There’s nothing quite like family. They can lift you as high as the heavens with a single hug, or sink you to the depths of Hell by reminding you of that one stupid thing you did all those years ago. And no one does either of those better than a sibling.

As I pulled Eve into a tight embrace, ran my hands through her choppy pixie hair and held her tighter than any woman I’ve ever hugged, a warmth and relief took root in my heart and flooded out to the very tips of my body.

“God, it’s good to see you,” I said as I pulled her tighter. “Do you know what we’ve fucking been through trying to find you?”

“I’m fine, Sis,” Eve replied, stroking my back. “I’m fine, okay? You didn’t need to come all this way.”

We broke apart from our hug and I eyed her closely. I looked at her change in hair and at how she’d stopped wearing makeup. “You look good.”

“Thanks,” she said, smiling widely. Around the side of the building, the meal was letting out and a flow of white-robed cultists were coming out of the main hall. “Hey, let’s go get some privacy, okay?”

“Sure,” Jake said. “Lead the way.”

We stepped into a side building, what looked like a small warehouse. Building supplies were stacked up in the corner, and a bare bulb hung from the center of the room, casting a yellowish light over our little trio.

Eve and I stood in front of each other, an arm’s length apart. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to hug her again or slap her for the shit she’d put me through. Seeing that beautiful face of hers, those wicked eyes, it was hard not to love her, to just be thankful she was back in my life. She was my sister, after all.

Then she ruined it. After all, she was my sister.

“How’s Pops?”

I decided the slap worked best. A good, hard slap.

She held her hand to her cheek, her eyes wide, mouth hanging open. “What the fuck, Elise?”

“Pops is fucking dead!” I yelled, my hands balled up into fists at my sides. “You left me with him, you fucking bitch!”

She stood frozen with a look of complete bewilderment. “Dead?”

“He had fucking cancer!” I yelled, all that relief I’d felt somehow flipping immediately to anger and outrage. “You left me with him, you left me to watch him die, clean up his puke, watch him wither away! How the fuck do you think he’s doing? Think he’s going on nature hikes, taking the scenic route out to Santa Fe? Doing day trips to Albuquerque? He’s in the fucking ground, Eve! Did you think the Great Alpha was gonna come down and give him a slobbery lick, and he’d be magically fucking cured?”

Her eyes began to wander. Behind me, Jake cleared his throat and took a step back.

Staying out of this was probably his best option. Sisters could fight like Amazons when they’re into it.

Her gaze strayed off into a distant, dusty corner. “I didn’t think about it,” she said after a long moment. She shook her head. “I just—I don’t know. I just ran. I just ran from everything. First Mom, then Pops. I just couldn’t take it.”

I clenched my jaw and squeezed my knuckles so hard they popped, the snap-crackling sound surprising me a little and causing Eve to flinch. “You’re right,” I said, “you didn’t think. You thought you could just leave and let someone else clean up your damn mess for you. Well, it was me that was stuck mopping up after you. Me, your fucking sister. And now I’ve had to travel across three fucking states to find you. Are you fucking happy?”

“You didn’t need to come find me,” she said, her voice dropping so low it almost seemed like a groan. “I didn’t ask you to.”

“You didn’t ask? You sent me that damn postcard, didn’t you? What did you think I was going to do? Stick it on the fridge with a magnet and just wonder where you were for the rest of my life?”

She sighed and dropped her hand from her cheek. “Look, Elise, I’m sorry. Okay? I fucked up. I fucked up big time. I should have stuck around and, I don’t know, left afterwards if that was what I still wanted to do.”

I kept my eyes on her and gave her a good long stare.

“It’s just, watching him…watching him wither away like that, shrinking down to a skeleton—I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t handle watching Pops die. And I’m sorry. You were always the stronger one, but what I did still wasn’t right or fair. I’m sorry, okay?”

I sighed deeply, frowning. “Come here,” I said with a groan, pulling her back into my arms.

We hugged tightly again.

“I’m sorry,” she whimpered.

I sighed again, hugging her more tightly but careful not to strangle her, which was very tempting. “You’re not one of them, are you?” I asked, my voice husky and at a near whisper. “You’re not really one of them?”

She pulled back, her brow furrowed and eyes narrowed. “Fuck no. You really think I would buy into that crazy shit?”

I released a breath of relief, a breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding. “Thank fucking God.”

“Were you really worried?” she asked as she pulled away, her eyes searching mine for an answer.

I shook my head. “No, not really. I mean, not entirely. I mean, no, I guess not.”

“That’s noncommittal as all hell.”

I looked away. “I thought that maybe, I don’t know, you were kind of taken in by it. This is totally the kind of shit Mom would have gone for if Pops hadn’t been around.”

She let out a bark of laughter. “Yeah, probably. But there’s spiritualism, and there’s the Great Alpha. I’m definitely not in that camp yet. Besides, I’m just here because, well, you know.”

“Know what? Know that the Denver Mafia is after you?”

Eve winced and stepped away. “Yeah,” she finally admitted. “Yeah.”

I kept my hand by my side even though, by God, I wanted to slap the shit out of her again. “You know Trigger is looking for all three of us now, right? We need to bring him back his drugs.”

She looked away, her teeth worrying away at her lower lip. “I…I didn’t mean to get you involved. That’s why I went north, you know, up here. Instead of back home.”

Well, that was something. She’d had enough sense to keep her big sister out of harm’s way, or try to at least. I just glared at her, though. “You fucked up. That man’s out for blood if he doesn’t get what he wants.”

Arms wrapped tightly around herself, she turned away from me, her fingers twisting the fabric of her white robes.

“His name’s Trigger,” I continued. “Trigger Thomas, and he’ll find us. Why’d you do it, Sis? Why’d you run off with those drugs? You didn’t sell them, you didn’t do them. Why?”

“I—I don’t know,” she slowly began, “I took them because I didn’t want Kevin involved in them. He was a sweet guy at first, but he was kind of an idiot. We were doing some stuff with a local biker club, making a little bit of money. But he got it into his head that he wanted to make more money. More, more, more. And, I guess, he thought it would make me happy if he made more cash. Like dealer cash.”

“You took it from him so he wouldn’t get deeper into it, didn’t you?”

Looking back to me now, Eve nodded. “That was the idea, yeah. I figured if I could take it out of his hands, if I could just remove him from it, I could somehow save him. Maybe, like, preserve him as that lovable doofus I’d first hooked up with. I mean, I wreck everything I touch, so I might as well have left something good in place. Right?”

“Didn’t work out that way, though, did it?”

“No. No, it didn’t. The bikers, they took the drugs from me. Payment, they said, for keeping me safe from Kevin, who was going ballistic now about everything. And then, payment for helping me get up here. Which, I guess, is better than the alternative. The way those guys looked at me, Elise…you have no idea.”

I frowned. I certainly did have some kind of idea. “Yeah, those guys were rough. Real pieces of shit.”

“I’d wanted to just take it from him,” Eve continued as she tried to brush a non-existent strand of hair behind her ear in a nervous tick, “to try and teach him a lesson. To, maybe, save him from getting into deeper shit.” She trailed off, leaving a weird pregnant silence in the air of the supply building, one that was barely disturbed by the murmurs and whispers of cultists outside as they slowly drifted back to work.

“Instead, you got him killed,” Jake said, finally breaking his silence. “We found him in the trunk of his car a couple days ago.”

Her lower lip began to tremble. She looked away again, for just a moment, but when she turned back to me, a finger was wiping away a tear. “He’s dead? Kevin’s dead?”

Jake and I both nodded. “Yeah,” Jake said. “He’s dead. Pretty sure the Denver Mafia were the ones who killed him, too. No proof, but they’re not going out of their way to deny anything.”

“Are you a cop or something?” she asked Jake warily.

Jake shook his head. “Just a friend. Used to be one, though, but not anymore.”

She turned back to me. “So what do we do now?”

“Well, we’ve got a couple options. We can either run or we can try and find some more. We’d try to buy them back from those bikers, but I don’t think they’d sell to me or Jake. Too much bad blood from the past.”

Eve let out another long breath. “I think I might know where we can get some more. But I don’t think either of you are going to like it.”