Page 32 of Prince with a Chance of Darkness

My hand found its way to my chest, to the scar I had there. It had faded a bit over the course of the last four years, but not much. I didn’t shy away from wearing shirts that showed it. It was a part of me. I survived something horrible and saw it like a badge of honor. I didn’t walk around telling everyone I got it by way of my bat shit crazy aunt who tried to sacrifice me toa demon or that I was fairly sure one of the infamous Weird Sisters had tried to turn me into a vampire.

I kept all that to myself.

Only Willa knew the truth of it all.

The full moon was nearly upon us and I needed to show her the cave where she’d be spending the next few nights. As luck would have it, the cave wasn’t just remote and out of earshot of the campus, it came equipped with its own restraints.

I asked my professor about them, wondering why it was there was thick iron chains secured deep into the rockface, but he claimed not to know. He was lying. I could sense it. I didn’t push for answers. I did start planning how the location might work to secure my sister though. I just hoped the chains would be strong enough to hold her.

Willa wouldn’t be all right if she broke free and harmed someone while in wolf form. She may share her body with a predator, but her nature was anything but that of a killer. She struggled enough waking up in random locations, naked and with evidence she’d eaten some kind of woodland creature—normal wolf food. If she hurt someone, I’d never get her back mentally. Already, she grappled with who and what she’d become after Romania.

I couldn’t put more on her plate.

It was my duty to see to it that she was secured and couldn’t harm herself or anyone else during the full moon. After all, it was my fault she had to share her body with a wolf to start with. Had I left well enough alone and not insisted we chase after a demon four years ago, things might have played out differently.

Helen would have probably found another way to get us to that cave in hopes of us working as the human sacrifices she required to unseal that demon’s cave, letting him leave, but our being there wouldn’t have been on me. It would have been totally on our aunt.

A quick glance over at my sister’s side of the room showed she was still asleep. I tried to settle back onto my twin bed, hoping sleep would return. My days and nights were already screwed up because of my stupid friggin’calling.

Ha. Try a curse.

I’d have said as much out loud, but Willa’s sensitive hearing would pick up on it, and it would wake her. Instead, I rolled onto my side, facing the wall. Faded wallpaper that I was pretty sure was original to the Victorian home greeted me. I knew how many scrolls appeared in its pattern within the area of my bed. I’d counted them enough times whenever sleep was elusive.

The home was certainly dated and old, but it had been where we’d laid our heads for the past three years. Our first year at Grimm College, we’d lived on campus in the dorms, as all freshmen were required to do. It made hiding what we were difficult. We knew we had to find a place off campus, but finances were an issue.

Our supernatural awakening in Mill Hollow four years ago had left us with more questions than answers. We’d done a bit of digging, hoping to be able to put the pieces together—to make it all make sense. Why had our aunt turned on our parents? How could she have played a part in her own brother’s death? And how could she, after having raised us from when we were ten, lure us to what she’d planned to be our deaths in Romania?

Was Helen really a psychopath and did that mean Willa and I could be ones too?

Our quest for the truth left us sitting in the office of our parents’ attorney several months after we’d started college. The wads of cash that we’d woken up to find in the motel room with us wouldn’t stretch as far as we wanted, and he was the head of the trust funds our parents had left for us. Trust funds that should have more than covered what we needed for many, many years.

The attorney had informed us that Helen had found workarounds, permitting her to access our funds. She’d emptied the coffers, as she had any other accounts tied to our parents. Willa and I had been left with nothing.

Willa and I were fortunate enough that our scholarships covered most everything. We were left needing to make the dollars stretch more. That was how we’d found ourselves living in what used to be a functioning funeral home on Gallows Lane.

We’d been forced to find a way to make it work. What other choice did we have? We’d never had a backup plan. We hadn’t thought we’d need one. I had never once believed that our aunt would do what she did. That she’d not only clean out our bank accounts but also try to sacrifice us to set an ancient blow-hard of a demon free. Had I known ahead of time, I’d have come up with some contingency plans and would have never gone to Romania.

I touched the wallpaper lightly, wondering whose room this used to be when the place was still operating as a funeral home. Had a family resided here during it all? Mostly, I wanted to know who would pick wallpaper this ugly.

The rent was dirt cheap, so I didn’t mind it too much. But it wasn’t my taste that much was for sure.

Besides being cheap to live in, the house had other perks. It was close to campus, and we shared it with a group of women we’d started to see as family of sorts. They didn’t know the truth about us, but we cared about them. I was of the opinion that we needed to bring in one or two of them and spill our secrets. We needed help each month monitoring Willa while I was forced to go out and patrol campus for supernatural threats.

While there was no governing body issuing orders to me, there was something deep inside of me that demanded I go out at night and walk the grounds. I had no idea if it was born out of guilt over how epically I’d failed my sister in Romania or ifit came from something else. Maybe it was part of my calling—being born a Murray Slayer. Or maybe whatever I’d been turned into during the attack in Romania was the reason for the compulsion.

I had no idea and was powerless to fight the urges, so I found myself out every night, walking the grounds, looking for threats and handling them accordingly. Unlike my aunt, who hated all supernaturals, I didn’t kill everything that crossed my path. I only killed the ones who were real threats to innocents. The ones who were trying to harm humans.

Sadly, every night that I went on the prowl, a small part of me hoped I’d find a supernatural crossing the line. If I did, I could kill them. I could quench the never-ending thirst for blood that I had.

It was sick and twisted and it wasn’t something I’d told Willa about. How could I? She had enough to worry about. Adding me standing on the edge of becoming some sort of serial supernatural unaliver shouldn’t be one of them.

I kept waiting for the people who ran the supernatural world to come for me. They had to have noticed there was a slayer on the campus here. There had to be some sort of bat signal that went up when a demon or another type of baddie was killed, right? Some kind of mystical signal that sent up magical flares?

Maybe there wasn’t any way for them to know what I’d been doing here in Grimm Cove. And maybe the oversight committee I’d heard my father talking about when I was little had no clue I was here, handling matters on my own—without any authorization or credentials. Then again, there wasn’t a badge one carried around while staking vampires.

If the oversight committee ever did show, I had no clue if they’d stand behind my choices, or if I’d be hauled into their version of a justice system to answer for my crimes. I didn’t know a ton about that side of things but from the little I couldremember overhearing my father and uncles talking about, they weren’t anyone I wanted to cross.

They’d whisper about them being as bad, if not worse in some ways than some Order of the Dragon group. I knew even less about them than I did the oversight committee.

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