Page 74 of Secret Shifters Next Door

Stalking through the woods toward the smell, it got thicker and more pungent. We were close. My vision was the strongest of all of us, and I saw it first. A shadowy structure in the distance through the trees.

“I see something.” I waved at them to follow me.

Three hundred yards later, we knelt behind a growth of underbrush and gazed out at what I’d seen. It was a small wooden cabin. The exterior was black, and the building looked to be hundreds of years old. I laughed when I saw it. There couldn’t have been anything more cliché.

“Looks like an evil witch’s cabin from a storybook,” I whispered.

“Literally what I was thinking,” Steff said. “What do you guys think? Is it made of gingerbread?”

“Do you think she’s inside?” Miles asked.

I shook my head. “I wouldn’t think so. She’s too smart for that. She may even know we’re here. We might be walking into a trap. I’ll check.”

Stepping out from behind the overgrowth, I shifted. My dragon form would be strongly protected against any spell Emily cast toward me. It was the safe way to go. Still, I kept my long sinuous body close to the ground, moving toward the house as stealthily as my massive body would allow.

The closer I got, the more abandoned the house looked. It didn’t appear as though Emily had used the cabin for very long. It did look fairly ancient, though. I crawled up onto the porch, my talons clicking on the wood. My first glance into the dusty and cloudy windows showed me that the cabin had been ransacked, like Emily had left in a hurry. Tables and chairs wereturned over, books lay strewn across the floor, and broken glass piled against one wall.

Ready to turn back and tell the guys what I’d seen, my body tensed. There, on the floor, something was protruding from around a corner––a pale arm ending in a decidedly feminine hand and fingers.

I shifted back and sprinted to the guys. Gasping, I said, “Looks like there was a struggle. I can see someone lying on the floor. We need to go in.”

Without another word, I led them across the forest and into the cabin. Kicking the door down and bursting inside, Steff and Miles shifted, ready for battle if one was waiting inside. Instead, we found a deathly quiet room. The turned-over furniture was everywhere. It looked worse than it had from outside. The hand was right where I’d seen it. I pointed it out to the others.

Steff and Miles shifted back, then stepped toward it. We rounded the corner and looked down. Emily’s lifeless eyes stared out at us from the floor.

“What the hell?” Steff asked. “How did this happen?”

Carefully kneeling down, I touched her neck, feeling for a pulse I knew wasn’t there. Sure enough, she was dead, and her skin was cold. A bit of her skin flaked off under my fingers. Her body was deteriorating fast, almost like it was turning to dust.

Miles saw it. “There’s no way to know how old she was. Witches can become close to immortal. I think her body is decaying years and decades in a few minutes.”

The house fell deathly cold then, right when Miles finished speaking. I stood, getting away from the body, not knowing what was going to happen. Steff’s breath came out in icy puffs as the temperature dropped further. Then, a massivewhooshsound erupted from Emily’s body, and it burst into blue flames.

We jumped back a step, but the flames weren’t hot. They were cold. Being near them was almost like holding your handover a big block of ice. Somehow, the flames were consuming her body but were cold at the same time. Before I could even process how weird that was, something even stranger erupted from within the flames. Emily.

It wasn’t actually Emily, but some projection of her. She hovered above the rapidly burning corpse of herself, and stared at us. Her mouth was moving, talking, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Either her spirit was too weak, or the sound of the roaring flames was too loud.

Seeing that we didn’t understand, she seemed to gather herself and spoke again. This time, the sound of her voice carried across the room to us. “You don’t have long. The hunters are coming.”

“Did they kill you? I thought you were working with them,” Miles said.

She sneered at him. “They killed me because I wanted to spare Harley. No matter what, I did come to care for her. Even if she is carrying a shifter baby. They decided she was unclean and had to be taken care of. I was trying to find a counter spell to break the one I’d created. I tried and tried, but there is no cure. No way to break the spell. It’ll keep going until its purpose has been fulfilled. There is no stopping it until you’ve all found your mates or been killed before then. When they discovered I was trying to reverse the spell, they came for me.”

She was starting to fade, the flames growing weaker as her body rapidly turned to ashes. I could see the panic in her eyes. The great unknown was rushing upon her, and she was afraid. No matter how ancient or powerful you were, there was one thing that made every living creature equal. Death.

Emily looked at me. “The necklace, Tate. The opal. Make sure Harley wears it. I filled it with protection spells. If she’s wearing it, and the hunters try to hurt her, it will automatically cast a shield of protection around her. No one will be able to get to her.Do it, Tate. Do it, and prepare for a fight, because there’s one coming. A storm is on the horizon, and you’ll have to survive it to save Harley. To protect your baby.”

Without another word, her body collapsed into ashes, and the flames extinguished. She vanished. Standing there, looking at what was left of her, we were speechless. Steff even knelt to try to touch the ashes, but they too vanished, almost as though they were snowflakes melting into the floor. There was nothing left to prove that Emily Heath had ever been on this planet.

There was nothing else for us here, other than the knowledge that at least one threat was now out of the way. The hunters still remained, though. Hunters who were powerful enough to kill a witch as strong as Emily. It was terrifying, and we brooded in silence as we headed back to the car. The drive home was equally silent. I was fearful and worried. There was no way to know what my friends were thinking or feeling, but I had to assume they felt the same.

We got back to Harley’s and informed her and Blayne about what we’d found at Emily’s cabin. Everything we’d seen and heard, including everything Emily’s spirit had told us before she vanished. After our story, Harley looked at me, and tears began to well in her eyes. She came to me and wrapped her arms around me, resting her head on my chest.

“Are you okay?” I asked, stroking her hair.

She nodded. “I’m crying for Emily. She died trying to protect me. She wasn’t a good person, but in the end, she was trying to do something right. Maybe if she’d had enough time, she could have changed. Maybe.”

Not long after the guys all left, Harley and I went to bed. While I brushed my teeth, Harley sat in bed, trying to read. When I sat down, she set the book aside and put a hand to her head as though she’d just remembered something important.

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