“I already did.”
“Then you’re not trying hard enough. And wait a second, dogs can totally track the dead. How else do they find bodies at crime scenes?”
“I’m not a damn dog, Priscilla.”
“Dog, werewolf, same difference. If there was a dead body, you could smell it.”
“I’m not saying I can’t smell a dead body when it’s in the room with me. I’m saying a dead body isn’t leaving a moving trail for me to follow.”
“Well, how the fuck am I supposed to keep up with what werewolves can do?”
“Easy. You don’t!” He threw the sweater down on the bed and stormed out of the room, and I sat back, aghast. The ass didn’t need to take it out on me.
By the time I got to the living room, Max was already trying to leave through the front door. It’s when I noticed Cora’s answering machine was flashing. “Did you check her messages?” I asked. Then I had to wonder who even has a landline anymore. Cora was such an old lady.
He hit the button, and the messages began to play. “I can tell you right now at least three of them are from me,” he said.
But the first message wasn’t him, it was a woman. It sounded like some chick with asthma having a mental breakdown, asking for Cora to meet her in Lunar City, and then it cut off abruptly. “I guess we know where she is,” I said.
Max said nothing at first and kept staring at the answering machine. I could tell he was letting the message sink in. “This is…not good,” he said calmly.
I laughed. “Not good? You know where she is now.”
“Someone calls her in the middle of the night trying to lure her to an abandoned city where werewolves lived, and you think this is good?”
“Well, Jesus, when you put it that way, I guess not,” I groaned. And people say I’m the negative one. “You gonna call the cops or what?”
“No, but I do have a plan. I’m gonna drop you back off at your place.”
“What?”
“You shouldn’t get involved in this.”
“Hey, I said I was gonna help, so I’m gonna help.”
“Really,” he said, his head cocked to the side. That didn’t sound like a question, but an awful lot like doubt. “You’re suddenly so eager to help? Out of nowhere?”
“Would you shut up and take my help?”
“Fine,” he replied as if it were actually painful. What a guy. “I have to make a stop first, but you can’t come. So in the meantime, you’re gonna have to wait for me.”
“Great. Awesome. I love waiting for men.”
“Oh, I knew you would,” he said so sarcastically, I almost punched him in the nose.
“So what am I gonna be doing while you’re on your stupid secret mission?”
I wish I hadn’t asked.
An hour later, he was dropping me off in front of her house. This huge ass home with a thousand snow-covered lilac bushes in the front yard, and dozens of wind chimes hanging and spinning from trees, making so much noise I thought I was having flashbacks from the war. The driveway was long and steep, so I knew I was gonna fall and break my ass from all the ice.
“I’ll be back in a few hours,” Max told me, and then rolled his window back up and sped down the road. I bet myself fifty bucks he wouldn’t come back.
The front door to the house screeched open, and there stood Wendy, wearing a dumb sideways baseball cap and an oversized sweater. She waved with one hand and yelled, “Hey, homegirl!”
Kill me now.
Chapter Four
MAX
I tried to keep it together as I drove down the empty road as fast as I could, but I was doing a pretty shitty job. That phone call replayed in my mind over and over again on a loop, and I knew I needed to record it and show them. You don’t get a mysterious call from Lunar City without it meaning something.
Goddamnit, I was so pissed at Cora. Why wouldn’t she call me? Why wouldn’t she just tell me, or anyone, where she was going? God, that girl drove me nuts sometimes. She’s like a magnet for danger, and was somehow still unaware of it.
I saw the street sign and exhaled. In a few minutes, I’d be talking to Brinly and Lincoln at their new compound. After the shitshow that was Paul and his crew, Lunar City wasn’t a habitable place for our kind anymore. Too much damage, too much blood spilled, and with all the attention that city got, we didn’t have the anonymity anymore either. They were basically forced into moving locations.
It was early in the morning for my visit, but if I knew them as well as I thought I did, I knew they’d be awake. They rose when the sun did.
The new compound wasn’t as large or luxurious as their old one, but it was gated and protected just as well, only on a lower budget. I knocked on the front door three times then five (our old code), and immediately the door popped open. The servant at the door wasn’t even able to get a word out before I said, “I need Brinly. Now.”
I was brought before Brinly mere moments later. It was surreal to see her seated in a chair that had once been Aga’s, with her floral dress draped over the arms and her hair braided up high on the crown of her head. She looked like a proper queen. I was tempted to bow, but she didn’t let me.
There was no time for catching up when I walked in. “Someone’s taken Cora,” I announced.
Her eyebrows raised. “Max, what happened?”
“The apartment’s empty, her phone left behind, her car gone,
