Alpha Divided

I quickly straightened my room, and put the gris-gris in the drawer of my bedside table. I’d deal with it later. Maybe it was dumb, but I needed to investigate Luciana at least a little before I left. I had to see if this was the kind of thing she was into. I needed into her craft room.

I put on my running gear and laced up my shoes.

I waited until I heard my cousins and Daniel in the kitchen, and then went quickly downstairs.

“Going for a run. See you guys in a bit,” I said.

“Have fun,” Claudia yelled as I left.

I took off down the front stoop and made a few laps behind the houses. That way, if anyone saw me, they’d think I was just exercising.

It might’ve been better to wait until night, but some things needed to be handled on the spot. This was one of them. I’d had enough waiting.

If I left now with the gris-gris, maybe I could even prove that Luciana had broken our deal, but I didn’t want to hide behind the Seven. I wanted to take her down myself. I needed more information. The more I had, the better my argument would be. I needed it to be airtight. I hadn’t been joking about burning the compound to the ground if I were double-crossed.

Luciana had taken me from my mate. She’d cursed me. Twice. I was done.

It was unfair to damn the whole coven because of one person, but in this case, Luciana had already corrupted almost everyone.

As I circled the compound, I used my Were hearing to listen to the conversations inside the houses.

I nearly slowed when I heard her voice in the schoolhouse.

“To prepare the spell, we’ll need the following ingredients—”

That was all I needed. She was teaching, which meant she’d be occupied for a while. Daniel was in my house, and even if he went home, I didn’t think he’d tell his mother on me.

I dashed toward Luciana’s house. The quicker I went, the less chance I’d have of someone seeing me. Or at least that’s what I figured. I’d never been a very sneaky person and my few escape attempts from St. Ailbe’s had only proven that.

I carefully went through the backdoor and closed it softly behind me.

The house smelled overwhelmingly of cloves. Sage burned somewhere too, but it wasn’t enough to combat the cloves. Piles of garbage took up a lot of the room. Stacks of newspaper and flyers. Trash from take-out. Things in shopping bags that had never been used.

Luciana was a hoarder. My nose crinkled. It wasn’t dirty per se, but it was dusty. There was no way someone could really clean with this much junk everywhere.

I watched my steps as I moved deeper into the house, not wanting to disturb anything. The layout was pretty similar to the one in my cousins’ house. From what I could tell, most of the houses at the compound looked the same. It made sense if the same contractor had built all of them.

I wandered toward where I thought her craft room might be. If there were something I could use against her, it’d be in there. I let my feet carry me along until I found myself staring at a navy blue door. Fingerprints smudged the black lacquered doorknob.

My gut said that I wouldn’t like whatever was beyond that door.

My palms were sweating as I reached for the knob and hesitated, not quite touching it.

All the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. This wasn’t a place I wanted to be, but I needed to go in there.

In and out, I told myself. I’d be fast. And then I was leaving the compound. Going home to St. Ailbe’s. Home to Dastien.

“Fuck it,” I said to myself, and gripped the knob, twisting until it opened.

I immediately put my hand over my nose and mouth, to stop myself from gagging. How had my Were senses not smelled it sooner?

The floor was shiny black and almost entirely covered with a pentagram. Candles burned at the five corners of the star, and from the orientation in the room, it looked like the star was pointed downward.

Seeing what was on the altar at the center of the pentagram made my hands shake.

A dead black-feathered chicken lay across it next to a bowl. Inside the bowl was a picture of Dastien and me. We were on campus, sitting in the quad. There was a notebook in my lap, but I was laughing at Dastien. The picture was wrapped with some kind of fine, dark brown string. The color of my hair.

I wanted to grab it, but the tips of my toes were at the edge of the circle surrounding the pentagram. I’d watched enough movies and read enough books to know that crossing that circle could be bad news. I’d either alert her I was here or unleash something ugly. Either way, I wanted no part in that.

A brown matte substance was sprinkled all around the floor. I squatted down to get a better look, but I didn’t want to touch it. I gave it a sniff and it smelled of iron. I hoped it was blood from the chicken, but it could’ve been from anything.