to rise. She was in her nightgown. A frilly purple thing that looked so out of place among the decaying leaves and dirt.
Her face was angled down, pressed into the earth, and her right leg was bent at an odd angle. I touched her shoulder. “Hey,” I whispered, my voice high and rasping, hand shaking.
Please don’t be dead.
“Maybe you shouldn’t touch—” Adrian started, but I’d already started to clear the hair from the side of her face, trying to see if there were any signs of life in her eyes. If she was breathing.
Once the curtain of hair was parted, I saw that a deep wound gouged into the side of her neck. Gnarly, torn puncture marks. A bite covered in semi-dried blood. The shade of red was so dark, it was almost brown. But it wasn’t the bite that made me gasp and jump back from the body, landing squarely on my ass.
It was her face. Her brown eyes stared unblinking, dull and clouded, right at me. I didn’t even know her name, but I knew her face.
It’s one of the minions, I thought, and instantly regretted it, feeling guilty for even thinking it. The one who’d gone with Kendra was Sasha. This one was… Heather, maybe?
Her black mascara was smudged in straight lines down her face, as though she’d been crying before she died. Or maybe while she died.
My stomach clenched and my chin began to quiver. The truth of what I saw sunk in. “She’s dead.”
I just touched a dead person.
Other than Sterling, I didn’t think I’d ever been this close to a dead person before. And seeing him—the man who tried to kill me and Elias—get his head torn off had been grisly, but it hadn’t made me feel like this.
This awful hollow feeling ate at me from the inside out. This profound sadness that came from thinking that she’d never see through those eyes again. And the gripping fear that it was now my job to tell someone what we’d found here.
“We should wake your headmistress,” Adrian said, sinking down next to me to place a comforting hand on my shoulder. When I didn’t answer he squeezed gently, turning me to face him. “Did you know her?”
I shook my head. “No. Not really.”
Once the galloping of my heart had slowed to a pace that allowed rational thought, I accepted Adrian’s outstretched hand to help me stand.
How had this happened again? The thought of telling Granger made all the blood drain from my face. She’d already had to deal with so much. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her about this. And what would she think?
What would everyone think? I realized how awful it would look and lost all my breath, hunching over to try to catch it.
“I’ll go inside with you if you want,” Adrian offered.
“Why?” I looked back to where Kendra’s friend lay limp and bloody. “Why did whatever it was that did this have to dump her here.”
Adrian stiffened, seeing what I meant. His eyes narrowed. A chill swept over me and I shivered. Cal growled, and then shifted quickly back into his human form.
I jolted at the movement and almost fell back, but Adrian caught me, righting me back onto two feet.
“Shit, Cal!” I cursed and then froze when I looked up to fix him with a glare for scaring the hell out of me. He was naked.
“Well, this might be the most interesting situation I’ve ever caught you in,” Rose’s voice said next to my ear, making me startle again.
Damn it!
I groaned, utterly spent and frustrated, and the day hadn’t even begun yet.
“That’s one impressive package,” Rose said in a seductive voice, and I looked at her from the corner of my eye to find her head cocked, her bottom lip between her teeth as she beheld the beauty that was Cal’s cock.
As though his nakedness didn’t matter at all, Cal sighed. “This isn’t good,” he said.
“You think?” Adrian answered.
I couldn’t stop staring at his parts. I tried to find my sense of propriety, but figured it’d either abandoned me or I never had one at all. Because damn. Rose was right. I’d felt it before, felt him, but… damn.
“Oh, sweet lord!” Rose exclaimed a second later. “Is that… a corpse? Well, this is a party.” She sounded surprised, but unbothered.
“Not the first one, either,” I told her.
“You don’t say.” She hummed thoughtfully. “Are your familiars into human tartar, then?”
“What did you say?” Cal asked, looking at me