Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (Dead Things Series Book 1) (19 page)

30

EMBER

E
mber bolted upright, crawling towards the back corner of the sofa, heart hammering. She scanned the room, trying to figure out where she was and how she got home. Seven faces stared back, shocked at her violent awakening.

“Welcome back,” Wren smiled. “How are you feeling?”

“What? What happened?” She fought to make her brain catch up. Her head hurt, every muscle ached.

Tristin rolled her eyes, “You passed out…again.”

Ember pulled a face at her cousin but said nothing. She couldn’t deal with her irrational hatred right now. She looked at each in turn, taking in their grim expressions.

Her stomach sank, “What did I do? Why do you all look like I killed somebody?”

Donovan shook his head with a smile, “You didn’t just pass out; you almost took out the entire town. Your magic is, like, out of control.”

They all stared at him, incredulous.

It came back to her in a rush; her mother, Mace, the voice…that crazy voice from inside her, the power that seemed to rip through her.

“How did you find me?”

“The wolves tracked you for a while but when they lost the scent, Neoma found you.” Isa told her, smiling at the girl.

Ember looked at the girl painting her nails in the corner, “How?”

Neoma just shrugged not even bothering to look up from her task.

“Neoma has her own gifts,” Isa said.

“I could have killed people,” Ember said, almost to herself. Kai’s gaze skated away from her to Rhys and then to the ground and she felt sick as she realized the truth. “You knew, didn’t you?” she asked Kai. “You knew something like this could happen. Who else knew?”

Everybody seemed confused by Ember’s sudden outburst, everybody except Kai, Rhys, Isa and Wren. “You knew too, didn’t you?”

Kai scuffed his converse across the floor, not making eye contact with anybody, “It was my fault. I asked them not to tell you.”

It shouldn’t have hurt. It wasn’t like she’d been there long enough for them to have any kind of loyalty to her. They didn’t owe her anything. They didn’t know her. They didn’t trust her. Why should they? She tried to ignore the sick feeling in her stomach. She should leave. She bit down on her lip, forcing back tears of frustration. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. She just couldn’t trust anybody. It wasn’t like this was a lesson she hadn’t learned years ago. She didn’t cry for people.

From deep inside, she could feel that power stir, a slow tiny burn just looking for the oxygen it needed to burst free. She tried not to panic. Her legs shook, body trembling from the inside like her organs were shaking loose. She wanted to scream in frustration. She couldn’t live like this.

Isa knelt down in front of her. Her skin burned as the alpha took Ember’s hands in her own, “Ember, I know you don’t believe this but we thought it was for the best. You are being overwhelmed by your magic. You have no control. It’s not your fault and nobody’s blaming you but you need to try to take some deep breaths. Okay?” Ember swallowed the lump in her throat, her first instinct to tell her to screw off.

She drew in a few shaky breaths, in through her nose, out through her mouth trying to ignore just how stupid she felt.

“Why did you go to the cemetery?” Wren asked, once she felt a little more in control.

She shrugged, hands flailing. “I don’t know. I wasn’t consciously going to the cemetery. I didn’t even know there was a cemetery. I just needed to get out of here. I just needed to leave.”

“Leave? And go where?” Tristin asked, shooting to her feet and pointing in Ember’s face. “Seriously? After Kai saved your life, you were just going to take off? You were just going to bolt and leave us to clean up your mess?”

Ember stared at her cousin, “What?” Leave? She wasn’t moving out of the state, she went for a walk. Isa shot Tristin a nasty look but the other girl was far too gone to heed the warning flash of gold eyes. Ember blinked at her in confusion.

“You are so selfish. I can’t believe you.”

Heat prickled along her spine and then she was on her feet lunging for the other girl. Rhys caught her, arm around her shoulders, holding her back as she screamed, “What is your problem with me? What did I ever do to you?”

Tristin opened her mouth, baring her teeth looking more animal than the animals surrounding her. Whatever she was about to say died with a single meaningful glance from Quinn.

“Nothing,” she muttered. “Forget it.”

“Forget it?” Ember shouted. Was she serious? “Seriously? Forget it? You are horrible all the time, you glare at me and roll your eyes and act like I killed your puppy. What did I ever do to you? What? Tell me, please.”

Tristin dropped her gaze but Ember’s magic pulsed barely contained. Rhys watched her closely, loosening his hold but not releasing her.

“Ember,” Wren said, voice soothing. “You need to calm down. We need to talk about some things.”

“Don’t you think if I could calm down, I would have? Don’t you think if I had any control over this, whatsoever, I would do it? I can’t control this. I can’t stop this. What am I supposed to do?”

That power roared to life under her skin and she opened her mouth to scream at the sudden pain but her voice wouldn’t come, she stared at the others helpless to stop it. Her magic was driving now and she was going to kill them all.

Everybody in the room froze. The wolves bristling at the energy shift in the room. She didn’t want this but she was a hostage in her own body. Rhys looked to Isa as Ember’s magic sparked from her fingertips. Ember didn’t want this but she was a hostage in her own body.

“Um, guys?” Neoma called softly from the doorway, moving silently on her bare feet.

“Little busy, sweetheart,” Wren told her without turning around.

“I know,” she told them, “I’m pretty sure that’s why he’s here.”

All eyes swung to the door. Mace sauntered in, taking in Neoma with interest. “Well, aren’t you just the most adorable thing ever? I haven’t seen one of your kind in a long while.”

Wren and Rhys growled, eyes flashing, teeth elongating.

“Relax, boys, it wasn’t a proposal of marriage,” his eyes found Ember’s and he tilted his head. “Well, seems that I’ve arrived just in the nick of time.” Ember paled at his presence but her magic purred, reaching out to him, trying to coax him closer.

“What are you even doing here?” Tristin asked, clearly confused by his arrival. “How do you know where we live?”

He cleared his throat, grin smug. “Interesting development, mate,” he addressed Kai. “While it appears Ember is unsure of her feelings towards me; her magic is a girl that knows what she wants.”

Tristin snorted, rolling her eyes.

“So she…” Quinn prompted.

“Summoned me? Possibly? I’m not entirely certain but I was just walking along minding my own business and found myself here, at your house. I can only assume she summoned me here.”

“I did not,” she managed to choke out indignantly, even as she moved closer to him. She held out her hand to him, horrified at her body’s treachery. She didn’t mean to do that. She didn’t want to do that.

“Oh, come now,” he told her, linking his fingers with hers. Her whole body shuddered, the power inside her licking through her fingertips, circling his fingers. His brows lifted, looking down at their linked hands. He had to feel that. He looked mystified, staring intently, pulling his fingers from hers only to have them drawn back into place, like a magnet. He tried it again and then once more, an amused smile curving his lips.

She growled as she realized he was enjoying himself. This wasn’t a game. She wanted to kick him but she could only stand there at the mercy of this power coursing through her.

“Well, that’s…disconcerting.” Quinn said, breaking the strange bubble of silence.

“I have no idea what I’m even watching right now,” Donovan voiced from his perch on the arm of the sofa.

“Ember might hate me, but her magic doesn’t.” Mace told them, watching as her hands worked up his forearms, amusement in his tone. “So, I guess that means I’m sticking around.”

“No way,” Ember said, teeth clenched so hard her jaw ached, willing her hands to stop moving over his arms. “There is no way that he is going to be around here all the time. He’s the bad guy. He doesn’t get to play hero.”

“Fine, I’ll go,” he pried her hands away from him with a grunt of effort and turned to leave. He paused, a myriad of expressions playing across his face. He took a step, then another, looking progressively more pained with each step.

“Really?” he turned around. “Don’t be ridiculous. You need me. You all need me. She will take this house down to the rafters and then the town.” He looked at Isa, “You’re the alpha? I can keep her magic under control. I can help her channel it. You have to see I’m better than the alternative.”

Isa sucked her bottom lip between her teeth and looked to Wren and then Ember.

“You can’t be considering this after what Quinn told us? We can’t possibly trust him,” Tristin said.

The walls of the house rattled, causing the pictures to shake. The wolves moved and Kai grabbed Tristin’s hand pulling her out of the way as the chandelier swung precariously over their heads.

“Maybe he’s doing that himself?” Donovan asked, looking spooked.

Mace looked equally spooked, “I assure you, I’m not. What exactly would I gain from this?”

“That’s a great question.” Wren asked, “What exactly are you getting out of this?”

“A sense of civic pride and a front row ticket to the show.”

She didn’t believe him and she wasn’t alone. It was Kai who spoke first. “Ember, what choice do we have? For whatever reason, your magic seems tied to his. Without him you could hurt people.”

Ember looked around, helpless. “Can’t one of you do your wolf thing and tell if he’s lying?”

“No heartbeat,” Rhys grumbled.

Ember startled, “N-No heartbeat? He’s dead?”

Mace looked at her imploringly, “Ember, just let me help you.”

She hated this. She didn’t want to be around any more people she couldn’t trust. None of this made any sense but Kai was right. What choice did she have, really?

“Fine,” she said, “but if you try anything-”

He held his hands up, “Best behavior, Luv. On my honor.”

Rhys snorted at his words but her magic relented, curling back to sleep in that place deep inside her. She winced at the blisters on his palms. “Did I do that?”

“Don’t trouble yourself, Luv, I’ll heal.”

“Gosh, everybody is being so accommodating why don’t you just have Quinn patch him up, since we obviously work with the bad guys now,” Tristin fumed.

“Tristin, that’s enough,” Isa warned, glowering at Mace. “Sometimes we have to work with people we don’t like…or trust. It goes with the territory.”

“You are wise for one so young,” Mace told the alpha. He then looked around, face splitting into that smug grin. “So, who’s going to tell me what she really is?” he grinned, triumphant.

31

KAI

K
ai slipped into the kitchen, abandoning Ember with a soul eating sluagh, a pack of extremely confused werewolves and his inexplicably hostile banshee sister. All and all, it was turning out to be a typical day. He just needed a minute to clear his head. He had no idea what to do about Ember magically tethering herself to a homicidal maniac. He also had no idea what to do about the fact she might also
be
a homicidal maniac.

Her magic could blow up at any moment. What if tying herself to Mace only made her stronger? What if it made the soul eater stronger? Her magic and his together? They could annihilate half the population. He absently rubbed his left arm, where the swirl of inked names wrapped around his bicep. He poked at the spot where Ember’s name should have been. He’d never had a name disappear. He couldn’t even ask what it meant.

His eyes fell on the plate of cookies on the counter, his stomach growling loudly. The only good thing to come out of this disaster was Isa’s stress baking had gone to a whole other level. Like hall of fame amazing.

He was reaching for a cookie when a hand gripped his bicep, hauling him out the back door and onto the porch. The sadness he felt over the loss of his cookie was cut short as two hundred plus pounds of werewolf slammed him against the side of the house. You’d think he’d be used to this by now. Rhys seemed to enjoy slamming him into things at every opportunity.

“Hello to you too.” He rasped, attempting to suck air back into his abused lungs. “You know, you could just ask to talk to me like a normal person. At least try using your words.”

Rhys just stood there, forearm across his chest, all broody eyebrows and intense eye contact. Kai licked his lower lip, trying to read something in the wolf’s face. What he wouldn’t give to know what was going on in that head of his.

He swore he did this on purpose. If you looked up enigmatic in the dictionary there was a picture of Rhys.

Kai hoped the slamming of his heart against his ribcage read more as fear and adrenaline and less oh-god-just-kiss-me-already. Rhys’ gaze dropped to his mouth before sliding away guiltily, like he was reading Kai’s mind. Kai wanted to punch him.

“So…” Kai said, clearing his throat and tapping Rhys’ forearm. “Air would be good here. You are sort of suppressing my diaphragm.”

Rhys did his nostril-flaring thing and stepped back. Kai took a deep breath as he returned to full lung capacity. Rhys paced the porch but said nothing.

Kai flailed his hands, “Oh my God, just spit it out. Your inability to talk to me is literally killing me. Just open your mouth and speak.”

“How much longer are we going to let this go on?” Rhys asked, voice low but vehement. He parked himself against the porch rail, far enough away from Kai for distance but not so far he had to speak loudly. Everything about him so calculating.

“What do you mean?”

His eyebrows shot up. “What do I mean? We have to tell them about her. We have to tell them everything.”

“Why? I don’t get why you think that we have to tell them everything. They know she’s dangerous, they know she can really mess things up. Why do we need to tell them that she was a homicidal preschooler? I’ve seen the way you’ve been looking at her since we got back. All you see is the girl responsible for killing our parents.”

Rhys huffed. “That’s not true.”

Kai arched an eyebrow, crossing his arms.

Rhys glanced at a spot over Kai’s shoulder. “Look, I know it’s not something she could help. I look at her like she’s dangerous, because she is dangerous. She is far more dangerous than anybody in there knows because we are lying to them. We’re lying to her. Even she doesn’t know what she’s capable of.”

Rhys huffed as if he was trying to gather up the courage to keep going. “If you had raised an army of zombies wouldn’t you want to know? If you’d inadvertently hurt people with the very magic you now can’t control, wouldn’t you want to know it? How do you think she’s going to feel if she hurts somebody? Killing somebody is not quite as easy to shake off as bumping over headstones and knocking a couple of pictures off the wall.”

“You are such a drama queen,” Kai told him.

His words lacked any real fire but Rhys punched the wall next to his head, startling him, “Am I? We have a sluagh in our house babysitting our reanimator. Do you get that? Do you know what those things do? They feed on the souls of innocent people without remorse. Hell didn’t want him. Do you see where he falls on the spectrum of bad guy to sphincter-clenchingly evil? We’ve let two deadly creatures into our home. We’ve let them near our family and we are leaving them defenseless because we are lying to them.”

Kai’s stomach did a weird flip-flop thing at Rhys’ use of the word ‘our’. He didn’t really know anything about sluagh except what Quinn had explained since the cemetery. There was no real solid research on these creatures. None they could get their hands on anyway.

“Quinn said it’s a legend; a Celtic ghost story Irish grannies told their kids to get them to behave. Like Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects,” Kai said.

Rhys rolled his eyes but otherwise failed to acknowledge his movie reference, “That’s exactly what the humans say about us in the outside world.”

Rhys moved to the porch railing again and Kai relented, “Fine, okay. She’s dangerous. He’s dangerous. They are both weapons of mass destruction. Why don’t you say what you really mean, Rhys?”

“Which is what?”

“That this is my fault, that I should have just left her to die. That if I had just collected her and moved on none of this would be happening right now.”

Rhys met his gaze, “I’m not saying that.”

“Actually you did say that. The night I brought her here, remember?”

Rhys’ cheeks flushed, “I was mad. I was concerned.” Kai could see him getting frustrated. He waited, trying to be patient. “It’s my job to take care of y-of the pack,” he said. “It is hard enough protecting us from vampires and trolls and the things we do know about. I can’t protect us if I don’t know what we’re dealing with.” He growled, “Why do you make everything so difficult?”

Kai said nothing, watching the expressions play across his face, letting him get it all out. “Do you get what is happening right now? Do you really get it? We know that twelve years ago there was a witch here so powerful they forced a coven to cast a spell on an entire town, a witch that bound a girl’s powers for years. We have a girl who can control the dead and our only failsafe is a soul-eating demon.”

Kai shook his head, gesturing helplessly, “Dude, our whole lives are dangerous. We fight monsters. We’ve almost died so many times. We always figure it out and we always survive. We are good at this.”

“No,” he balled his fists. “We are lucky. We are just lucky. This is why you frustrate me…because you just don’t get it.”

“Then why don’t you explain it to me. I’m right here.”

“I-” he turned away looking out over the yard suddenly super interested in the yellowing grass.

Kai couldn’t resist his own growl of frustration. “Oh, that’s right. You don’t talk about your feelings. You just grunt and shove and act perpetually pissed off. You think I don’t get what we do is dangerous? Our parents are dead. All of our parents are dead and they were good at this. They fought with all the information and they still died but I can’t focus on that. If I did I’d spend all my time broody and miserable like you.”

Rhys looked over his shoulder at Kai, expression unreadable. He was quiet for a long time before he asked, “Have you thought at all about what is going to happen to you if they find out what you’ve done?”

He could play stupid, but he knew what Rhys meant. He hadn’t thought about it. He’d actively been not thinking about it because thinking about it made him feel sick to the point of vomiting. Rhys was being kind by saying ‘if’ they found out. It was only a matter of time before the Grove realized what he’d done and they came to punish him. He spent every night trying to think of anything but what that punishment would be.

“What good is thinking about it? It’s not going to change anything. Whatever they are going to do to me won’t change by my freaking out about it.”

He was sure that the wolf could smell the fear on him but he didn’t acknowledge it.

“We can’t lose you.” Rhys told him, quickly adding, “We can’t lose any more people.”

“Whether you guys lose me or not, you can’t let it stop you from living your life.”

Rhys looked at him like he was crazy, “Your sister would never get over it. Isa would be devastated. Quinn would try to find a way to get you back. The pack would fall apart. Why aren’t you more afraid? You have to want to stay alive.”

“Yeah? I can wish myself alive now?” Kai asked, gut twisting at the thought. Why was he so hell bent on talking about this? What did he hope to accomplish? “Do you think telling me this is helpful? Do you think telling me my imminent death will ruin the lives of everybody I love is in some way going to help the situation? Do you think making me feel guilty will somehow change what’s going to happen?” He pushed forward, for once getting in Rhys’ face. “Okay, let’s play this game. Yeah, sure, why not. Tell me. How is Wren going to feel? Donovan? Neoma? Oh, I know, how are you going to feel?”

Kai knew he was being a jerk but he couldn’t stop, panic gripped him like a hand around his throat and he wanted to hurt Rhys for this, for making him think about this. “Come on, tell me. How are you going to feel when I’m not around to shove into walls anymore?” Rhys was silent. “Come on, man. You wanted to play this game. Tell me. Will you be happy to be rid of me once and for all? Will you admit how you feel about me when I’m long gone?” He was so close he could feel Rhys’ panting breath on his face. “Will you regret not kissing me when you had the chance?”

Rhys’ eyes flashed green and they stood there, breathing in each other’s space, neither willing to concede, “I-” Rhys swallowed, head dipping ever so slightly but enough for Kai’s heart rate to rocket alarmingly.

The back door to the porch opened and shut. “Hey, where’d you two losers take off too?” Quinn called out.

Rhys blinked, looking to Quinn before pushing Kai gently out of the way and walking back into the house.

Quinn looked startled and then contrite. “Sorry, man. Didn’t mean to, uh, interrupt.”

“Can’t interrupt something that was never going to happen.” Kai shrugged, swallowing hard past the lump in his throat and dropping to the steps. He rubbed the palms of his hands against his eyes.

Quinn dropped down next to him, clapping him on the shoulder. “Friendly advice, man?”

“Sure.”

“I think it’s time you moved on.”

Kai scoffed, “Like you and my sister?”

“Oh, I’m not saying give up entirely. I’m just saying maybe you should show him that you are a strong independent reaper who don’t need no wolf.” Quinn finished his statement with a head bob and a pointed finger.

Kai’s eyebrows flew up and gave a startled laugh.

“You’re ridiculous, man, but I love you.”

“I love you too, buddy.”