Page 99 of Hell’s Half Acre

Sorcha blinked slowly. Then, she blinked again. Was he serious? Had she heard him correctly?

Surely not.

“Beg your pardon?”

“I need to know your ancestry. One bite is all I need.”

“Or try Ancestry.com. Better yet, a DNA test. There are a lot more sanitary ways to go about it nowadays. Are you insane?” She spoke so rapidly that she wasn’t sure if he could understand her. Plus, all the images it conjured in her head were definitely not healthy.

Her head tilted back, his teeth grazing the pulse at her throat. Heat crawled through her body, starting at her fingertips and ending low in her gut. She banished the image—mostly successfully.

“They won’t tell me what I need. Ancestry.com assumes you know who all your people are. It’s not as reliable as you think. DNA testing won’t show if you have a lineage outside of the human realm. That’s what I need to know. More to the point, it’s what you need to know.”

She wasn’t really sure if she was ready to know that.

What if he was right?

And that was followed by an even scarier thought. “You think this had something to do with my sister’s death, don’t you?”

“I don’t know. And I mean that. It would explain some things, but you know what I do…people are crazy. They do vicious things to each other all the time. Her death could be random. What concerns me are the creatures after you, and the Aztec priest who tried to kill you. I need to know why.”

“I have no Aztec in me. I’m English, Welsh, and a whole lot of Irish. On both sides. My mother’s people came here in the mid-1800s. My father’s family immigrated in the 1930s and 1950s.” Her conversation with Acheron flashed through her mind. Were her parents actually her parents? She didn’t know. And if they weren’t, she wasn’t sure she wanted to find out.

Luke scratched his chin. “That’s a lot of time to marry someone who had something in them that they didn’t know.”

Great. Another chilling thought.

Luke’s gaze intensified. “Ever wonder why your grandfather became a spiritual warrior? What pulled him to that?”

She hated the fact that she had no idea. It was something she’d known about him, but for some reason, she’d never asked. Just taken it on faith.

Pun intended.

Sorcha chalked it up to all the things children accepted about their family without ever being curious enough to ask the most basic questions.

Don’t you want to know the truth?

Yes. But… “Do you have to bite me?”

“It’s the best, easiest way.”

Of course it was.

And she couldn’t believe she was even considering what she was considering. She’d lost her mind.

But he’d struck the one nerve that wouldn’t give her peace. What if he was right and this was why her sister had died?

It sounded stupid. Maybe it was. Yet if it could give them a new clue or new direction, she owed it to Siobhan to find out. Because what hurt most was the fact that her sister’s death seemed so meaningless.

Having a reason wouldn’t make it right or hurt less. But mentally…

Maybe it might help.

“Will it hurt?”

Luke shook his head.

That was comforting, sort of. “Okay. Just know that if it hurts, I’m going to kick you really hard in a very uncomfortable place.”