Page 26 of Enslaved

“It’s not about the bird or the mole. They shouldn’t have been there. Because of the souls. Living things stay away from dead places.” A second after the words leave her lips, I read the exact moment she regrets them.

Is she remembering how I’m related to those dead people? Or has she remembered how I nearly separated her head from her shoulders outside the café?

Her gaze skates away from my face.

“Go on,” I growl.

She wrenches her eyes back to mine, swallowing hard enough that I can track the motion on the slender column of her throat. “I don’t know what happened, but I think the souls… left.”

“Left?”

She nods.

“And they went where?”

Her gaze turns evasive. “I think they… somehow… I don’t know how, but maybe they kind of—”

“Get to the fucking point,” I snap.

“Attached themselves to me,” she ends in a rush.

“Attached?”

“I think so. Maybe that’s why I smell of wolf to you, but not to Sera and Aunt Mel because neither of them said—”

“Do you have a keeper?”

Her slow blink tells me I surprised her. “Uh, what?”

“A keeper?” I repeat, slowing my speech in case there’s more going on in this witch’s head than a need to risk her life to converse with dead souls. “A nurse? Or medication?”

Her eyes widen. “You think I’mcrazy?”

I don’t say a damn word.

“I amnotcrazy.”

“What you are,” I growl as I stalk around the bed toward her, “is dead if you don’t tell me what the fuck you were doing where you shouldn’t have been.”

She flattens herself against the wall; her fear an acrid tang in the air between us. “I told you. The souls—”

“Of my dead pack have attached themselves to you. Is that what you’re saying?”

Her lips part, but the second before words leave her mouth, she seems to change her mind about what she was going to say. “Something like that. And if they had,” she murmurs, “it wasn’t because of anything I did.”

I gaze down at her bent head. I should rip her apart right now. Why haven’t I?

“You heard about what happened with my pack?”

She darts a rapid glance at my face. “Yeah.”

“A witch did it.”

“Oh.” Her body seems to get smaller and smaller as I stand over her.

And that’s when I notice the faint wolf scent has faded. Only she doesn’t even smell of witch now. Just of something floral and sweet that I’m guessing she showered with.

Why does her scent keep changing like that?

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