what good would answers from my own fractured psyche do me? But I’d seen too much in my life to dismiss her presence. I’d assumed this was a nightmare. Now I wasn’t so sure.
It seemed almost too convenient, her showing up at the same time as the charred woman who was following me everywhere.
Unless…
“Have you been following me? I…I’ve seen you.”
Her hand pulled back, but my cheek was still wet. I felt coated in sticky fingerprints, as if she were a child covered in melted chocolate, but the iron-scented tang of blood was everywhere now, totally inescapable. The sheets and I probably looked like a macabre Jackson Pollack painting.
“I am everywhere, but nowhere. You can only see me when I want to be seeeeen.” Her voice was pinpricks all over me. I wanted to throw up in my mouth. I wanted to cover my ears and blot it all out until the mercy of silence remained.
Mercy. What a joke.
Mercy McQueen was sitting right in front of me, and the only reprieve I could imagine was her being gone. Perhaps mercy was the last thing I wanted.
“If you’re not following me, who is?” The common sense part of my brain told me I was insane for engaging her in conversation. Every consonant and vowel out of her mouth pushed me closer to the cusp of an imaginary ledge. Somewhere there was an invisible line between sanity and madness, and I was blithely skipping towards it.
“You were my favorite. You were the daughter she never was. I wanted to keep you.”
I may not have ever met Mercy, but I’d heard my share of stories—none of them good—about what happened to her to make her the way she was. Amelia had sworn that Mercy, though difficult, had been a loving girl once. She’d loved a human boy, and he’d gotten her pregnant. Then that human boy stopped being human. He was turned by a vampire, and when he rose, he attacked Mercy in a fog of vampire hunger. In order to save her from his own attack, he gave her some of his blood.
She’d been nine months pregnant at the time.
Both Mercy and her baby survived, but her child, my sister Secret, was born…wrong. Her werewolf DNA and the vampire blood made her something unique, something impossible, a hybrid of both monsters.
Mercy thought Secret was a freak. She abandoned her baby, and spent the next two decades cultivating the be all end all of grudges against her child. She drove herself mad and blamed Secret for ruining her life. In the end, Mercy’s need for revenge pushed her so far, Secret had no choice but to push back.
No matter how human we pretended to be, in the world of monsters it sometimes came down to kill or be killed.
Mercy’s head was delivered to Callum in a box.
So I never got to meet her. I never got to ask her who my father was or why Ben and I had been left behind. Maybe she thought she was doing right by us. Maybe she knew she couldn’t be a proper mother. I didn’t regret the life I’d been given, but there were times I’d needed answers only she could provide.
Was my need so deep I was conjuring her ghost now?
Or was I totally insane? Like mother like daughter.
I didn’t love either of those options.
“Who’s following me?” I demanded.
“You’re so like your father.” Icy, verbal claws dug into me, dragging me along on this story whether I liked it or not. She had me hooked. “So alike, so alike. Killers, the both of you.” The croaking sound followed this proclamation.
“W-what?”
“Quite a family of killers I’ve managed to create. I expected it from your demon-seed sister. Not you though. You were my favorite.”
She had to stop saying that. It was hardly a compliment to know your homicidal-maniac mother was super keen on you.
“I’ve never killed anyone,” I insisted.
As far as I knew, it was true. I’d used some nasty magic against the Loups-Garous, a pack of renegade wolves who shared the Maurepas Swamp with La Sorcière and me, but I hadn’t killed any of them. No matter how much those sickos might have had it coming. Murder wasn’t in my wheelhouse, and I wanted to keep it that way.
“Ssssssure you have,” she hissed. “She’s following you for a reason.”
“She?” Now I didn’t care so much who my father was, though the revelation he was a killer wasn’t promising. I was much more focused on finding out