All I knew was that I scented the Mother on the animal, who, at the sight of me, paused, his eyes darting from left to right, which made me wonder if it was going to attack or run away.

Now it had seen me, the cackle had died off, which told me it was scared.

Well, good!

I was damn glad about that.

For months, that noise had been haunting me, making every night’s sleep restless, but tonight, I’d vanquished it, and I decided to vanquish the fucking beast who’d tormented me for what felt like far too long.

I dove into action, running after the beast, but when I leaped high, pouncing up into the moonlit sky so that I could take it down, I heard a scream. I remembered it from when I was young. From when Lara had yelled bloody murder after father had slapped her, and the scream entwined with sobs I just knew belonged to her too, and like that, I was torn from my dream and back into my bedroom.

My mates were asleep, dozing around me. Eli was curled up between my legs, which would have been hilarious if he wasn’t so fucking big. Austin’s face was tucked into my shoulder, and Ethan slept on the side where Eli usually rested.

I sat up though, wide awake and jarring them into the same state as I twisted around, needing to act.

All day, I’d been trying my mom’s number, but she’d been unresponsive.

I just knew she’d answer now.

How I knew, I wasn’t sure, but I just knew it.

Lara needed me. I felt that so keenly it was an ache in my chest.

My mates jerked into wakefulness when I started moving, and they watched me dopily, not even asking any questions as I scrambled to get my cell from the many wireless chargers on the nightstand.

As I sought out the number, a number to a person I’d never imagined wanting to call again, a number that I’d rang a dozen times today, I was actually relieved when I heard a rasped, “Who is this, and why won’t you stop phoning me?”

Her voice hadn’t changed in all these years.

That was my first thought.

It was soft and whimsical, a little lyrical. She’d told the best bedtime stories, and when she’d sung lullabies for us, it had been so easy to drift off to sleep, to ignore the sounds of a new pitch where we’d pulled up to park for however long we could stay before we moved on, and to just fall into a restful slumber.

But she was weak.

Always had been.

She’d never protected us from our father’s wrath, had never stopped him from slapping us. His favorite move had been to backhand us, just a gentle tap, but because Draga Krasowski was a brick shithouse of a man, it was enough to send us flying as we went soaring onto the floor.

Jana had even earned herself a scar on her lip where he’d split it open with his signet ring. I remembered that particular occasion so well, because her gift? An ability to get small glimpses of the future. A gift he’d tried to monetize. That one particular time, when he’d asked her to pick a winner of a football game and she’d messed up, he’d slapped her.

The memories flooded me, flashing me back to a time that I didn’t necessarily want to forget, because I didn’t believe in looking back and forgetting everything. If you did that, you learned nothing from past mistakes.

Because I knew she was getting impatient, I sucked in a breath, knowing I had to shove aside past differences and do this to get to Lara, to help Lara… to help my baby sister who needed me, I whispered, “Mama, it’s me.”

Lara

When the creature slammed into my door, I felt sure I was a goner.

In fact, I’d never been surer of anything in my life.

Aside from the fact that I was going crazy, of course.

But I was pretty sure I’d been going crazy since I was a kid. Since I’d first started sensing people’s feelings, reading things into them that no empath should be able to read.

When I’d started seeing things inside them? I’d known I was losing my mind, but I’d hidden that talent, that so-called gift, and had played at being normal.

I knew what psychiatric hospitals looked like. I’d been to one once when I was a kid, when I’d been hospitalized after Jana’s death, which came so quickly after Sabina’s abandonment when she’d run away from home then died soon after, and it hadn’t been pretty.

In fact, it had been horrendous, and I’d made myself a promise that I’d do everything in my power to stop that from happening ever again.

So to hear my sister’s voice in conjunction with the rattling door was more bewildering than I could have imagined.

To hear the woman who I thought was dead talking to me on the phone, telling me shit about our mom that no one except for us kids could know? Even worse.

I had to believe, but even as I started to, my fear got tangled up in it, and I had to deal with the fact that the hyena was trying to break down my fucking door.

Until, of course, it wasn’t.

Until the noise stopped and there was a heavy slump, a loud bang as if—

My brow puckered as all went silent. And I meant silent.

I lived in the forest for a reason—to get peace and quiet. Out here, there were very few people, and even if there were, they were hunters who were traipsing in and around the forests a few times on the weekend. I’d purposely picked a town that was quiet, with a forest surrounding it that was large and plenty, and wasn’t on the tourist trail.

I’d picked somewhere where I could enjoy a tranquility that wasn’t often found in the real world.

I went to Kinsdale every week to pick up my groceries, but that was where things had gone wrong this weekend.

That was where everything had changed.

I’d learned that maybe I wasn’t so crazy after all.

Maybe the creatures, the spirits, I saw in others weren’t key signs that I was deranged.

Maybe they were people like the hyena out on my front porch. Maybe they were able to turn from an animal into a human and back again—

If there was more to the world than I ever knew, maybe I wasn’t insane.

The thought was enough to trigger a panic attack.

For so fucking long, I’d thought I was losing my mind, I’d thought I was losing my sense of self. I’d preserved it for years by living in the backend of nowhere, by keeping to myself, by staying alone, but I was, I had no shame in admitting, lonely.

I missed people. I missed doing normal things.

I missed the cinema and popcorn that was way too expensive for what it was, but that never tasted as good elsewhere.

Kali Sara, I missed the taste of a burger that I hadn’t cooked myself and which had been griddled on a stove that cooked a thousand burgers a day and was seasoned with that flavor.

I missed eying up a hot guy and watching his butt flex as he strolled down the street, and I missed coffee. Genuine barista coffee.

“Lara! Lara! Are you there?”

That voice. So uncanny. So Sabina.

She’d explained that she hadn’t died, I registered. Had explained it, but my brain had barely managed to process it. She’d told me our dick brother, Cyrilo, had come at her in a truck and had shoved her off the road with her baby boy and her husband. She’d told me that she’d been running for years, running from our father.

Of course, there was a bittersweet irony to the fact that for as long as she’d been running, our father had pretty much been institutionalized. Early onset Alzheimer’s had taken him hard, and as cruel as it was, as evil…I was glad.