THE SOUND OF a V8 engine revving down the street pulled me from my preparations for the somewhat dreaded, but necessary, meet and greet at Evie’s house. Even though I was tempted to ignore the droning noise, I couldn’t. Not when an all too familiar pull in the pit of my stomach told me I was needed outside. The sensation claimed me—the customary tug of my senses that always indicated my twin was nearby. Usually, I found the phenomenon to be somewhat comforting—especially during a difficult hunt. But now, it felt ominous. A warning about the dangers that were about to unfold for Evie.

No. I clung to the desperate hope that the feeling was misplaced—that it was just nerves over what the day would bring. It has to be wrong. Lou can’t be here. She can’t find out about Evie.

My heart thumped heavily against my ribcage as I raced through the corridors and pushed open the door with all of my strength. I sprinted to the road just in time to see Lou turning onto the street. There was no doubt anymore; she was looking for something—and that something was me. The task of helping Ben sort through his shit obviously wasn’t as time consuming as I’d hoped it would be.

Closing my eyes, I breathed out a small sigh of relief. Despite the shitty situation of Lou arriving, at least she’d chosen the best possible day to turn up. Any previous day and Evie would have already been on her way over, and would have stumbled across the danger without any warning. Of course, a few days later and we might have disappeared entirely, so I couldn’t be entirely overjoyed at the timing.

On Lou’s next lap around the block, she spotted me. Or perhaps she sensed my proximity the same way I’d been able to feel her drawing nearer. Regardless, it was clear she knew I was there.

Stupid twin shit.

I should’ve known I wouldn’t be able to escape from her curiosity, even with her distractions. We were linked in multiple ways, one of which was the unexplainable twin bond that on occasion almost bordered on ESP. Some of our links went deeper still; they had less to do with being twins and more to do with surviving through shared sufferings. Her disappearance and the way we’d learned to cope with it in the years after she’d returned had forged a stronger bond than most siblings—even other twins—ever had.

At least it had until our teens, when hormones and jealousy had appeared for the first time. Girls started to notice me and the boys noticed her. She hated the former and spurned the latter. I couldn’t explain her logic completely, all I knew was that so many of her trust issues ran deep to her core, and she had a hard time with outsiders. Dad, Eth, and I were the only one she’d ever really let in—me even more than the others—and since our early teens, she’d been terrified of the day she might have to let me go.

The knowledge that I’d been so willing to run from that bond, and the promises I’d made, twisted my stomach a little as I saw my sister’s frown. It was clear she was in full-bitch mode once more—almost standard for her these days—but she hadn’t always been that way.

In fact, only a few short years ago, she’d been fragile, and I’d been her hero . . . of sorts. I could easily recall those days.

 

THE DOOR to my bedroom creaked open, and Lou stood just outside the empty frame.

“Are you awake?” Her voice was strained, and the tears on her face glistened slightly in the soft moonlight.

“Yeah.” I yawned as I answered her.

It was the sound of her screams that had pulled me from sleep, and I was ready to go back to my dreams, but I was also ready to push all that aside to give her whatever comfort she needed.

“Bad dream?” I asked, even though I didn’t really need to. All signs pointed to yes after all.

She usually found her way into my bedroom after a nightmare at least twice a week. During a particularly bad one, when the night terrors struck and held her body captive and immobile, I would have to run to comfort her in order to silence the screams that echoed endlessly throughout the house. It was a lot for a twelve-year-old to handle, but I was long used to her recurring visions. Every time it seemed like too much, I just remembered that it could have easily been me haunted by the memories of years of torture at the hands of fae.

It should have been me. My body quivered as I considered the things she’d suffered through, things she would have avoided if the stupid fairies had just picked the other baby—if they’d picked me.

She sniffed and nodded. “It was like they were cutting me again.”

Her hand wrapped over the faint scars on one arm. Even in the darkness, I could see the thin lines that covered both of her arms. To a casual observer the lines spider-webbing across her skin were easy to miss, but Louise had whispered how each one came to be. Each and every mark was evidence of the excruciating torture she’d endured at the hands of her masked assailants, the likes of which I wouldn’t even consider inflicting on the worst demon from Hell. That knowledge made them glow like beacons to me—sliver-thin reminders of the monstrous nature of the fae.

It was the main the reason I hated fairies above any other type of monster I’d encountered. None of the other foul creatures I’d faced would carve runes into the skin of a toddler for God knows what reasons. Eat them, sure, there were at least a hundred species that would do that. But somehow, I could almost understand that. Hunger was a primal drive, one that even humans would do crazy things to sate. It was something that could steal away all normal sense and decorum. Torturing an innocent child . . . that was something else entirely.

One day, I would ensure that every one of the bastards who had done it to her would pay.

Knowing that voicing all of those opinions would do nothing to help Lou in that moment, I pushed them aside. Instead of dwelling in the past, I sat up in my bed and patted the mattress beside me to invite her into the room. The sound of her feet padding over to my bed, accompanied by her stifled sobs, filled the space between us. After she’d sat down beside me, I wrapped my arm around her shoulder.

“You know they can’t hurt you anymore, don’t you?”

She nodded, but her previously quiet tears grew louder. The force of her sobs shook the bed beneath us, and I worried because she couldn’t possibly have been getting enough oxygen.

On the other side of the room, drawn almost awake by the sound of Lou’s sorrow, Eth snorted loudly before snuffling, rolling over, and then settling back to sleep.

“Eth and I have your back,” I reminded her. “Always. We’ll never let those filthy beasts near you again. We’ll never let anyone hurt you again.”

Like she did so often when her nightmares struck, she brushed her fingers across the intricate patterns of her scars. With almost delicate precision, she traced the razor thin marks as she chewed on the inside of her cheek. Her quiet introspection was the result of her memories, but that didn’t make me hate it any less. Sometimes she could sink into herself for days on end, occasionally even answering unheard voices. It was those times that the guilt ate at me the most. I would have gladly accepted the weight of that burden on my shoulders to spare her the suffering she’d been through.

“Did you hear?” I asked, trying to draw her mind from the past by talking about the current case that Dad was working in a town about twenty miles away. “Dad thinks it might be a poltergeist.”

She lifted her eyes to mine. It was clear she realized my words were little more than a diversion, but she wasn’t so deeply stuck in her own mind yet to refuse to be distracted. “Really? Do you think he’ll want us to help?”

“Probably.” I chuckled before nudging her shoulder with my own. “You know he’s useless without us.”

She giggled in response. It wasn’t entirely true, and we both knew it. Dad was more than capable of destroying most of the creatures we encountered in our life—he’d been the one to single-handedly rescue Lou from the fae den after all. It was just a long-running joke in our family that Lou and I somehow made it easier for him to find them. There was some truth to the joke though. No one could explain exactly why, but it was almost as if we had a sixth sense about all things other. Between that, Lou’s desire to rid the world of all the freaks and monsters, Dad’s experience, Eth’s willingness to do just about anything, my ability to find my way around most computer programs and databases, and the four of us were without doubt the strongest team in the USA—maybe even the world.

 

LOU FLOORED the car toward me, fishtailing down the street before stomping on the brake at the last second. The car pulled up to a stop in a cloud of dust and rocks just a few yards from where I was standing. I lifted my hand to cover my face so that I didn’t get sprayed by the rocks. I only lowered my arm again once the dust had settled.

She climbed out of the car and cast me a rebuking scowl. Then she took in the building behind me and turned her nose up in disgust. I resisted rolling my eyes. Of course she’d be the one member of my family to find me.

And of course she’d bring the car that Dad would most likely notice was missing—his favorite cherry-red SS Chevelle. It meant he wouldn’t be far behind once he realized it was gone. While I doubted he’d notice my absence in any hurry, I was certain he’d miss that car after only a few hours.

“Why are you here, Lou?” I was so disappointed about my date with Evie being disrupted that I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm about seeing my sister, especially with the danger her presence signaled for the woman I was infatuated with.

Lou flicked her long bangs to one side. “Hello, dear sister, it’s nice to see you again. How was your long-ass drive from New York? I’m sorry that I’m staying in a hovel of a warehouse and all that you had to work with to find me was a picture from a surveillance camera near the airport.” Her snide pitch wasn’t lost on me.

I sighed and couldn’t resist the urge to roll my eyes this time. Her bitch-mode was definitely turned to full. It was an attitude that I was slowly getting used to—the same attitude I’d had to put up with from all of my family since Evie had left. I was willing to concede the fact that maybe I was the one with the attitude and they were just projecting it back on me, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t sick of dealing with it from the three of them. “I came here to get away from your shit, so what do you want?”

I regretted the harsh words the instant the hurt fluttered through her eyes. Of course, being the cold, hard bitch she’d grown to become, she tamped it down again just as quickly as it had escaped. “That’s the thanks I get for making sure my brother is still alive, is it?”

“I’m fine.”

“Well, I can see that now. We’ve all been worried about you. You disappeared so suddenly after we found Ben. We thought maybe you’d been replaced too.”

“I told Eth I was going.”

“But he said you were acting strange.”

My jaw flexed as I pressed my teeth together in irritation. I hated that they could read me so well. It had saved our lives often enough, but that didn’t make it easy to deal with when it turned around to bite me on the ass. “Then get back in the car, go back to Hell and tell everyone else that I’m doing just fine. I’m still me. I’m not a doppelganger. If I was, I probably would’ve wanted to stay close to you all in order to do some actual damage and not hide away in this shithole.”

Lou took a step away from the car and moved closer to me. “We’re not at Bayview anymore.”

“Why not?” I was certain they’d stay at the prison for a little while longer until everyone was certain that the fae doppelganger wasn’t part some a larger conspiracy.

“We’ve got an assignment. Dad asked me to find you for it.”

“Whatever it is, you don’t need my help. The three of you have handled things before on your own.”

She stepped forward, her voice almost sweet as she spoke. “Of course we need you.”

“If you just need a fourth, why not take Ben.”

“We need you.”

I was going to continue to argue, but figured there wasn’t really much point. She’d only argue back, and we would never get anywhere. Every extra minute she was here was a minute more that I’d be late for seeing Evie and meeting her father. I couldn’t imagine how crazy I would’ve felt if Evie had not turned up for one of our daylong dates after she’d promised she would.

I wished I had some way to contact Evie and let her know what had happened. I hated that neither she nor her father had a cell phone. Not that it would’ve have helped if they’d had one. It wasn’t like I could contact Evie with Lou watching me as intently as she was.

“Look, I drove all the way down here. I’m exhausted, starving, and just about ready to kick your ass to force you to come back with me. Why don’t you get in the car, and we can go get something to eat at least? Then we can just talk, like we used to,” Lou offered.

It wasn’t a huge sacrifice, and I could use the time to try to convince her that I just needed a few more days on my own before I would be ready to return for any mission they had for me. Evie and I could arrange to be long gone by the time my family realized I’d failed to show and came back down to find me.