Chapters (43)
- The Outlaw Demon Wails
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- The Undead Pool: An Excerpt
- Chapter 2
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Also by Kim Harrison
- Credits
- About the Publisher
But I was out. I had to talk to my mom, and it was going to take more than two security guards in tuxes to stop me. Why hadn’t she told me? I thought, my palms sweating and my stomach clenched. Why hadn’t my crazy, loony mother told me?
The tires squealed as I took the turns, and once on the three-mile drive out of here, I started to get scared. Was the reason she hadn’t told me because she was a little nuts, or was she a little nuts because she was too afraid to tell me?
Twenty-two
The thump of Trent’s car door shutting broke the autumn stillness, and the human kids waiting for the bus on the corner turned briefly before going back to their conversations. Someone had smeared a tomato on the street sign and they were giving it a wide berth. My arms wrapped around me against the cold, I tossed the hair from my eyes and headed for my mother’s front walk.
The chill from the rough pavement went right through my socks and into me. Driving over without shoes had felt odd, like the pedal was too small. The time spent getting here had cooled me down, too, Trent’s comments about shame, guilt, and embarrassment reminding me that I wasn’t the only one whose life this touched upon. Actually, I was sort of coming in on the tail end of this drama—an afterthought, an also-ran. I was either the accidental shame of someone’s mistake or the result of a planned action whose beginning was covered up.
Neither option left me feeling very good. Especially since my dad had been dead for a long time, leaving plenty of opportunity for the man who’d gotten my mom pregnant to come forward if he wanted. Or maybe it was a one-night fling and he didn’t care. Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe Mom just wanted to forget.
The kids at the stop had noticed I was in my socks, and I ignored their hoots as I tiptoed up the walk with a hunched posture. The memory of standing at the bus stop rose through my thoughts, of me going in on the same bus that dropped the human kids off. I never understood why my mom had wanted to live in a mostly human community. Maybe it was because my dad had been human, and no one would be as likely to notice he wasn’t a witch?
My toes were cold from the melting frost as I reached the porch. Starting to shiver, I rang the bell and heard it chime faintly. Waiting, I looked around, then rang it again. She had to be home; the car was in the drive and it was freaking seven in the morning.