Sealed With a Curse (WG 1) (38 page)

“It’s all right,” Aric said. We stepped back onto the path cautiously, unsure what lay ahead. Aric didn’t finish watching the bears disappear around the bend. Instead his preternatural side searched where I searched, in the direction they’d run from. “Gem,” he said, his voice bordering close to a growl.

Gemini slipped his sweater over his head, revealing the muscular T-build common of all wolves. Taran’s jaw fell opened and I think she might have drooled. “Will you hold this?” he asked.

She nodded. This time it was her turn to fall speechless.
Gemini cracked his neck from side to side. A large black wolf punched his head through Gemini’s back, sniffing the air. Like solidifying ink, he slid his powerful form onto the hard soil and sped off in a blur of black. The human half of Gemini that remained blinked his dark eyes. “Come. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

Gemini’s ability to split into two remained, hands down, the coolest supernatural feat I’d ever seen. Taran squeaked when he whisked her in his arms and raced after Aric and me.

My tigress made us fast, faster than wolves. Common sense, and the realization that “danger lurked, Will Robinson,” kept me from bolting ahead. Aric still felt I moved too quick despite being a breath behind me. “Don’t get ahead of me, Celia.”

“I found it,” Gemini’s low voice said behind us. “This way.”

The path veered in two separate directions. One led deeper into the woods. Gemini kept us on the one paralleling the river.

The sour stench of death stung my nose just as Gemini’s other half appeared before us, baring his teeth. We followed behind him. Our pace slowed as we ambled down a small, steep hill where an abandoned mill hugged the edge of the river. The large broken wheel sat in the water, moving just enough to squeal. The rest of the large structure dented inward where the moss-covered roof had partially collapsed. A deathtrap in the making, and one long forgotten. Someone should have demolished it decades ago, but the small town didn’t strike me as possessing funds to see its destruction through.

The closer we neared the mill, the more the foul odor increased, its acidic scent sharp enough to make my eyes
water. “Son of a bitch,” Taran muttered. Her blue eyes blanched to clear. Something skulked inside. And it didn’t want us there.

Aric whispered into his phone. “We found something. Track us.”

“On our way,” Koda said on the other end.

Gem eased Taran onto the ground as we crept onto the rickety porch steps. A few good tigress strikes and the moldy and graffiti-lined brown building would collapse inward. Too bad we had to investigate before sending it, and the malevolence lurking inside, to hell’s trash heap.

A padlock the size of my palm lay discarded on the mud-splattered floor, its hook twisted as if broken off. Slowly, Aric opened the creaky door.

Footmarks cut into the thick layer of dust. Drops of dried blood were splattered like raindrops alongside of each step. My growl rumbled in sync with the wolves. My tigress didn’t like it here. But she hated what waited even more.

Pockets of light trickled through the holes in the wall, illuminating sections here and there in the otherwise pitch-black room. The increasing aroma of death forced my claws and fangs to shoot out. I barely kept my tigress from emerging.

A set of stairs led up to the second floor. A small office with a door opening to another room sat to our far left. The vast room on our right housed bent and broken pieces of metal office furniture. This must have been the area where the administrative staff worked back when the mill had still struggled to stay open.

We abandoned the small sectioned-off area without so much as a sniff. After all, the revolting fragrance of
sulfur permeated stronger to our right. A few folding chairs leaned against the dirty 1960s wood-paneled walls and a tattered armchair lay tucked in the corner. The calendar push-pinned into one of the panels remained opened to February of many years past.

We followed Aric through the large room, trailing the footsteps, and of course, the blood. I bit back a gag, the smell of decay threatening to bring up my lunch. Taran swore beneath her breath. She didn’t have to possess an inner beast to sense the death. Death slapped at our faces and demanded respect.

The roar of the river echoed from the back. Likely a section of wall had caved in based on how loud the sound of rushing water carried through the mill. We passed through a small room where the branches of firs poked through the busted sections of moss-eaten walls. Despite the growing Grim Reaper aroma, I thought we’d have to cover more of the building until we found our quarry.

I thought wrong.

The mill opened to one enormous area strewn with burlap sacks, broken rakes, and oh, yeah, a stack of corpses. Most girls got flowers, or maybe chocolates on their dates. I got dead bodies. Lots of them. Lucky me.

Taran stumbled away, choking back her sickness and burying her face into Gem’s chest. Aric gripped my arm, offering me comfort. He didn’t need it. He witnessed death as often as I witnessed life as a labor nurse. And yet as much as I wanted to mirror Taran’s actions, my tigress kept us in place and took in the horror.

Four males lay slumped like a deck of cards toward our right, their bodies rigid, but no obvious signs suggesting cause of death. The lack of decomposing flesh
and the few flies circling their forms suggested they’d met their demise fairly recently.

And yet as gruesome as I found them, they didn’t compare to the naked woman left abandoned in the center of the room. My hands trembled. Perspiration slid like ice against my chilled skin. Her clouded eyes stared blankly at the ceiling while an expression of sheer terror and agony froze the features of her young face. Her entire abdomen appeared chewed open from the inside out and her half-eaten bowels lay over her hips like wet ropes. Flies swarmed her and took their fill. Small water bugs crawled along her bloody nails. She’d clawed at the splintered floor. God only knew the pain she’d endured before her heart had mercifully stopped beating.

Part of me wanted to run screaming. The other part struggled not to release my tears. Humans generally feared me. Their fear often manifested into dislike and more than often hate. I’d been mistreated to the point of cruelty throughout my life. But as horrid as others had often behaved, no one deserved to die like this. No one.

Aric pulled me into him, his voice harsh yet gentle all at once. “You don’t have to look, Celia. And you don’t have to be brave. If you prefer, Gemini can escort you and Taran outside.”

I shook my head, unable to rip my gaze from the poor soul in the center of the room. “No. I’ll stay.”

Aric gave me one last hug before releasing me and stepping forward. He said I didn’t have to be brave. So I wasn’t. I stayed put as he and Gemini’s wolf examined the bodies. They inspected the males first, circling their forms and drawing in their scent. I stopped trying to work so hard to smell. It remained my last ditch effort to keep from hurling. All the dead men had their mouths
opened. They likely screamed until their last breath. A cricket crawled out of one whose tongue hung out. That’s when I stopped looking as well.

I heard Aric and Gem’s wolf tread toward the woman. They paused. “Do you see what I see?” Aric asked, rage clipping his words.

“Yes,” Gemini’s human side answered. He clutched Taran close against him with his head lowered. I supposed he could see with his other half. “Two burrowed out in separate directions.”

I forced my mouth opened. “Two what?”

Gemini raised his dark almond eyes. “Demon children,” he answered.