Page 20 of Blood Magic

I stared at him, aghast. I was pretty sure I saw the sheen of actual tears in his eyes. "You're fucked up," I informed him. “They’re not children. My mother doesn’t even have roosters.”

He glared, then stomped away, angry and sad at the same time. All I could do was follow, unsure whether to laugh or kick him in the head.

Just before I reached the porch, I saw a spirit. I sighed, but I wasn’t really upset. I’d had enough of peace and quiet. I thrived on stress, apparently.

The dead person was a woman who’d been in her mid-twenties when she’d died, which, from the look of her clothes, had been recently. It was only when I drew closer and she turned her head that I saw the side of her throat had been torn out.

“Ouch,” I said, walking up to her. “What happened to you?”

Her eyes widened, and then, when she realized I could see her, she screamed. I heard her scream—and I rarely heard vocalizations from the dead people. It was one of the things that made it so difficult to help them. But she screamed. It was short, piercing, and full of grief and despair.

The last time I’d heard a spirit speak had been when my ex-alpha’s dead mate had come to me when I was a child. I believed that was when Adam Thorne began to hate me—and it had only gone downhill from there.

The dead woman began to sob. She wanted to hold me, to make sure I didn’t get away, to feel the touch of someone who could see her, but her arms went right through me. I could only imagine her state of mind.

“It’s okay,” I said, gently. “I’m going to help you. Tell me what happened to you.”

She tried, but her voice went in and out and I only got a few words. Still, it was better than nothing, and I wondered if I was getting stronger and more tuned in to the spirit world.

What I did understand was that her name was Sara, and I believed she’d been attacked by vampires. I got about ten words from her—and six of them were vampire.

I did not know why she was stuck here.

My mother came out to see what was keeping me, and when she saw me talking to…nothing, she turned around and marched right back inside. My abilities made her nervous. I think she’d rather have gone on thinking I was insane than to know I saw dead people.

I wondered if Lucy’s recent spate of vampire dreams had something to do with this woman and her attack. I didn’t want to pull her away from the lunch table or draw attention to myself—not everyone who lived in my mother’s house was a nonhuman or aware of nonhuman business.

Sara talked to me for ten more minutes before she disappeared. Sometimes that happened, and they seemed not to be in control of it when it did. They just…blinked out.

As I got up from the porch step to go inside, though, she reappeared across the yard. After a confused look around, she spotted me and charged toward me, running exactly like a living person would.

And this time, her words didn’t skip. I heard every one of them.

“Vampires didn’t kill me,” she said. “But they caused a woman to. She did not know what she was doing. She wasn’t in her head.” Once again she tried—and failed—to grasp my arms. “You must go to my brother. Tell him what has happened.” She looked around wildly, cocking her head as though she were hearing something I couldn’t hear. “When he doesn’t believe you, tell him…tell him I told you about Paul and the bayou in Louisiana. Tell him the fucking vampires got me, and then you show him where they’ve put me.”

I leaned closer. “Where, Sara? Where did they put you?”

“Hurry,” she said, running toward the woods. And this time she didn’t run like a human would. She skipped in and out, appearing much farther away than she would have had she been alive.

I followed her.

When I entered the woods, I couldn’t help but flash back to when I was last in these woods, being attacked by my ex-alpha—who’d forcibly taken my mother—and then shifting and trying to kill my new alpha.

But now I understood why the spirit was haunting the area around my mother’s house. And I believed I knew why Sara was still here. Unfinished business. It’d fuck a spirit up every time. She needed me to find her body and tell her brother what had happened to her.

And that wasn’t all.

The next time she blinked out, she reappeared beneath a huge old Oak tree, and she was pointing at the ground. I wasn’t surprised that the vampires had buried her beneath a tree—same as how they’d buried the vampire in Long Shadow. Vampires believed their souls lived in trees, and that eventually, by feeding the trees blood sacrifices, they could retrieve their souls. They were terrified beyond anything else of dying.

Vampires were immortal—but if they were forced from this world, they went on to live in the world of a thousand suns.

Hell.

And there they would live forever, burning for eternity.

That was their faith. That was what they believed. And it terrified them like nothing else. But the vampire girl had told me that her maker would help me because he didn’t care if he died—and that was just strange.

“Mark it well,” Sara told me. “Bring my brother. Tell him to find peace, because I can’t rest until he is no longer full of grief and hatred. Tell him.” She was growing dim and weak, and her words, once again, were intermittent and somewhat fuzzy. It didn’t matter. I understood them all—even the ones she hadn’t actually said.

“I’ll tell him, Sara.”

She rattled off a series of numbers, and I put them into my cell phone. I’d ask Max to find any women named Sara who’d disappeared from the area recently and would call Detective Moreno to let him know where she was buried. Then I’d contact her brother so he could get some closure.

I brought up an app and got the coordinates I’d need to give to the detective.

When I looked up from my phone, Sara was gone.