swear to you I saw her, just there. She was pounding on the glass and screaming at it. At us. Floating in the middle of that wall like a freak.”
Edric puts his feet up on the dash, unbothered.
“Just get us the fuck home. You didn’t see anything.
That house was fucking empty; no way anyone is living in there.
And there’s nothing in there even worth haunting.
You’re on edge and looking for a reason to keep hanging on to the past, and it’s manipulating your brain.
Turn the truck back on and get us out of here. ”
Ignoring him, I pocket the keys in case my pack tries to leave my ass here, intent on walking right back to the door we just walked out of. I felt the wards let us in, heard the locks working to close us out, but they should remember me and let me back in, right?
The second my hand makes contact with the garish bronze doorknob, revulsion snakes through my stomach, instantly making me want to vomit all over the dead flower bushes lining the porch.
I hop onto the banister instead, creaky as it is, trying to climb my way to the window two stories up.
If I’m remembering correctly, that window was just in the middle of a wall with no stairs to speak of near enough to reach it.
If that was Winslow’s ghost I saw, it was a damn strong one because when the sun hits the glass, I can see smudged fingerprints.
Do ghosts have fingerprints?
“Get your ass back in the truck now or I swear to god I’m going to fucking make you,” Edric yells from the driveway.
I flip his grumpy ass off and stare at the window a moment longer, hoping she’ll reappear.
Winslow might have fucking ruined all of us, but I’m sick enough to want another hit.
Being in the house she used to live in was a mind fuck.
The guys were right; the scent in there was too damn fresh to be hers, she’s been dead for weeks now and who even knows the last time she was here before that? It doesn’t make any sense.
Lest I seem like an even crazier person, I head back to the truck, knowing the second we’re home I’m going to be going through all the papers the jackass lawyer gave us with a fine-tooth comb, because something isn’t adding up.
“Somebody pull up the papers from the lawyer while I drive. What exactly does it say about the ward in the house? I thought you said it was a dog, Monet.”
I can feel his shrug from here. “I don’t know.
Winslow’s will said something about us being responsible for the companion creature left in the house.
For all I know, it could be a fucking plant.
Why the fuck do you even care? Everything it needs is on auto order.
I don’t even know why we came here in the first place. ”
“We came because our dead omega wanted us to, and I don’t think it’s a dog in there.
” No one states the obvious, that there was nothing in that house that could possibly belong to a dog, no scent of a dog, and no mess of a dog locked indoors for weeks alone.
” Believing the vague wording in the will was referencing a dog is easier though.
“Well, the budget allocated for the care of whatever’s living in there is far too small to keep a human alive, so it can’t be that,” Moon the fucking nerd says.
“Kind of weird we couldn’t access itemized receipts to see what she’s paid for, but I honestly don’t even care enough to look for answers.
She’s been gone almost a month— it’s time for us to put her and her bullshit in the past. You guys know we aren’t actually required to do everything her will asked us to, right?
We can just fuck off into the sunset and scrub her from our lives. ”
Whatever, I don’t need approval. I’ll come back without them and try and do surveillance.
Or maybe I’ll just get blackout drunk and pretend being inside Winslow’s house didn’t affect me.
Maybe Moon’s right; the only thing unhealthier than my pack’s relationship with Winslow is the way we dropped everything to fulfill a dead girl’s wish.
Maybe it would be so much better for us to cut her out of our lives now and find a way to start healing from the trauma that was our entire relationship.
The drive back to the pack house is tense, and not only because we were just surrounded by Winslow’s things. It should be biologically impossible for your dead omega’s scent to affect you so hard.
Even when I pull into the house, we all sit stewing in the truck, in the garage, with the engine and the overhead lights off, because once we get out of this truck, it gets heavy again and we have to face everything.
“Was anyone else waiting for Winslow’s ghost to jump out and haunt us, or was it just Clement that went that far off the deep end?”
I roll my eyes at Monet, well the fuck aware they don’t believe me about the ghost. “Must be some powerful fucking wards if they keep even ghosts inside,” I try to joke back, but my tone falls flat.
Edric hops out and storms off, slamming his door behind him.
He’s always been a bit on the superstitious side, and I know he’ll never actually admit it, but he fucking hates the idea of ghosts.
He’s probably headed to his room to make a salt circle and pray because he’ll be worried that whatever energy we encountered at the house followed us back here.
“I get that you guys don’t believe me. Whatever.
All I’m saying is that we should at least consider getting a hold of the blueprints.
Even if it ends up being nothing, Winslow is hiding something.
Why leave wards up on an empty house? She told us she had no other family, no one to pass things onto, so why bother keeping the wards up?
They’re clearly strong; she easily could have keyed them to her life force so that they fizzed out when she died.
That would have been the cheaper option, and we all know about Winslow’s love of money.
She paid a hefty amount to keep them running this long and we all know any and all suspicions about Winslow were pretty much always correct. ”
Moon stops with his body halfway out the truck, eyes tight. “What are you trying to insinuate?”
I finally climb out of the driver’s seat and shut the door, leaning my back against it because everything feels too hard right now.
“I don’t know, man. I just…I know I heard something, saw something, someone with dark hair, and there were fingerprints.
Clear as day. Then again, if anyone was going to haunt us, it would be Winslow, wouldn’t it? ”
That earns me a couple of pity laughs, even though every time we have to use her name it cuts a bit deeper.
“We just need to crack open some beer and try to wash the night out of our head. We knew it was going to fuck with us, seeing where she lived when she wasn’t with us, and I think we all need some time to just…
not think about all this shit. Maybe she was hiding something, she always was; she just doesn’t strike me as the type of person that would stop protecting something she considered hers, even in death.
It doesn’t feel…out of character to me that she’d keep an empty house locked up and protected.
” Calloway pats me on the shoulder as he walks by me, holding the door open while everyone else files into the house, looking back at me until I follow suit.
“Maybe we should get a cat or something. Make those fuckers find their buried nurturing instincts,” he half kids as we head upstairs together, trailing behind the others.
“They’d forget to feed it within the week and then we’d be cat killers right along with our omega killer title.”
He stops cold, pinning me to the wall. “Shut the fuck up. Stop feeding into that toxic bullshit my family’s been spewing at us again.
We don’t need them, okay? What happened to Winslow was…
tragic, maybe, but none of us had a hand in her demise.
She’s gone, and until we get all the reports back, we have no way of knowing what actually killed her.
You heard the doctor though; it looked like she had been using something foul, the way her arms were all marked up.
“We couldn’t save her. Not because we weren’t strong enough, but because she wasn’t.
I don’t know how, but we’re going to find a way out of this, okay?
Maybe we aren’t the type of pack that talks about their feelings and hangs out all the time, but we’ll get back to that place.
Once everyone’s done processing the shitstorm that Winslow caused, things are going to feel better.
My family isn’t going to get anywhere with their bullshit investigation or lawsuit, so stop letting them take up your mental energy. ”
I relax against his hold, wrapping my arms around him in a rare show of comfort. “You promise?” I mumble against his shoulder.
Calloway’s arms wrap around me right back, his shoulders untensing.
“Things have to get better. There’s something good out there for us, I swear to you.
We just have to be patient enough for it to find us.
Otherwise, what was all the suffering for?
I can’t believe that we dealt with all the shit our scent match put us through, just to end up single and miserable.
I don’t know when, but we’ll figure it out.
Who knows, maybe there’s a beta out there that’s looking to adopt a bunch of crazy alphas.
Either way, fuck my family. You guys are all I need. ”
I’m surprised by the laugh he draws out of me, breathing a little easier as we make our way to the kitchen with everyone else.
The beers are cold and so is the house, but we’re all still here, all still together, and maybe we just need to believe in something good like Calloway thinks, and it’ll manifest.
Hah. Unlikely.