Page 27 of Witch's Wolf

“It’s too early for riddles, hun. Can you please be more specific?”

She smirks against the rim of her mug.

“Please?” A low chuckle escapes her. “Thanks for confirming what I’m seeing. What would you say if you saw me coming out of a man’s room, wearing that exact smile?”

Heat prickles up my neck, but I force a laugh.

“Yeah, okay. Somebody got some last night.”

“Seriously? That’s the best you’ve got? You’ve said much worse to me before,” Monica says, squinting and unimpressed.

“Fine, doc.” I grab the second mug, fingers curling around the handle, welcoming the warmth against my skin. “I’d probably tell you something like, ‘you look like you’ve been run through with something hard, and more than once.’” I smirk, but it fades quickly. “I should probably be grateful you don’t throw my own crap back at me.”

“So true,” she says, chuckling. “I’m the nice one.”

Her expression softens, but she’s not letting me off the hook. I sip my coffee, buying myself a second, maybe two. It’s bitter but grounds me and pushes the sleepy away.

“What are you doing here, anyway? Shouldn’t you be at work by now?” I ask, changing the subject.

“I took the day off,” she says, setting her mug down and studying me too closely. “Because I heard what you and Sam found in your shed.” My stomach clenches. The heat from the coffee does nothing to stop the chill crawling up my spine. Monica tilts her head. “That must have been a hell of a shock.”

I swallow, but the lump in my throat stays put. Yeah. A shock. That barely scratches the surface. I exhale slowly, gripping themug tighter. I focus on the heat seeping into my palms. The warmth anchoring me into this moment while trying to hold the fears at bay.

“How?” I ask.

“Helena was worried about you. She told Raul.”

I nod, pursing my lips. Sipping more coffee to try and hold off facing the part of yesterday I had buried under my feelings for Sam.

“You’re right,” I murmur, the words raw and painful. “I spent most of yesterday trying to convince myself I’d imagined it. Hoping if I ignored it long enough, it would stop being real.” Which clearly didn’t work. There is no denying the horrors I found in that shed. My world is tilting, shifting, like I’m on crumbling ground and there’s nothing solid left to hold on to. “Mon, I don’t even know where to start. Should I bother trying to understand witchcraft? Should I start digging into my parents’ deaths? What the hell would you do if you were me?”

She picks up her mug, frowning. She taps her fingers against the ceramic in slow, thoughtful beats, thinking before she answers in the way that she always does. Monica is probably the smartest person I know, and she doesn’t speak without having thought through what she’s going to say, especially when giving advice.

“Take one thing at a time. Yesterday hit you hard. I know Sam… helped you through,” she says with only the slightest of smirks, “but don’t try to shoulder everything at once, Erica. You might snap.”

“Might?” A hollow laugh escapes me. “Trywill.” I rub at my temple, pressure building behind my eyes. “I keep circling back to what Helena said.”

“What exactly did she say Erica?” Monica asks. “I’ve only got a piece, that you had really bad news and would need support.”

“Apparently there’s a spell on my future keeping her from seeing it, which is great, I guess?” I shrug, unsure what to really think about that. Do I need a witch looking at my future?

“And?” Monica prods, knowing that I didn’t say it all.

“That my parents are… alive.” The words don’t fit in my mouth. Like I’m telling the biggest lie I’ve ever said, but the unease twisting inside is real. I stare at the floor, unable to meet her eyes. “I’m stuck in this impossible place. Part of me wants to believe it. My parents alive, it should be a good thing, right? But the other part, the louder part, knows that’s bullshit. No one survived that crash. And even if by some miracle they did, why would they have abandoned me?”

Monica sighs, setting her mug down with a quiet clink.

“No matter what you believe, you need answers. And the only way to get them is to dig.” She hesitates and the silence stretches. I force myself to meet her eyes. She’s chewing her lip, debating. “It’s going to be brutal, Erica, but I don’t see any other path forward. You’ll have to exhume their bodies.”

My stomach clenches. The air in my lungs turns solid.Exhume.Like they’re not just ghosts in my past but something tangible, something that can still be uncovered, still be touched. Monica keeps going, her voice steady.

“DNA testing will take time, but at least it’ll give you something concrete. Unless you want to go through the NTSB.”

I shake my head automatically, remembering how long those investigations drag on.

“That could take years. And they’d never reopen the case for me, not without cause.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” she agrees, leaning forward and putting her elbows on the counter. “It would take more than one person pushing for them to revisit something that happened twenty-two years ago.”

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