And I’d think harder about that subject another time. Today, I needed to raise the dead and send them home.
I had Dana and Rick along with Jennifer-Nicole’s parents put the word out to any shifters who had a child go missing to meet us out here. But not until after I raised the kids from the ground. I didn’t want any parent to see their kids as animated corpses
“Okay,” Owen said as he sat down in the folding chair Sam pulled out of the back of the SUV. “I’m not as strong as you are, so I’m going to go in the direction of town. It seems less likely there would be any bodies out that way, or at least not as many.”
“Good thinking,” I said sitting in another chair a few feet from him. “I’ll go toward the coast and then along the woods that stretch away from town.” There was a large span of forest and mountains surrounding Shipton Harbor.
We sat and focused. Almost immediately, I began to feel them. Now that I’d done so many animals back near my house, I could tell the difference right away. I left the pure animals to their rest and only called to the shifters.
“They’re coming,” I whispered. A mountain of emotions swirled inside me.
Not long after the first bodies walked or crawled to us, Alissa turned up in her minivan. Several of the coven members poured out, including Bevan. “We’re here to help,” she said.
I’d called the coven too and asked them to come, but I wasn’t hopeful they’d show. Of course, the killer would be curious, but the whole coven?
“Thank you,” Olivia replied. I was too deeply focused on finding bodies to even welcome them. “I think the plan is once they get all the bodies here, we’ll get them to shift and tell us who their families are. So if you could grab a notebook and pen and help me write down their information, that would be great. Once they’re all raised, I’ll send a text to our shifter connection.”
“Where is the hunter sheriff?” someone asked. I almost laughed and broke my focus.
“He left so that he doesn’t have to feel obligated to report the murders. The shifters wouldn’t want their children listed in some human database, and in fact, many of these children likely don’t exist on paper,” Sam said then added, “For the record, I’m not here as a cop, so I don’t count.” I tried to tune them out as they kept talking and finally succeeded.
I stretched my net far and wide and found shifted animal after shifted animal.
Some were old. Very old. My stomach churned and my heart broke. So many kids.
Eventually, as my net widened nearly to the next town down the coast, I ran out of dead shifters to call. And as we waited on them all to come, we began the heartbreaking work of cataloging the names of the dead.
The witches quickly learned how to have the children shift from animal to human form as Owen and I animated them. Olivia and several of the coven members wrote their information down on a piece of paper and pinned it to their little bodies when they told us their details.
A couple of them looked twice at Magnus, but not enough for me to try to blame anything on him.
As they shifted back into their little bodies, Sam carefully and reverently put them in black canvas bags, then moved the location information to the outside.
I sent a text to Dana to let her know it was okay for the shifter families to come. I knew they were close by, waiting for the word.
Finally, well into the evening, all the bodies had been claimed by their parents or friend of the family. The sense of closure was there, but there was also a lot of sadness and anger. I couldn’t feel any more bodies coming our way, and none of the children had been able to identify anyone other than Penny.
“It certainly seems like Penny was a major factor in all of this,” I said with a sigh once all the shifters had left. I turned my gaze onto Bevan. “What do you think, Magnus?”
He looked from me to Sam and back. “How would I know?”
I shrugged. “You seem shrewd. I thought you might’ve drawn some conclusions.”
He gasped, then snapped his mouth shut. “I haven’t.”
Guilty much? But the sucky part about the whole thing was we couldn’t hold Bevan or anyone without proof they were involved. The truth would soon be revealed. There wasn’t much we could do but wait until the serum matured.
Just as Drew pulled back up next to the barn in the same SUV he’d dropped me off in, I heard sobbing. Soft, female cries. I glanced at Olivia, who obviously heard it too. Had we missed one?
I followed the sound behind the shed where I stopped dead in my tracks. Sitting against the shed with her legs pulled to her chest and her head rested on the tops of her knees, was a small person. She looked to be around fifteen to sixteen years old, but my magic and intuition said she was older than that.
Glancing over my shoulder, I noticed that Olivia, Drew, Owen, and Sam had followed me. Dana and Rick stood back a little further. Olivia motioned for me to talk to the girl. I rolled my eyes and knelt in front of her, leaving a few feet of space between us. I needed reaction time in case she attacked me. She didn’t look like she’d been dead long, but ghouls could be extremely unpredictable.
“Hello,” I said softly.
She sniffed and lifted her head. Yellow cat eyes searched me. It took me off guard at first, but I managed to not gasp or jerk back. I was just too tired to freak out. Plus, enough crazy crap had happened in the last several months that I was over being shocked that another undead thing had entered my life.
She glanced behind me and shrank away. “Don’t send me back.”
Oh, no. “You mean back to the dead?”
She nodded. “I want to stay.”
I caught Owen’s attention and he shrugged. “It’s up to you.” Then to the girl, he said, “You do understand that you would be under Ava’s protection and control. If you go rogue or turn on anyone, she will send you back with a single thought.”
Wow, I could do that? Owen would know since he was my necromancer trainer. I was more powerful, but he was more knowledgeable.
The girl sat up a little straightened. “I understand. She is my Alpha. Got it. And I’ll be good.”
I sat on my ass in the grass next to her because my legs were starting to go numb from squatting. “What’s your name?”
“Zoey.”
“No last name? Do you have a family we can contact?”
Her bottom lips trembled, and she shook her head. “No. My parents died when I was young, and I’ve been on my own since. I didn’t know where to go. I’m a tiger shifter so my cat helped me survive on my own.” She ducked her head. “Or it did, I mean.”
Olivia moved closer and knelt, then fell on her butt and rolled to her side. I laughed at her. “Graceful much?”
Zoey snickered as Olivia threw a handful of grass at me, then studied the girl. “She looks human. I mean, of course, she does, but she doesn’t look like Alfred at all. Zoey could go out in public with a little makeup and no one would be the wiser.”
My bestie was right. The girl’s skin was smooth and pale, not at all like the leathery zombie-like texture of Alfred’s skin. Except for the yellow cat eyes, Zoey looked like any other young adult in Shipton.
I rolled to the side and stood, making a quick decision before offering my hand to Zoey. “You’ll be staying with me. I’ll have to move Wallie into my office so you can have your own room. And we need to give you a last name.” I thought about it for a few and said, “Lowe. That’s my maiden name. My dad was a necromancer, and it would be easy enough to say you’re a long-lost cousin.”