Page 10 of Prince with a Chance of Darkness (Grimm Cove #7)

Chapter Ten

Mina

Gallows Lane House, Grimm Cove, South Carolina…

I sat on the edge of my twin bed in the room I shared with Willa, staring down at my bare feet as I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to chase away the hunger that gnawed at my gut. It had ripped me from my sleep, an ever-present reminder of the monster I’d become. A direct result of the cave incident.

Neither of us remembered all of what had happened in Romania, despite our hopes that the memories would return to us. Just fragments, whispers of terror and pain. What we did know was that we’d been taken, dragged into something beyond our comprehension. That Helen had tried to sacrifice us. That she hadn’t survived, and neither had her twisted little accomplice. That someone had pulled us out of that cave, placed us in a hotel in Mill Hollow, and left behind letters of warning to us not to go home.

We didn’t know who had saved us. Didn’t know why someone had left us those warnings, the flowers, and cash, or who had packed up pieces of our past and given us a fresh start in Grimm Cove. But we had listened. We had stayed hidden, built a new life, and adapted to our new reality.

We were different now.

My instincts were sharper. My senses were heightened. My nights were filled with an undeniable pull to patrol the streets, hunting things that most people would rather pretend didn’t exist.

Willa had changed even more. She had to lock herself away every full moon, forced to endure a transformation neither of us had seen coming. A wolf lived inside her now, a beast that clawed at the edges of her control. When it was out, it was downright deadly.

Oh, and when my emotions got the better of me, I tended to turn into black mist and place jump. If that wasn’t freaky enough, sometimes, at random—okay, not ransom—when I was deeply aroused, I had fangs.

Totally sucked.

Pun intended.

Willa had it worse. She got furry and turned into a wolf.

And no matter how much we wanted to pretend otherwise, keeping that secret was getting harder.

I should be sleeping still, trying to get in as much rest as possible before sunset. My days and nights were a hot mess, leaving me catching cat naps here and there throughout the day and running on empty at night.

Willa had been at me for years to take better care of myself. That was easier said than done. The night called to me. Yes, I could be out in the sun, but it’s something I wasn’t on the best of terms with since Romania four years ago. It drained my energy levels quickly, not to mention it gave me a hell of a sunburn if I was in it for too long. I did my best to plan all my college courses to fall in the morning or evening. A few times, I’d been stuck with a midday course and tried to take shadier walking routes to it.

Complaining wasn’t an option. Not when my sister was stuck needing to be chained or locked away once a month while she turned into a white wolf. The first time it had happened had been something of an eye-opener for the two of us. Thankfully, we’d heeded the warning from her letter and had taken precautions.

Sadly, those precautions hadn’t contained her in wolf form, but they had slowed her down enough for me to process what was happening and give chase when she broke free. I’d followed, guilt consuming me because I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was the reason she was like that. The reason she had to share her body with a wolf. My need to prove our worth as natural-born slayers had overridden my better judgment and played right into our psychotic aunt’s hands.

She’d known me well enough to set the trap for me to follow, and I’d fallen for it—hook, line and sinker. I’d also dragged my sister along for the ride, against her protests. My actions put us in the cave that night, and Willa’s condition was my reminder to never let it happen again—to never get so full of myself that I lose sight of what really matters.

I could have lost her that night. Helen and Lester could have succeeded in killing her, and I could have ended up having to live without her there—always by my side—come hell or high water.

She had never blamed me outright for what happened to us. She didn’t have to. I knew it was my fault. It was part of the reason why I tried so hard to find the perfect spot to contain her during her shifts.

This month had to be different.

Last month, I’d been positive that I’d found a spot that would hold her. That it would work to keep her contained enough to ride out the full moon, safely tucked away from the public. And that the chains I’d gotten would hold.

I’d been wrong.

She’d escaped.

I swear, her wolf could hire out as a magician for parties. It was that good of an escape artist. Willa didn’t even have opposable thumbs in wolf form yet managed to break out of every spot I’d found to date. I’d been trying to talk her into letting me set up a camcorder to record her overnight. That way, we could see how it was she was managing to break free.

The new spot will be different , I thought, thinking of the cave I was planning to scout one last time before nightfall, just to be sure it would hold her. It was a stroke of luck that I’d discovered it at all. It wasn’t easy to spot. It was deep in the woods that were off campus.

The only reason I’d been there was because someone had taken me to it. Of course, when Willa asked, which she would, I’d lie. She was already worried enough about how I lived my life. I didn’t need or want to hear her lecture me on the number of seemingly random hookups I had with guys.

Plus, the guy who had taken me to the cave so we could have some alone time wasn’t someone she’d be cool with me hooking up with at all. She’d be less than thrilled with the age gap with him being twice my age and she’d blow a gasket when she found out he was my chemistry professor.

I’d find a way to bend the truth so that Willa would accept it and not ask me anymore questions. If I thought what the professor and I had was serious, I’d entertain confiding in my sister but for now, I was just having fun with him—using him to handle my needs. He didn’t seem to mind too much. He was great in the sack (and on cave floors) and never questioned why I had to run off at all hours of the night. Heck, sometimes he was the one running off without warning.

The guy was totally obsessed with his research and he had multiple locks on his personal lab. At some point I was going to ask him what it was he was researching, but my focus was already split enough between final exams and demon hunting.

Plus, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what Henry was up to in the lab. If I found out and it was something not great, I didn’t want to feel obligated to do something about it. It’s why I liked to tell myself he was trying to cure cancer or something in there.

Our relationship, which didn’t have a label beyond, forbidden hooking up, didn’t include long heart-to-hearts or walks on the beach and crap. It was carnal and filled a gap we both apparently had and needed to satisfy. The few times he’d hinted at taking things to another level, like just seeing one another, and no one else, I’d found a way to change the subject.

So far, there had been only one time when the topic had come up that he’d seemed to take it badly—if you considered rocking my world on the cave floor as bad.

I didn’t. But I could have sworn his entire demeanor changed mid-kiss, becoming someone else entirely—agitated, more demanding and commanding. None of which was his normal. It might have had something to do with the medicine I saw him taking every so often. I wasn’t sure what it was for but he carried it around in tiny vials. Maybe he was diabetic or something.

I didn’t question it, and I didn’t judge. That was why what we had worked. I’d once had a wooden stake fall out of my hoodie pocket in front of him. He’d never once batted an eye or questioned why I’d be carrying a stake around campus with me. And on the rare occasions that he and I slept next to one another, he never pressed me for details about the nightmares I’d have—ones with Helen stabbing me in the cave.

My hand found its way to my chest, to the scar I had there. It had faded a bit over the course of the last four years, but not much. I didn’t shy away from wearing shirts that showed it. It was a part of me. I survived something horrible and saw it like a badge of honor. I didn’t walk around telling everyone I got it by way of my bat shit crazy aunt who tried to sacrifice me to a demon or that I was fairly sure one of the infamous Weird Sisters had tried to turn me into a vampire.

I kept all that to myself.

Only Willa knew the truth of it all.

The full moon was nearly upon us and I needed to show her the cave where she’d be spending the next few nights. As luck would have it, the cave wasn’t just remote and out of earshot of the campus, it came equipped with its own restraints.

I asked my professor about them, wondering why it was there was thick iron chains secured deep into the rockface, but he claimed not to know. He was lying. I could sense it. I didn’t push for answers. I did start planning how the location might work to secure my sister though. I just hoped the chains would be strong enough to hold her.

Willa wouldn’t be all right if she broke free and harmed someone while in wolf form. She may share her body with a predator, but her nature was anything but that of a killer. She struggled enough waking up in random locations, naked and with evidence she’d eaten some kind of woodland creature—normal wolf food. If she hurt someone, I’d never get her back mentally. Already, she grappled with who and what she’d become after Romania.

I couldn’t put more on her plate.

It was my duty to see to it that she was secured and couldn’t harm herself or anyone else during the full moon. After all, it was my fault she had to share her body with a wolf to start with. Had I left well enough alone and not insisted we chase after a demon four years ago, things might have played out differently.

Helen would have probably found another way to get us to that cave in hopes of us working as the human sacrifices she required to unseal that demon’s cave, letting him leave, but our being there wouldn’t have been on me. It would have been totally on our aunt.

A quick glance over at my sister’s side of the room showed she was still asleep. I tried to settle back onto my twin bed, hoping sleep would return. My days and nights were already screwed up because of my stupid friggin’ calling .

Ha. Try a curse.

I’d have said as much out loud, but Willa’s sensitive hearing would pick up on it, and it would wake her. Instead, I rolled onto my side, facing the wall. Faded wallpaper that I was pretty sure was original to the Victorian home greeted me. I knew how many scrolls appeared in its pattern within the area of my bed. I’d counted them enough times whenever sleep was elusive.

The home was certainly dated and old, but it had been where we’d laid our heads for the past three years. Our first year at Grimm College, we’d lived on campus in the dorms, as all freshmen were required to do. It made hiding what we were difficult. We knew we had to find a place off campus, but finances were an issue.

Our supernatural awakening in Mill Hollow four years ago had left us with more questions than answers. We’d done a bit of digging, hoping to be able to put the pieces together—to make it all make sense. Why had our aunt turned on our parents? How could she have played a part in her own brother’s death? And how could she, after having raised us from when we were ten, lure us to what she’d planned to be our deaths in Romania?

Was Helen really a psychopath and did that mean Willa and I could be ones too?

Our quest for the truth left us sitting in the office of our parents’ attorney several months after we’d started college. The wads of cash that we’d woken up to find in the motel room with us wouldn’t stretch as far as we wanted, and he was the head of the trust funds our parents had left for us. Trust funds that should have more than covered what we needed for many, many years.

The attorney had informed us that Helen had found workarounds, permitting her to access our funds. She’d emptied the coffers, as she had any other accounts tied to our parents. Willa and I had been left with nothing.

Willa and I were fortunate enough that our scholarships covered most everything. We were left needing to make the dollars stretch more. That was how we’d found ourselves living in what used to be a functioning funeral home on Gallows Lane.

We’d been forced to find a way to make it work. What other choice did we have? We’d never had a backup plan. We hadn’t thought we’d need one. I had never once believed that our aunt would do what she did. That she’d not only clean out our bank accounts but also try to sacrifice us to set an ancient blow-hard of a demon free. Had I known ahead of time, I’d have come up with some contingency plans and would have never gone to Romania.

I touched the wallpaper lightly, wondering whose room this used to be when the place was still operating as a funeral home. Had a family resided here during it all? Mostly, I wanted to know who would pick wallpaper this ugly.

The rent was dirt cheap, so I didn’t mind it too much. But it wasn’t my taste that much was for sure.

Besides being cheap to live in, the house had other perks. It was close to campus, and we shared it with a group of women we’d started to see as family of sorts. They didn’t know the truth about us, but we cared about them. I was of the opinion that we needed to bring in one or two of them and spill our secrets. We needed help each month monitoring Willa while I was forced to go out and patrol campus for supernatural threats.

While there was no governing body issuing orders to me, there was something deep inside of me that demanded I go out at night and walk the grounds. I had no idea if it was born out of guilt over how epically I’d failed my sister in Romania or if it came from something else. Maybe it was part of my calling—being born a Murray Slayer. Or maybe whatever I’d been turned into during the attack in Romania was the reason for the compulsion.

I had no idea and was powerless to fight the urges, so I found myself out every night, walking the grounds, looking for threats and handling them accordingly. Unlike my aunt, who hated all supernaturals, I didn’t kill everything that crossed my path. I only killed the ones who were real threats to innocents. The ones who were trying to harm humans.

Sadly, every night that I went on the prowl, a small part of me hoped I’d find a supernatural crossing the line. If I did, I could kill them. I could quench the never-ending thirst for blood that I had.

It was sick and twisted and it wasn’t something I’d told Willa about. How could I? She had enough to worry about. Adding me standing on the edge of becoming some sort of serial supernatural unaliver shouldn’t be one of them.

I kept waiting for the people who ran the supernatural world to come for me. They had to have noticed there was a slayer on the campus here. There had to be some sort of bat signal that went up when a demon or another type of baddie was killed, right? Some kind of mystical signal that sent up magical flares?

Maybe there wasn’t any way for them to know what I’d been doing here in Grimm Cove. And maybe the oversight committee I’d heard my father talking about when I was little had no clue I was here, handling matters on my own—without any authorization or credentials. Then again, there wasn’t a badge one carried around while staking vampires.

If the oversight committee ever did show, I had no clue if they’d stand behind my choices, or if I’d be hauled into their version of a justice system to answer for my crimes. I didn’t know a ton about that side of things but from the little I could remember overhearing my father and uncles talking about, they weren’t anyone I wanted to cross.

They’d whisper about them being as bad, if not worse in some ways than some Order of the Dragon group. I knew even less about them than I did the oversight committee.

Some slayer I am.

I snorted. Did I even count as a slayer anymore? Had I ever counted? Did what happen in Romania change everything?

Would they be able to tell me what in the hell I was now? Slayer? Vampire? Something that belonged on the island of misfit toys? Would the constant hunger I felt every stop? Would my sister ever be able to control her wolf side?

And what was the rest of our lives going to be like?

Would we always have to chain Willa during full moons, or would she develop control? Would I always have an insatiable hunger in me that nothing seemed to satisfy? Would I always fight the urge to be out at night, hunting for baddies? And would I ever find forgiveness for my multitude of sins? Would some other nut job show up thinking Willa and I were the key to freeing the demon in Romania?

Enough. Get some more sleep and then spiral into doomsday scenarios in your head.

I sighed and hit my pillows a few times, attempting to fluff it while also working out some aggression. I closed my eyes, briefly wondering what had caused me to wake to begin with.