I stop talking, because a brief memory crosses through my mind so painfully that I’m forced to wince. I’m thankful to be sitting, because my legs go numb when the pressure pulses through my body, and the scene quickly rolls out.

Jack…

Jack…

“Jack! This ends tonight.” The echo of my own voice pushes through my thoughts.

My eyes come up to meet Emit’s, and I slowly rise, my spine dancing with a new tremor.

Jack…

That Jack…

“Why does it look like you’ve just had a huge revelation that has stunned you out of operational mode? Are you rebooting, Van Helsing?” Damien asks me.

“She does this. She does it all the time. She does something crazy, but there’s so much more going on that you dare not look a gift horse in the mouth. Sometimes it’s easier to just accept all the good she brings, while overlooking all the fucked up impracticalities that accompany it. We know she does this. We both love it and hate the mystery of it, because of our desperate need for a fresh breath and our great many trust issues.”

“What are you on about?” Arion asks.

“Jack was a different sort of monster. One that I long forgot about, because he was a freak-botched science experiment—not magic,” I murmur, questioning what I know about absolutely everything. “What if it’s all been a fucking lie from the very beginning?”

I turn and dart out without another word, hearing the wolf’s feet pounding the floor as he follows.

He doesn’t ask questions.

I don’t have answers.

At this point, my head’s going to explode if one more thing comes flying at me.

“Why did you ask about Jack?” I ask him as we sprint across the town, weaving between some straggling evacuees.

We’re both looking over our shoulder at every possible second, waiting for the shoe to drop.

“Because I’m about to ask everything that doesn’t make sense. Damien had to sedate her just to get her out of this situation, because she clearly lost control there at the end.”

I stop and take a deep breath once we reach my archive room, my hand shaking as I reach for the door.

“This storm isn’t natural. Violet can’t conjure storms. You fell out of the silver without a person to thank,” he carries on. “I feel like we’re on the outside of an inside job, and it makes me feel like I’m a pawn.”

“The feeling is mutual,” I say quietly, as I quickly type Jack’s name into my system. “Who broke my chains?”

“That’s the thing. No one broke them. They simply fell off,” he confesses.

I straighten, turning to face Emit, my mind settling down ever so slightly. The machine beeps, and I turn to see the file pop up.

“Who the hell is that?” Emit asks, leaning past me.

I turn back, even though now my mind has turned in a new direction, making it hard to focus. The pressure that built up remains repressed, causing my temple to throb.

“Start at the beginning,” I tell him, my voice chilling.

“What do you mean?” Emit asks, as I point behind me.

“Was your first impression of Violet memorable?” I ask Emit, my voice staying very calm.

“Extremely. She was stumbling around in homemade underwear, while Anna mocked her,” he says. “Why are you asking that?”

“During this time, Anna continuously mocked her to the point of turning every single thing she did into some silly action. We consistently talk of the severity of her inexperience versus her increasingly high list of impossible things, and carry too much casual dismissal. Why, Emit?”

“It’s not just because of Anna. Anna was even dead for a while,” Emit answers, even though he’s not full of conviction.

“A dead ghost. Back from the dead. Let me introduce you to Jack, Emit,” I tell him, my voice as shaky as my hands. “Jack has a long list of aliases that I’ve killed him under. William. Edward. Bailor. Montana. Maxwell. The list could go on, but you get the point.”

“What does any of this have to do with Anna?”

“I’ve killed Jack three dozen times, under one name or another. What if Jack realized he couldn’t beat me as a man, and finally found a woman to haunt and use against me?” I bite out.

His brow furrows, clear confusion in his gaze.

“If Anna is really Jack, and has somehow found a way to attach himself—or herself—to Violet, we have an even bigger fucking problem. Jack was an altogether different breed of monster, Emit.”

“What are you talking about? Why wouldn’t you have told us something like that?” he asks, taking a step closer.

“Because you don’t even bother keeping your own wolves in line, mongrel,” I grind out, glaring at him. “Why in the hell would you have cared about another monster that was usually almost too easy to slay? Why would I report that to you?”

“How do you know it’s always the same monster? What the hell are you even saying? Why is this important if it’s so easy to kill?”

I honestly don’t know what I’m saying, but as I stare at the screen with the blurry image of Jack, seeing his green eyes glowing bright, something uneasy settles inside me.

“Because I killed the monster by slaying the man it was haunting. The monster is nothing more than some sort of spirit. It lives off the soul of a human. But—”

“Violet’s not human,” Emit, the bloody brilliant man of obvious insight he is, says.

“I’m always impressed by your powers of deduction,” I tell him very dryly.

Lightning crashes so close that all the lights in my home shut off, leaving an eerie silence to follow.

I glance out the window, seeing my staff’s homes along the river’s edge. All the lights are off, as the wind howls and the storm rages even stronger.

Emit’s phone rings, as my mind works in circles, trying to figure out how the pieces fall together.

I’ve seen Violet’s monster. It was nothing like Jack or any of the others.

“There’s a distinct lack of howls. Tell me my wolves aren’t frenzy feeding right now on all the humans we’re evacuating,” Emit says over the phone, sending my spine rigid.

Fucking hell. I didn’t even think about how tempting zombie-like blood tanks would be to some of the barely-leashed monsters.

“No, Alpha,” Charlotte, one of his human mothers he turned several centuries ago, says over the line. “That’s the thing. I can’t seem to even stick my foot outside,” she says, a whine in her voice. “The omegas we have here are cowered under anything they can find. My instincts demand me to shrink for the first time since I became a wolf. I can’t even make it to the fields like you asked me to do.”

If Charlotte can’t move, then most others will be frozen in true terror.

“That’s Idun’s power,” Emit tells her quietly. “She’s her monster right now.”

“Will hiding in the cellars do any good?” she asks.

“Only from the shifters. Get the children underground. Stand prepared to defend them if they start ransacking our lands. Call me immediately if it—”

There’s a loud set of feral barks in the background, followed immediately by a scream on the line. Emit’s wolf bursts free, and he crashes through the window beside me in the next instant. His phone topples to the ground after he’s gone, and I hear a loud gasp, seconds before the line buzzes with static.