down at my hand. The whip was no longer there, but I held in my palm the tiniest fraction of a piece of leather. “I don’t know. I just took it.” I tucked the leather into my pocket.
Penny tapped my arm. “I hate this place.”
“This is where they all died,” I said softly, “Gran, my parents, and Alan. By something called a tonton macoutes.”
Penny sucked in a sharp breath. “That is . . . that is very bad, Bree.”
I stared hard at her. “How bad. What is it?”
“They. It is an army of the undead, Bree, raised to control people. They’re not supposed to exist anymore. I thought . . . I thought our coven had put them to rest years ago. They kill with their bare hands and tear out throats with sharp, claw-tipped fingers.” Her arms shook as she clutched at her cane with both hands.
An army of the undead. I could only imagine the terror of my parents, of Gran, and even of Alan, when they saw what was coming for them.
I looked around the house, trying not to dwell on the thought of the tonton macoutes.
“Okay, an undead army is damn ducking bad. But what if the thing we’re looking for is here in this house? What if that’s why Gran and my parents came here? Because this was where the thing—the ingredient—is?”
Penny closed her eyes and nodded, giving the floorboards a single tap of her cane.
Which was how we ended up searching the house room by room despite the fact that the place made our skin crawl. As we searched, Penny filled me in on the whole undead army angle.
“The tonton macoutes aren’t really dead, and they aren’t really alive. They don’t feel pain, but they can be killed.”
“Head shots?”
She gave me a look. “This is not fantasy, Bree. A wound that could kill you or I would kill them. Head. Heart. Removal of limbs. They don’t feel the pain though, so if the blow is not an immediate death they will keep coming until they bleed out.”
I grimaced as I flipped open a closet. A small ghost huddled inside. I held out my hand. “That terrible woman is gone. You are free now.”
Dark eyes looked up at me, and then she smiled and streaked past me, a rush of cold air that was there and gone in a flash.
An hour ticked by, and then another. The sun was fully up now, and if I hadn’t been exhausted before, I surely was now.
Sitting on the third stair from the bottom on the main floor, I gripped the wooden banister and pulled myself upright. “Penny, I don’t think it’s here.” Okay, so I was a little afraid to say out loud that we were looking for angel wings, because let’s be honest, who was listening? A bunch of ghosts for sure. Maybe others.
Penny joined me. “Let’s go then. This place . . . it is terrible to be where those you loved were killed. Their last moments might have been spent here, but this is not where you should remember them.”
She was right. I didn’t want to be there, and while part of me wondered where it had happened, the rest of me didn’t even want to guess.
Swallowing back tears, I let Penny tuck her arm into mine and lead me out of the house. We headed down the sidewalk, making our way toward the coven’s safe house. Alan fell in beside us, to my right, and I made myself speak to him.
“Thanks, Alan.”
He startled. “For what?”
“For getting Penny and Kinkly,” I said. “I wasn’t in as much trouble as I thought, but you went and got them.”
He cleared his throat. “Sure thing.”
Penny was quiet.
A few minutes later, the sound of Kinkly’s wings snapped my eyes upward. She heaved a heavy sigh as she dropped onto the top of my head. “You okay?”
“Scarlet’s such a bitch,” she growled and punched the top of my head.
“Ouch!”
“Sorry, sorry,” she muttered. “She’s going on and on about how we shouldn’t be here, saying that she should get the wings! I pointed out she already has stupid wings. What a dumb runt.”
I’m going to pretend that she said runt. I can’t even say the other one in my head without cringing.
I paused and looked at Penny, who shook her head. Yeah, we needed to talk about this when we got back to the safe house.
Because the real question burning through me was what in the world was a fairy doing