Right?
I could only hope. I had nowhere else to turn right now. Perse had warned me that this wasn’t an arcana overflow. I wasn’t the one responsible for this. A part of me worried that the person responsible for the girl in the mountains had come after me.
That couldn’t be right, though. Why would they come after me? I hadn’t seen anything. I had nothing to give to the police!
I slammed the car into park outside Cerri’s apartment. I’d made it across the city into Lakesedge in record time. For the supernatural side of town, it was blissfully quiet. The wind remained still, refusing to rustle the trees as if it knew that I would jump at even the slightest sound.
Even shutting my car door behind me made my breath hitch. I raced to the warehouse and ran up the winding stairs to Cerri’s apartment door. There, hand raised, I hesitated. Who was I to bring this down onto Cerri’s head? Did I really want to involve my friends in my problems?
They didn’t understand my arcana. Sure, they all had their suspicions, but I’d done my best to keep it to myself, so I wouldn’t scare them away. Cerri knew that I had one foot in the grave, but she didn’t know that I could raise the dead.
Before I could think of anywhere else to run, the door opened and Cerri yanked me into the apartment. She shut the door behind her and put her hands on her hips as she looked me up and down.
“What is it this time? It seems like there’s always at least one of us in mortal peril lately.”
Cerri’s hair was a mass of blond curls beneath her green bandana. She looked like she’d rolled out of bed and slapped the bandana on last minute. There was a movie from the eighties playing on the television. A man with the biggest cod-piece I’d ever seen danced with a bunch of puppets.
I realized that Cerri had fallen asleep while watching a comfort movie. I’d interrupted her lazy night in.
“I should go. You don’t need to deal with this.” I began backing away.
Cerri sighed, a sound that was almost a growl. She grabbed the front of my shirt and yanked me further into the room. “Spill. What’s going on?”
She was always the responsible one. While Ness thrashed and Vi started fires, Cerri stuck around to pick up all the pieces. I couldn’t ask her to handle my problems, too. It wouldn’t be fair of me. If that was the case, though, then why was I here?
Because I had nowhere else to go. I couldn’t hide with my dad’s side of the family. They were normal, human in every way. Mom’s side of the family was a mystery to me. She never mentioned having siblings. According to her, her own mother died young, too.
I was alone.
My chest tightened. Adrenaline chilled my veins. I tried to breathe past the suffocating pressure, but every breath was shallow. My head swam. The room started to tilt. If I didn’t sit soon, I was going to drop.
“Addie!” Cerri grabbed ahold of me just as my knees buckled.
I would have been more than happy to sit on the floor, but Cerri led me over to the couch where she sat me down and pressed her palm to my sternum.
“Is this some sort of magic?” I asked as my chest expanded.
Cerri let out a shaky laugh. “No magic. Just psychology…or is it physiology?”
Her touch calmed my rising panic. I guessed it was something she’d learned as part of the local shifter pack. They liked touch. It comforted them. Even though Cerri was born to shifter parents, she couldn’t shift. It seemed that despite her inability to change forms, she’d still picked up a few things from her shifter family.
“Thanks,” I whispered softly.
She bent her head so she could try to look me in the eye. “Now, tell me. What’s going on?”
Where did I start? Instead of spilling the story of how I’d found a dead girl while camping and how the killer might be after me now, I got up and made my way to the big window that looked out over the parking lot.
I shouldn’t have.
The lot writhed with bodies. Even in the dark, I could see shapes moving, all crawling towards the building. I jerked back, realizing that the lights inside silhouetted my form and gave away where I was.
I ran across the room and slapped the light switch while Cerri cried out in confusion. Before she could ask more, I grabbed her arm and yanked her close so I could put a hand over her mouth.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
She wrapped her arms around me while I let my head fall against her shoulder. This close, I could feel the way she trembled, too. The cool and collected façade that she always wore fell apart in the dark.
“Do you have anything we can use to fight our way out?” I asked softly.