Page 15 of Till Death

“What have I missed?”

Kay shook her head as she said, “Too much, Jade. We’ve missed you and we’ve been trying our best to do what you’d want while you were gone, but…” she trailed off in a sigh. “It’s been hard. Harder than I thought. If you hadn’t brought the wolves, or the vamps, then we’d be gone by now.

“Cliff showed up within the hour after you disappeared. Arianna is with Jasper now, and Queen Imani took a small group with her as well, although there’s no guarantee they aren’t at each other’s throats by now. Do vampires and wolves normally get along?”

Not that I’d ever seen, but then again, extenuating circumstances and all.

“Okay, good.” I nodded along with her until we were two little bobbleheads. “Any news on the spellcasters?”

“On the way,” Lawrence cut in.

I heard what he didn’t say, however. He didn’t think the extra witches would make any sort of difference and, after what I’d just seen, I wondered if he wasn’t right on the money.

“We can use whoever is available to help. I’m sorry I left you alone.”

And the rub of it? I’d left them alone only to fail in saving Cole. It kicked me squarely into useless territory.

A ghostly figure swam into view and although my pulse kicked into high gear, I turned to face Marla, her familiar face lifted in a smile.

“You don’t know how happy I am to see you, too,” I said to Marla with a tight smile.

The thought of her niece on her own across town had my hand clenching and unclenching at my side. Kay rubbed soft circles along my back and even though I’d become too tightly wound, the comfort of the gesture went a long way toward fixing me.

Just seeing them again, seeing their faces…

They were alive. They were in one piece, and they were together. What else mattered?

Marla still wore her high heels, her head held back and proud. Did ghosts get rattled? I knew they could die again. They knew they could die again. And yet she looked as unimpressed with the current state of things as she might have watched someone track mud through her house.

We’d helped each other get our balance before, but I knew there was no going back from what had just happened, no matter how glad I felt to see my friends unharmed, if not unchanged. And if she was here, then her twin sister, Tamara, wasn’t far off. Twin bond indeed. Tamara still wore a low-cut shirt to show off her figure, her hair a shade darker than Marla’s and her red lipstick in place. They were mirror images of each other and yet worlds apart.

“It’s nice to see you two are working together,” I told the two of them.

Kay and Lawrence glanced at each other, their expressions sorrowful mirrors. Uh oh. Apparently I’d missed something during my absence. What had the witch sisters been up to?

“This place is as safe as we could make it,” Tamara said with an odd solemnity. “There comes a time where it doesn’t pay to fight but to retreat and recover.”

“So she says,” Marla replied with only a hint of sarcasm.

My gaze swept over the room, seeing all the familiar faces. My friends were here. Some of them, and I couldn’t help remembering how I’d felt the last time we all played Uno together. They were more than my friends. They were family. They meant more to me than my own life and I knew things were only going to get worse for us. I had to face the real possibility of losing them all, especially now, with Michael gone.

They’d stayed here to hold down the fort while I went off to do what needed to be done. That didn’t make any of the steps leading to this point any easier to swallow.

Kay stared at me with worry clouding her eyes. “Things have not been good.”

“These kinds of situations tend to make allies out of even the strangest bedfellows,” Marla said.

I gave her a small smile. “True.”

“We’re doing the best we can and this one is still not happy,” Tamara said, waving her sister’s concern away.

Besides Kay and the witch sisters, I saw Cliff, our alpha wolf from the Stonebrook pack, standing along with someone I did not expect to still be around.

I gnawed on the inside of my cheek to keep any emotion from showing through on my face. If I said I wasn’t happy to see Andre the vampire again, I’d be lying. No matter how a chill crawled down my neck that had nothing to do with him.

When I first met Cliff,I’d thought there was more to him that I didn’t see. He maintained the same weighted eyes, the same military straight posture and blond hair. Now all of those features were accompanied by a steel resolve.

One of them was only here because of Cole.

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