Gypsy Truths (All The Pretty Monsters #6)- Kristy Cunning Page 0,155

first landed into a world she knew nothing about,” I decide aloud.

“If I ever find that rabbit hole, my parents will just have to be happy for me and miss me while I’m gone. It’s possible I may never find my way back, if it turns out to be where I belong. But the place the book explains is too similar to the home in my head. Or maybe it’s a heaven I’ll never see, since heaven is only for the dead,” Talbot says, reading from a journal of some sort.

“Could you do something productive?!”

“This is from Violet’s fourteen-year-old journal,” he says, as though he believes he’s explaining something. “It’s what she wrote after reading Alice in Wonderland, and apparently she was the dark, brooding, rhyming type of teenager, who suspected she’d never die, even as she protested the possibility of immortality.”

The sirens that have been wailing in the distance finally come to an end. The fresh and abrupt silence seems to interrupt his thorough analysis of Violet, which is honestly making me want to rip his head off just for knowing so much more about her.

Straining my hearing, I spot a familiar whisper in the wind several miles away.

“The vampire is moving fast,” I say, even as I remain distracted, trying to figure out where it is he’s heading. “He may know where she is.”

I turn and leave Talbot behind, feeling my phone vibrate with a reminder of a text.

Lifting my phone, while darting a look up here and there to dodge inanimate objects, I quickly skim the contents of a text from Vance.

VANCE: Stay on Violet. She’s somewhere in the direction of the old field.

I really should check my messages more promptly. Fucking hell.

Talbot surprisingly catches up, which actually pisses me off. I’ll blame it on the fact I’m famished.

“Violet has a weakness to my pheromones that she doesn’t experience with any other I’ve noticed so far,” I cut in, my feet moving like feathers, barely touching the ground, as I follow the whispered whistle of the vampire’s wake.

“That’s because I forgot you,” Talbot confesses. “When I created Hyde’s defenses, I remembered every Morpheous, including the infamous Dorian Gray. But I forgot you.”

I grin, almost as though I feel complimented.

“That doesn’t give you any sort of edge. Hyde will still rip you to shreds if you challenge Violet.”

In the next breath, he’s gasping for air, because I have him slammed against a tree in the forest near Morrigan property. His eyes widen, as my own eyes cloud over with the monster’s influence.

“I’ll torture you for all eternity if Violet isn’t as strong as you claim, after all this hope you’ve forced upon me. If she ends up being tortured by Idun for the rest of her immortal life, you’ll suffer by my hand for the rest of yours. You’re going to help us put Idun underground, and this time, we’d like to fucking keep her there without having to bury the entire Neopry House. Then you’ll help us subdue Violet, so that she doesn’t get stuck in monster mode.”

He says nothing else, and I release him, barely catching Arion’s trail again.

“I don’t know if I can subdue Hyde. I warned her she wasn’t ready, but she didn’t yet trust me enough to help guide her. I didn’t want to push too fast, but I had no idea things would escalate so abruptly. She’s wildly and unpredictably reckless,” he adds quietly.

“If we can’t get her back, I’m going to sever your cock from your body and feed it to a bathtub full of piranhas,” I inform him very seriously.

“I didn’t have to tell you anything. I chose to, because you’re my alpha,” he fires back, lips thinning. “I chose to because I was trying to earn her trust and pay my dues, since a thousand years of solid, substantiated, rogue beta work wasn’t good enough. Marta pretended to not even know me, because she didn’t want me telling Violet anything at all. I was going to tell her everything and start coaching her, since she’s outlasted all the other hosts combined. But there wasn’t enough time to earn her very wary trust, so I counteracted my mother’s curse, and I risked it all by telling you the truth. I didn’t have to do that.”

Fortunately for me, a shriek from ghosts has me tripping over my own feet, and Talbot damn near does the same thing. It interrupts the semi-decent explanation he was making.

I hate my beta.

My gaze lifts to