Page 27 of Wind with a Chance of Wolfsbane

They pulled away, and the SUV disappeared down the road.

Mina and I stepped out from the side of the inn, staring in the direction they’d driven off in.

“Mom wasn’t soft or weak,” said Mina. “He’s a dick.”

I put my hand on her shoulder gently.

“Who do you think they’re meeting?” asked Mina.

“I don’t know. Lester probably has a local drug dealer in his pocket,” I said with a shrug, but my stomach tightened. I’d never had a lot of trust in the man to start with, but the events in the airport parking lot two weeks ago left me questioning nearly everything he said and did.

Mina snorted. “Right. He’s such a cliché.”

“Total bottom-feeder,” I added, the worry in my gut increasing. “I have no clue what she sees in him.”

“Think the meeting they’re having has something to do with what they’re hunting here?” asked Mina.

I shrugged. “No clue.”

Demons and hunting were part of the reason we were in Romania to start with.

Helen had scarcely been around, leaving Mina and me to explore the small town and its surrounding area. There was only so much to do in the middle of nowhere Romania, and we’d managed to do it all.

My sister was getting restless, especially since there didn’t seem to be any cute guys our age in the area. At least not that we’d seen yet. It would have been a lie to say I hadn’t been hoping to bump into some hotties too, if for no other reason than to get me to stop thinking about White-Shirt Guy, but I wasn’t about to admit as much to Mina. She was undoubtedly the more boy-crazy of the two of us. She didn’t need my stamp of approval on her behavior.

No. I’d stick with trying to imagine what men with hot accented voices who saved young women from distress at airports looked like and dreaming about characters from a gothic literature novel for now. That was about all the excitement I could take.

Something brushed past my hand, and I spun around, flailing my arm like a madwoman once more, batting at thin air with my book, positive the swarm of killer insects was back to exact their revenge for me swatting them before. I swung my book around madly, using it like a tennis racket. “They’re on me!”

Mina grabbed me, halting my meltdown, and then brushed her hand over me in a way that said she didn’t care if a bug was on me and wasn’t trying to get it off but rather was doing it to shut me up. “There. No bugs.”

“You didn’t even look,” I argued.

“We’re outside, surrounded by nothing but trees at night,” she returned. “Bugs kind of come with the territory.”

I pivoted and attempted to head for the door of the inn.

Mina caught my arm and jerked me around. “Willa!”

“What? I’m going back inside,” I said.

“That place is a dump and probably has more bugs in it than out of it,” she supplied, halting my attempt to return inside.

She was right. It was a dump.

It was the kind of place that turned a blind eye to the questionable deals our aunt had made with other locals to secure what would be needed to fight some great evil she’d alluded to but wouldn’t elaborate on—at least not with Mina or me. Instead, when she was present, she talked in private with the other hunters who had come along with us, always looking over her shoulder like we might overhear something we shouldn’t.

The behavior was out of the ordinary for her in the sense that she usually didn’t care what was said around us. From a very early age, we’d been exposed to talk of death, monsters, and violence. She’d not been what any sane person would label nurturing, but she was all we had.

Helen had been what could only be called shady in Romania. So had the people she was associating with. There were the other hunters who were rarely far from her side, and then there were the people who had been coming and going from the inn. The ones I’d seen her talking with last night had left a pit in my stomach.

They’d shown up in expensive cars, all dressed in fancy suits, reminding me of movies I’d seen about the mafia. Unlike the men with whom Helen typically surrounded herself, these men seemed put together and were good-looking. As handsome as they’d been, something about them screamed deadly, almost feral. Like under the expensive suits were animals waiting for the chance to attack.

The idea they’d been shifters or anything of the like was laughable. Helen would never be caught dead dealing with supernaturals. No. She killed them. She didn’t hang out with them.

Mina twisted slightly and yanked something from one of the side pouches of her backpack of doom. She unfolded it, and I realized it was a map. “Take a look at this.”

I did, noticing a few sections with red circles around them. “What am I looking at?”

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