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I don’t blame them.If I were in their situation, I’d be long gone.

Riley and Amber formed their own pack and lived in Providence. Riley had finished up at Brown and then settled into an apartment near campus. His old roommate, Aaron, and his sister, Hannah, became werewolves shortly after their last semester. Riley explained no one had forced them into being werewolves like he had been but that they had chosen to be bitten.

Riley had informed me at a coffee shop a few months back that he and Amber were dating. They kept the pack a priority, though, as well as their allegiance to the witches. They’d assist us when we needed help to track down a vampire clan. I, of course, hated getting him involved, but the other four in the coven felt we fought better with a wolf pack by our side.

After graduation, Shannon moved to New Orleans, where her mother grew up. It didn’t take much for Shannon to convince her parents they needed to leave East Greenwich as well. The danger she believed would reach her family was too much of a risk.

God, I missed her a lot. I mean, I understood why she left. Involving my friends in this life after what happened a year ago was a tremendous risk. The ones who were all too human needed to stay away.

Shannon was smart to pretend nothing supernatural was going on around her. We spoke a few times a week on the phone, but we kept the conversations brief, and she was careful not to ask questions that could lead to answers she didn’t want to hear.

And then there was Cami …

CHAPTER 4

I QUIETLY ENTERED the doorway and spotted Cami in the corner of her dimly lit, gloomy bedroom, staring at a canvas painted with mist-like swirls surrounding a grove of trees.

“Oh, no,” she said. “This is all wrong. It needs more black.” She gripped the paintbrush and glided the black paint around the edges, making wide to narrow circles until she reached the center. “That’s better,” she added, turning around to face me. “Hi, Mercy.” Her voice was flat and emotionless.

She had removed all the pastel colors that had covered the walls and furniture of her room the moment they’d released her from the hospital. “The bright colors are blinding me,” she had once explained when I came to visit her. Cami had moved back in with her mother, Laurie, and since then, had only left her room for meals and psychiatric appointments.

“Hey, Cami.” I stepped further into her room, scanning the walls that were covered in paintings like the one she worked on now.

Always black.

Always depressing.

None of her paintings made sense. Black paint covered most of the canvas, usually surrounding a forest or a river. It was unsettling.

After Cami awoke from her “coma,” she wasn’t Cami anymore. I knew she must have seen disturbing images or felt something during her possession that forever changed her. There wasn’t a spell we could conjure to bring her back from that nightmare. I leaned down next to her and looked up at the painting.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “Can I have this one? It’ll look great in our training room.”

She stared at her feet, avoiding eye contact with me as she nodded.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” She looked up and grabbed my wrist to keep me from leaving. Cami’s grip was fierce, and the expression on her down-turned face made my heart hurt. I held her hand and gently pried her fingers from my skin. “Caleb and I are going to train for the rest of the day with my coven, but I told him I wanted to stop by to see you. I’ll be back. I promise.”

I lowered her hand toward the paintbrush.

“Are you sleeping okay?” I asked her. Cami shook her head, keeping her eyes on her feet. “Okay.” I pulled out two sleeping pills from my purse and placed them on her nightstand. I had been supplying them for her at least three times a week because every spell we had tried wasn’t working. I grabbed the painting on the easel and replaced the spot with a blank canvas for her. She grabbed the paintbrush and started over.

_______________

ONCE I ARRIVEDback at my house, I entered the spacious basement where we had been training for the last year. Ezra and Simon shared a room in the far-left corner, sleeping on a bunk bed like two college roommates while we used the rest of the space.

We had lined the walls with steel hooks and racks on which we could hang our wooden stakes and silver daggers. In the center, a two-inch-thick pad stretched from one end of the room to the other. Ezra also bought a boxing bag we kept in the corner by the bathroom. He and I were the only ones who ever worked out with it. I may have been able to retrieve several memories back on how I fought in my past life, and the coven had been training me this last year, but I still needed to work on my endurance.

Leah descended the stairs with her hair pulled up in a short ponytail, barefoot, and wearing a tank top with yoga pants. She was tiny, especially without shoes, but she sure kicked ass when she fought.

“Was it a vampire or a human?” she asked us.

“Vampire,” Caleb cut in as I opened my mouth to answer her.

“Sounds like a fucking party.” Ezra beamed, coming over to the pad while pounding his right fist into his palm.

“God damn, Ez, be a little more sensitive. Mercy knew the victim,” Leah snapped.

“It’s fine, Leah,” I said. “I need to detach my feelings from this case so we can catch whoever did this. Caleb’s having Roland investigate the Black Horse clan,” I explained.

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