‘What is it?’ I asked, rushing over to where she stood, but she quickly moved around the sofa and pushed me away as a bleak call sounded out all around the house.
‘You don’t need to see it,’ she assured me, hurrying me out of the parlour. ‘But unless the junior league took up animal sacrifice this season, I think we can officially confirm this is where your wolf has been hiding.’
Back in the hallway, even though I didn’t want to let them in, I closed my eyes and listened to the voices clawing at the edgesof my mind. There were so many and they were all in pain. Awful, ugly things had happened here and we were nowhere near the worst of them. Every room was hurting from what had happened here and the whorls of magic were so intense, I could almost see them. I hadn’t experienced anything so chaotic since I saw the craft room blackened by Catherine’s influence. It was as though Astrid had taken that same energy and turned the whole house against nature.
‘We need to check the kitchen,’ I said, almost sure I saw something move at the end of the hall, turning a corner into the back of the house. ‘Or at least I do.’
‘You’re not leaving me alone out here,’ Ashley argued as she trailed after me. ‘Whatever is waiting in the kitchen can’t be any worse than what I just saw in the parlour.’
She had no idea how wrong she was.
Neither of us screamed. The scene was too sickening for that; any kind of noise would’ve felt performative, for our benefit only, and poor Ileen Stovell deserved better. In the centre of the kitchen, right by the butcher block table, Ileen’s body lay on the floor, all of her limbs protruding at the wrong angles. Ashley physically turned me away, pulling my head to her chest until she heaved and ran out the room, leaving me alone to look again. Not all her limbs. Ileen’s hands were missing. Her empty eye sockets stared into eternity and her mouth was open, the tongue cut out, frozen in an endless scream only I could hear.
No hands, no eyes, no tongue, no way she could identify a Were. A task rendered all the more difficult by the wound that ran across her throat, a gaping scarlet slit cut from ear to ear.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered to the unnatural scene, words I was getting too used to hearing and saying. ‘I am so sorry.’
Backing out of the room, never once looking away, I found Ashley, crouched in a ball on the bottom step of the stairs, tears pouring down her face.
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘There’s nothing we can say,’ I replied, my turn to soothe her for a change. ‘All we can do is try to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.’
I was angry, beyond angry. To take Wyn was bad but he was another Were, he was a player in this game and he knew the risks. What Astrid had done to Ileen Stovell was one of the most brutal things I had ever seen, not only the act itself but the meaningless death. Ms Stovell had done nothing to deserve this ugly end other than have the misfortune to be born close in age and location to my grandmother. A whole life spent trying to be someone’s friend until she found herself face to face with me at the DeSoto when Astrid happened to be watching. It was senseless and disgusting and I would never allow anything like it to happen again. For weeks, people had been asking me who I wanted to be, what I wanted to do with my life, and I didn’t have an answer.
Now I did.
I wanted an end to all this death and violence, whatever the cost. I wanted Wyn, Ashley and my friends to be happy. I wanted to know that on the day I took my last breath, it wasn’t the end of a life I had wasted.
Ashley and I stood shakily, leaning on each other as we prepared to leave, before the authorities inevitably arrived. They would never solve what happened here and I knew years from now it would be another ghost story for the tourists of Savannah. Ileen Stovell would always be remembered.
‘Do the Stovells have children?’ I asked Ashley, pausing by the door as she replaced the shoe horn in the umbrella rack where she’d found it.
‘Two daughters. Both moved away, one is in New York, the other somewhere in the Midwest, I think. Poor things.’
‘No sons?’
‘She had a son,’ Ashley said with a questioning look. ‘He died when he was just a toddler, some kind of terrible allergic reaction, Catherine said, no one could do anything to save him. Said the family was never the same after that.’
At the end of the hallway, Ileen Stovell crouched down beside a little boy, the same blonde hair as her, the same sparkling blue eyes. She whispered something in his ear and he giggled, waving at me, before he pulled away into one of the other downstairs rooms. I raised a hand in return then followed Ashley outside, closing the door on Ms Stovell until the next time we met.
Chapter Forty-One
The Were emissary arrived at exactly midday, just as Wyn said she would.
‘Emily Bell,’ she said, looking surprised when I opened the front door myself. ‘My name is Cerian Price. Do you know why I’m here?’
‘I know why you think you’re here,’ I replied. ‘Won’t you come in?’
She was alone and while she was on her guard, she wasn’t afraid. She truly believed she was on the right side of a fight that needn’t exist.
‘You’ll forgive me for not offering you a drink, I’m a little pressed for time,’ I said, arms folded as she scanned the house, mapping it, just in case. ‘I imagine you also have places to be.’
‘Six feet under our patio,’ Ashley commented as she, Lydia and Jackson all emerged from the parlour and flanked me on both sides. Our small but perfectly formed army.
‘This place is something else,’ Cerian said, craning her neck to get a better look at the third-floor ceiling. ‘Can’t imagine Wyn in a place like this.’
I flinched at the sound of his name and she smirked.
