Page 47 of Grave Beginnings

I stared at that notation and it brought me back to that moment of standing there with the sense of doom looming behind me.

Want to play with me?Replayed in my mind, the noise shifting to the cackle that chilled me to the core. My gut flipped over as I remembered seeing my grandmother’s ghost. How could I tell the difference? What if she’d been the thing that had been pretending to be a kid?

I saw my grandmother’s ghost today.

I confessed to Angel in our chat. I don’t know why I told him, only that I needed to tell someone and worried Ivan or Grandpa would be upset.

My phone rang, and I scrambled to pick it up to keep from waking Ivan.

“Tell me about it,” Angel said, voice soft rather than the demand I expected.

I let out a long breath to steady myself. “I went to my parent’s house after work. Was worried about Ivan. I guess, for good reason. The place was surrounded by cops. When I went up, theycalled him a monster. He’s not a monster. He’s just a kid; teenager, but still a kid… and his shifter form is this tiny, adorable cat with black feet and anime eyes.”

“A black-footed cat?”

“Yes. He has black feet in that form.”

“I mean, that’s the species.Felis nigripes, deadliest animal on the planet. They have a sixty percent kill rate. Mostly birds, snakes, and mice, but they are deadly accurate hunters.”

“No way. He’s adorable.”

“I’m sure he is. But cops, in fact most humans, treat shifters as monsters. All variants, really, but shifters get the worst of it. I won’t tell you all the hate media we get about how we are soulless beasts.”

“I’m sorry people suck.”

“Yeah, me too. But you went to help your brother? That’s great. Your grandmother’s ghost was there? You saw her?”

“She looked like I expected a ghost to,” I confessed. “Like her, only younger and sort of transparent. No one else noticed her. You don’t think she was that shadow thing, do you? Following me or something?” I wondered if the apartment was safe. Should I take Ivan to a hotel? Was anywhere safe if I had some shadow supernatural following me?

“Did you get the same sense of unease from her that you got from the shadow thing?”

Had I? “No. Not at all. She asked me to take care of Ivan, then faded.”

“Sounds like it was her, then. Maybe she was waiting to cross until someone took him in hand.”

Tears stung my eyes, and I swallowed hard, suddenly unable to speak. What would Grandpa think if he knew I’d seen her? What would Ivan think?

“Jude?” Angel’s voice asked a thousand things I couldn’t form the words to answer. He let the silence hang between us for a few seconds, then added, “Sounds like she said all sheneeded to, and that she trusts you to be able to take care of Ivan.”

“I don’t even know where to start,” I said.

“Giving him a safe place is a good start. It’s more than a lot of people would do.”

“But shifters and necromancers don’t mix.” Everyone said that I would turn on him, use him in a spell I didn’t know how to do, or something equally horrible. Did that mean I was the monster?

“Does your power snap and sizzle when he gets close?”

No. I hadn’t felt any of that. Or his magic at all. Maybe because Xavier had been overwhelming my senses? “No?”

“Why is that a question?”

“There were some NHVs there.”

“Did they hurt you?”

“No. But they wanted Ivan.”

Angel sighed. “You’ll find a lot of HVs and NHVs find shifters useful. Your brother will have to learn to protect himself. You said something about teaching self-defense classes. Maybe show your brother some of that.”