“Pull over.”
I was not going to take orders from a ghost.
“Please,” he added.
I eased off of the gas and guided the truck into the parking lot. The shop was closed. There were no other cars.
“You going to ghost your way in there?” I asked. But when I glanced in the rearview, Val was gone.
“Is he?” Lu sat, and Lorde yawned, her black tongue curling as she tried to stretch in the small space.
“I don’t know. I’ll go—no, I think he’s that way.” I pointed toward the edge of the parking lot, to the grass and trees.
“Let’s see.” Lu touched my arm. Then she was out the door, Lorde right on her heels.
I got out of the truck, stiff from both sitting and the attention and focus it took to drive, unused to those normal things.
Lu’s head tipped up, as if she could smell a storm on the wind, and I took a sniff. There might be a storm coming but it hadn’t hit yet. Lorde happily nosed her way to the grass so she could pee.
Lu waited for me to come up beside her, then dropped her hand, waiting for me to find it with my own.
The moment our fingers touched I felt grounded, settled. Home.
I wondered if this was the thing Val was missing. A home didn’t have to be a place. It could be a person, or a part of you that you couldn’t exist without. A part of you that you would fight to keep hold of, no matter the consequences.
Lu squeezed my fingers lightly, then started walking. “This way?”
I angled us a bit to the left. “He’s staring at the trees, and that wolf of his is pacing in front of him.”
“He has a wolf?”
“Uh…I didn’t say that before?”
“No, Brogan, you didn’t. A ghost wolf?”
“I suppose.”
“Why…” Then her eyes narrowed. “Is Val a werewolf? A shape shifter?”
“I’ve never heard of a werewolf ghost. Can that even exist?”
The look she gave me was a reminder that I wasn’t something people thought could even exist.
“Fine, just because I haven’t heard of it,” I allowed.
“Val,” Lu said, “are you a werewolf? A shifter?”
“He was,” another voice said.
The man who pulled away from the shadow of the tree had been so hidden, even Lorde hadn’t detected him.
He was one of Summer’s guards, the one with ice-chipped eyes, who’d been kind to the girl, Abbi.
“You knew Valentine?” Lu asked.
“Is he here?” he asked in lieu of an answer. “I thought I felt his hate.”
I took a better look at the ghost. Val’s fists were clenched, his wolf crouched, ready to leap, rend, kill. The man’s and wolf’s eyes glowed red, their ghostly forms outlined in a silver so bright, it burned black.
