Chapter 345 You Mixed-Blood Mongrel

Emilia’s POV

Lily’s words sent a cold shiver crawling up my spine. We’d come here to find witches, not to wander into some Silent Hill nightmare with the fog and the staring eyes and the dead, breathless quiet.

I turned, a wisecrack already half-formed on my tongue, something to cut the tension and make her roll her eyes at me.

She was gone.

My heart lurched. “Lily? Where are you?”

A heartbeat ago she’d been right beside me, close enough to elbow. Now there was only white, and the sound of my own pulse hammering in my ears.

The fog had thickened into a wall of white, swallowing everything past my own fingertips.

I flung my arms out and swept them through the empty air, grasping at nothing, turning in a tight, frantic circle. “Lily!”

Eve stirred low in my mind, her voice tight with unease. “Emilia, this fog isn’t natural. I can’t catch Lily’s scent. It’s like she was never standing here at all.”

“The mind-link. Let me try the mind-link.” I reached out with my thoughts, straining toward that familiar thread that always connected me to her.

Once. Twice. Three times. Nothing came back but a hollow, echoing silence.

My stomach bottomed out. Lily had vanished from my side, and she hadn’t made a sound.

Not a scream, not a scuffle, not so much as a breath.

People don’t disappear like that. Not on their own.

Which meant Lily had been right. Someone was out here in the fog. Watching us. Had been the whole time.

For a few seconds I just stood there, breathing too fast, my hands shaking at my sides. The white pressed in from every direction and I couldn’t tell up from down. Lily was gone. Taken. And I had led her straight into this.

Then I made myself stop. I shut my eyes, dragged in one slow breath.

I planted my feet and lifted my chin, pitching my voice into the white nothing. “Our car broke down outside your little town. We stumbled in by accident. We’re not invaders, and we’re not here to make trouble. If there’s been some misunderstanding, we can talk it out like civilized people. So give me back my friend.”

Silence answered. Thick, smug, and deliberate.

Fine. If polite wasn’t going to get me anywhere, I had other settings.

Deep down, I’d known that walking into a town full of witches who hated my kind might go exactly like this. That was why I’d spent the drive quietly stuffing my pack with every stupid, desperate idea I could think of. I’d hoped I wouldn’t need any of it.

Well. So much for hoping.

I swung my pack off my shoulder and dug out the two bottles of whiskey I’d lifted from the hotel minibar, along with a hand towel. My hands weren’t quite steady yet, and I let them shake.

I twisted the cap off the first bottle, soaked the towel through, then started dousing the nearest trees, flinging amber liquor across their trunks until the air went sharp and sweet with the reek of it.

Eve watched through my eyes, baffled. “Emilia, what on earth are you doing?”

I upended the second bottle over a thick cluster of underbrush and spared one silent, mournful thought for my uncle Chuck, who would’ve thrown himself bodily to the ground to lick it off the moss.

Then I pulled out the matchbook, tucked deep in my pack like a little gift from fate, and called into the fog. “Here’s how this goes. If you don’t show yourselves, I set this whole forest on fire. I’ll even count you down. Three generous numbers.”

“Three.” The word rolled out of me loud and steady.

“Eve,” I murmured under my breath, “it’s been ages since we really stretched our legs in the woods. How fast do you figure we can run?”

Her grin curled warm through my mind. “As fast as you want, the second we shift. Fast as we please.”

“Faster than wind and fire?”

“Two!” I bellowed into the mist.

“Yes, Emmy. Faster than fire. No question.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“One!”

Still, no one stepped forward. The fog hung there, daring me.

“Suit yourselves,” I told it softly. “This was your choice, not mine.”

I struck the first match. It flared, sputtered, caught. For one heartbeat I stared at the little flame and thought of Lily somewhere out there in the dark, and I almost faltered. Then I thought of her gone for good, and I didn’t. I flicked it onto the soaked towel, and the flame leapt up with a hungry whoosh, blue and gold climbing into the dark. I had the second match pinched between my fingers, angled toward a liquor-slicked branch, when a voice finally tore through the haze.

“STOP! Stop it, you filthy mixed-blood mongrel!”

High, sharp, and female.

Wow. It had been ages since anyone insulted me with that much venom. I should’ve been furious. And part of me was. But honestly? Hand on my heart, I’d almost missed it. There’s a strange comfort in being hated by strangers. It’s familiar.

Eve and I locked onto the sound in the same breath, our wolf-sharp hearing cutting straight through the fog to pin down exactly where it had come from.

I didn’t give her a chance to run.

I blurred forward, fast and low, and materialized right in front of her before she could so much as flinch.

A girl. Early twenties at most. Black hair, a scatter of freckles across her cheeks, the kind of face you’d call sweet under better circumstances. Cute, even.

But my Lily mattered more than cute.

I seized her by the throat with my left hand and hauled her in front of me, letting the shift ripple halfway through my body. My fangs lengthened past my lips, and my right hand curled into long, inhuman claws.

“Give me back my friend,” I shouted, “or I rip hers out right here.”