Page 6 of Trick Me (Immortal Vices and Virtues: All Hallows’ Eve)

Chapter

Two

ASH

“ V ittu helvetti!! Damn it!”

The Finnish curse rushes past my lips and ricochets off the bathroom walls with enough venom to strip paint. I’m scrubbing apple juice from my jacket.

“?‘Send Ash to find his mate,’ they said. ‘The stars have spoken,’ they said. Well, the stars can take their prophecies and shove them up their asses. I knew I shouldn’t have attended. I have too much to do back home with the pack, and you sure as fuck can’t rush finding your mate.”

Every surface around me gleams with the kind of perfection that only magic can maintain.

Gold fixtures that never tarnish, mirrors framed in silver so pure it sets my nerves and wolf on edge.

We’re not weak to silver in the way some may think, but pure silver still makes my skin crawl, some ancestral memory of when it could actually hurt us.

Koi fish swim eternal circles on the tiles, scales shifting between copper and gold and colors that shouldn’t exist. Seaweed painted in the corners sways in an invisible current, reaching up toward a ceiling painted to look like the surface of water seen from below, complete with filtered sunlight.

Tentacles—because apparently someone decided this bathroom needed tentacles—curl around the base of the sink and up the sides of the stalls. They’re carved from what might be obsidian or maybe something else entirely.

The chandelier overhead shouldn’t exist. It’s made from what appear to be water droplets, each one catching and throwing light in ways that create rippling shadows across every surface.

“Thirty-two years,” I inform the swordfish mounted on the far wall, wringing out my jacket. “I’ve survived without a mate this far. Would another decade kill them? Suddenly the pack needs their Alpha paired off.”

Nine months. That’s how long my father has been dead.

And it’s been fucking bliss being out from under his shadow, his constant criticism, his iron-fisted control over every aspect of pack life.

The bastard clung to life through pure spite, too mean to die even when his organs started shutting down one by one.

The pack celebrated for three days straight when he finally stopped breathing.

Bonfires and drinking and dancing because the tyrant was finally gone.

I didn’t celebrate. I stood over his grave in the rain, waiting to feel something. Relief, satisfaction, maybe even grief. Instead, I felt nothing. Just the weight of becoming everything he said I could never be, inheriting a pack held together by fear rather than loyalty.

Now the elders want me mated. Want the bloodline secured. Want little Alpha babies running around to ensure the pack’s future. As if I don’t have enough problems trying to rebuild what my father destroyed, trying to earn trust instead of demanding obedience through violence.

Movement catches my eye. The swordfish’s tail fin twitches.

I freeze, watching. The fin goes still. My imagination, obviously. Too much fae magic in the air making me see things that aren’t there. I turn back to the sink, running more water over my jacket.

The swordfish gasps.

Not a small movement, not a trick of the light.

A full-body shudder that sends cracks spreading through the mounting plaque like lightning through glass.

The wood splinters, screws ripping free from the wall with sounds like tiny gunshots.

The preserved fish—the very dead, very stuffed fish—tears free from its mount and hits the marble floor with a wet slap that echoes off every surface.

For a moment, I just stare at it. Then, with the kind of calm that comes from having seen too much weird shit to be properly surprised anymore, I walk over and crouch beside the supposedly deceased fish.

It’s flopping. Not just twitching, but full-on thrashing, tail slapping against the marble hard enough to crack the tiles.

Gills desperately trying to pull in water that isn’t there.

The glass eye is rolling wildly in its socket before fixing on me with an expression I can only describe as pissed off.

The fish’s mouth opens and closes, and I swear I can hear it trying to scream.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” I tell it conversationally, maintaining eye contact because looking away from a resurrected swordfish feels like admitting defeat.

The fish’s response is to thrash harder, its sword scraping against the marble.

“Whatever magic runs this house, I want no part of it. You hearing me, fish? This is your problem now.”

The temperature drops so fast that my next breath comes out as fog. Frost spreads across the mirrors in fractals that look almost like writing in a language I don’t recognize. The chandelier overhead dims, its water droplets freezing solid with tiny cracking sounds .

That’s when Mikael walks through the wall.

My heart doesn’t just skip; it stops entirely, a full second of absolute stillness before slamming back to life hard enough that I’m surprised my ribs don’t crack.

“Fuck no.” The word comes out strangled, barely recognizable as human speech. “No, no, no. Not possible. Not fucking possible. You’re dead.”

Mikael stands there in the battle gear he died in, and the detail is horrifying in its perfection.

Black vest torn open at the chest, revealing not just the wounds that killed him but also the damage beneath—broken ribs visible through ghostly flesh, one lung collapsed, the strange angle of his shoulder where it had been dislocated in the fight.

Three claw marks run from his throat to his stomach, so deep that, in life, you could see his spine through the gore.

The memory hits with the force of a sledgehammer to the chest…

Rain turning the battlefield into a swamp of mud and blood.

The warehouse district, abandoned since the last surge, now crawling with Bruck pack members who’d taken a local pack’s children.

Forty-three of them, all under sixteen, stolen from their beds while we’d been dealing with a territory dispute up north.

Twenty of us against twice that many. Not good odds, but the ferals that make up the Bruck pack are usually disorganized, fighting each other as much as their enemies.

These ones were different. Coordinated. Led by Cain and his younger brother, Tobias.

Their father rules the wild pack, but he’s too old now and lets his sons make the calls.

Mikael on my left, and his twin, Magnus, on my right. The plan was simple. Hold the bridge while our strike team extracted the children.

The first wave hit like a tsunami of teeth and claws.

Bodies everywhere, the screaming of children mixing with howls of rage and pain.

I was fighting three at once when I heard Mikael’s roar cut short.

Turned to see him separated from the line, surrounded by six ferals who’d clearly targeted him specifically.

“Ash!” His voice, desperate. “Ash, help!”

But if I left the line, if I abandoned the bridge, the ferals would flood through. The strike team would be trapped. More would die.

“Hold the line!” I roared, even as I watched them tear into him. Even as he screamed my name with his last breath. Even as Magnus begged me to save his brother, tears mixing with rain and blood on his face.

All the children were saved. Seven warriors lost. Mikael died calling for me, and I let him, because that’s what Alphas do. We make the hard choices. We sacrifice the few for the many.

We live with the ghosts.

“Ash?” Mikael’s voice sounds wrong, echoing from somewhere deeper than his throat, maybe deeper than this reality. “You look rough, brother. Rougher than me, and I’m dead.”

My hands shake as I press back against the wall, the cold tile shocking against my palms but not as shocking as my dead packmate standing there making jokes. “You’re dead. I carried your body myself. Buried you next to your mother. You’re dead.”

He tilts his head, a gesture so perfectly Mikael that my chest aches. “Death is negotiable in places of power, brother. You know this. Or did you skip that part of the lore lessons to chase girls?”

“I’ve never seen ghosts. Never. That’s not my gift, not my burden.” My voice cracks on the last word.

“Maybe it is now.” He steps closer, and I can smell him—copper, rain, and… death, maybe. Or regret. “Speaking of family, how’s Marina holding up?”

“What?” The question is so normal, so casual, that it breaks my brain a little. “Your sister? She’s… she’s managing. The pack provides for her.”

“Good, good.” He nods, then his expression shifts to something more serious. “Tell her that new lover of hers is stealing from her. Going through Mother’s jewelry, the stuff she kept hidden in the floorboards.”

“Marina doesn’t have a—what are you talking about?” My mind races, trying to process this. “How do you know about any jewelry? How are you here ?”

Mikael shrugs, a gesture made surreal by the way his damaged shoulder doesn’t quite move right. “ Death makes you notice things. See patterns. Like how you’re panicking right now instead of thinking. Very unlike you, Alpha.”

The title hits wrong coming from him. He never called me “Alpha” when alive, just “Ash” or, when being particularly annoying, “Your Royal Wolfness.”

The bathroom door slams against the wall as I barrel through it, desperate to escape my dead packmate who won’t stop talking. I need air, space, something that makes sense.

I crash directly into someone coming around the corner at speed.

The bump sends them flying backward, and instinct kicks in before thought.

My arms wrap around a slim waist, yanking them against me to prevent them from hitting the floor.

The momentum spins us, my back hitting the wall as I absorb the impact, keeping them safe even as my spine protests the collision.