Wolf's Bane (Monstrous Hearts #2)

Chapter Ten

I went through her files and found out what she's planning: a seance for Magdalene on Halloween night. Supposed to take place at your cabin. She found a few mediums, so I have to call them all to find out which one she picked to do it. Give me a few days, all right? Shouldn't be that hard to cancel it.

At any other time, Rob's panic might have been laughable, but Alice was too struck by what she had learned to pay it any attention.

"A seance," she muttered, thoughts flashing together over that single word. Then she remembered the number 31 circled and pinned by the address of the cabin on Darby's corkboard. The date of Halloween, yes, but also of something older, stranger, deeper: Samhain, one of the pagan roots of that night of jack o'lanterns and candy.

Alice, a fan of mythology and legends from childhood, knew a little about that ancient holiday. It had been a seasonal festival marking the end of fruitful crops and the beginning of winter starvation—and the play of life and death didn't stop there. It had also been seen as a day when the dead could slip in among the living. A day when the boundaries between life and death thinned to nothing.

Suddenly, Darby's desperate drive to get into the cabin made perfect sense, and Alice found herself laughing despite the pain it caused her ribs. "A seance to guide Magdalene back on the night she can fully be back."

Her shoulders were still shaking when the bed shifted with new weight. As Colton settled beside her, tilting his head at her phone, she looked up at him, still filled with a strange glee. "That's the perfect ending for her book—her getting to see Magdalene again, if only for a night. And the cabin would be just the place for the seance. Like she said, it's where Magdalene spent her final days. No one but you knows exactly where in the woods she died, so the cabin is the next best thing. And that's why she's pushing so hard now, because it all revolves around Samhain."

Then she tapped back to Rob's most recent email, skimming through it again. "And Rob said he didn't know anything."

"He lies a lot. Told me the truth only to save the rest of his ribs."

"You beat him up?" She was honest enough to admit to feeling a brutal satisfaction over the idea. "Before or after you saw the photos?"

"Before. After I saw the photos, I knew that I'd go back and kill him. Later, though, when it won't come back to you. When he's spent some time squirming over it." Colton's voice sounded as steady as ever, but something flickered in his eyes, there and gone again before she could understand it.

He had shrugged off his jacket somewhere else in the house, and now that crisp dress shirt looked a little disheveled—sleeves rolled up and the first buttons of his collar undone, exposing hard muscle dusted with hair. The veneer of civility worn down. The wild animal, restless and ready to escape.

He seemed to be waiting for a response, eyes intent on her face and tension growing in his shoulders with every passing moment of silence. In truth, she didn't know what to say. Arguing for Rob's life—no, she couldn't bring herself to do that, not while remembering how she had finally broken down crying during one of those sessions, and he had only continued taking photos, angling himself to better capture her face. Had any of those ended up among the ones Colton had seen? From the look on his face, it was likely.

And yet...killing him? Would that help at all? Would it be sweet to her, his blood spilling from a ruined throat? She needed more time to think about it, and reached up to trace the side of Colton's jaw, hoping to distract him from a straight answer. "You've got a definite bloodthirsty streak."

There was a growl from him before he said, "He hurt you."

That was true, and she didn't see a reason to deny it. "But he's not the big problem. Even Darby isn't. It's Magdalene. She's somehow driving Darby to do this, isn't she?"