Karma’s wheezes grow silent, and suddenly she sucks in a sharp breath as all the color she’d lost returns, making her look healthy once more.
“What’d you do?” Dice asks her.
Kya doesn’t speak, but pulls a book out of her pants and holds it up. “This is a journal. Read it when I’m gone. Put up a soundproofing spell. Stay out of our fucking way. And keep a lid on the new one coming, if you know what I mean. The last thing we fucking need is for these people to get ahold of something like that.”
She starts to turn, but Karma grabs her hand, the one still holding the book.
“Thank you,” she whispers hoarsely.
“Save your thanks. Just do what the book tells you. You need to stock up on energy as quickly as possible. You’re not even strong enough to see souls the way you need to. You missed the wolf and apparently you missed the new one too.”
“New one?” I ask immediately.
Kya looks up at me, and that smirk from earlier emerges again. “Yeah. I think you want to sire her. That helps me narrow down the possibilities of what she might be.”
My heart slams into my ribs, and the air gets sucked out of the room.
“Good job on intimidating the hell out of her. Made it easy to be her hero, considering she’s scared to death of you. By the way, she never knew who we were. But your paranoia is even worse than ours, surprisingly enough. And now we have our latest recruit. Well, if she’s as powerful as her soul leads me to believe she will be.”
I’m racing toward her, but she disappears before I can reach her, laughing mockingly before she completely gets lost. My fist slams through the wall, and I curse as the book falls from nowhere and lands to the ground with an audible thud.
“Leah? They have Leah?” Karma asks, seeming renewed as she hops down and grabs the book.
“Apparently,” I growl. “And we pushed her right into their nest.”
“Relax. It sounds like Kya wants her on their team,” Roslyn says from somewhere close by.
“You don’t understand,” Kane tells her, “he wants to sire her. Think of how possessive you are of Thad. Now multiply that by fifty.”
I can actually hear her swallow as I take several long, deep breaths.
“She’s fey,” Karma whispers. “And I missed it.”
Dice hugs her middle while pulling her closer. “You were sick. And your sister is a hashtag-bitch, by the way. Major hashtag-bitch.”
“I’m going for a walk,” I grumble, immediately pushing my way outside. Kya is going to wish she hadn’t shared that last part with me.
Chapter 9
LEAH
“Victor scares me,” I tell Aunt Masie.
“He’s a scary guy,” she says casually, pulling a blanket from overhead as she makes a bed beside mine.
There are too many people in our house tonight, and I think she’s worried about leaving me in the room alone.
“What happened at school today?” she asks, brushing my hair back from my face.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
She frowns as she looks over at my stack of horror movies and weird relics I’ve found and kept over the years. It’s not as weird as what I’ve seen a lot of people do. I’m not sure why I get singled out.
“People are just monsters in disguise,” she states quietly. “It’s why you don’t trust anyone but family, sweet girl.”
Someone must have told her what they did to me… How that stupid girl made me think we were friends and then… Then helped the Leonard’s humiliate me once again by printing and making my creepy drawings and poems go viral. As if I wasn’t already the freak.
“You trust Victor,” I point out, even though he’s big, scary, and maybe a little crazy.