Cursed (Howl, #6) Read online

  “I left town because I didn’t want her to know what I’d become,” Eddie told her. “I told myself that, one day, I would be able to tell her about it, but . . . after the autopsy, I knew it was just too dangerous for me to involve my mother in my life. I started receiving death threats from people who seemed to think I was the one who had killed Joe.”

  Colby eyed him curiously. “Why would people think you were the one who killed Joe McKinley? Was there bad blood between the two of you?”

  Eddie shook his head. “No, it wasn’t that. In fact, there was no way I could have had bad blood with him because we’d never even met.” He took a nervous gulp of his lemonade. “The reason people thought I killed Joe McKinley was to get his talisman. They thought I wanted to become the next powerful werewolf, but obviously, they didn’t know me all that well. Power is the last thing I wanted. Heck, I still don’t want it.”

  Samara found it odd how, even though Eddie looked young, he talked like he was much older. The thing was, though, she had expected the coroner who did her grandfather’s autopsy to be someone much older and much wiser. She wasn’t sure how Eddie, who hadn’t been a werewolf for that long, knew enough about being a werewolf to be able to perform an autopsy.

  “So, did you kill him?” Luke asked, meeting Eddie’s gaze.

  Samara gaped at Luke. Why would you even ask him that? Obviously he didn’t kill my grandfather, since we know he’s still alive!

  We don’t know for sure that it was really your grandfather who you saw. It could have been a hallucination . . . or maybe Joe McKinley really is back in spirit form, Luke replied without meeting Samara’s gaze.

  “No, of course I didn’t kill Joe,” Eddie replied, shaking his head. “My parents may have raised me to be many things, but a killer isn’t one of them.”

  “So, your mom doesn’t know you’re a werewolf,” Samara said, processing what Eddie had said moments earlier about protecting his mother.

  Eddie shook his head. “No, she has no idea I’m a werewolf. I know it would just break her heart if she knew. You see, my mom always blamed herself for a lot of things in my life. I was born with a rare heart defect, which she always attributed to the fact that she was an older mom. I just know if she found out the truth, she would find some way to blame this whole thing on herself.”

  “There’s no way she could blame herself for you becoming a werewolf,” Samara insisted. “I’m guessing your mom isn’t a werewolf. Is your dad one?”

  Eddie shook his head and laughed. “No, neither of my parents are werewolves. But there is a way in which my mother could probably blame herself. She and my dad went away on a vacation once, and they hired this woman to stay with me. My mom didn’t really trust me not to get into any trouble while she was gone, you see, so she thought I needed a babysitter, even though I was seventeen. Well, the woman got really angry at me, and she changed into a wolf right in front of me. It scared the hell out of me, so I tried to shoo her out of the house. I didn’t even know that werewolves existed and, well, it was just terrifying. Before I could get her out of the house, though, she bit my arm.” Sighing, he met Samara’s gaze, with a pained look in his eyes. “Enough about me, though. I’ll trust that you won’t say anything. Why are you here?”

  Samara hesitated. Even though she wanted to talk to Eddie more about his life, she also knew that she needed to get the answers she had come here for or the whole trip would have been a waste. “We need to talk to you about my grandfather.”

  “Well, I could have guessed that much,” Eddie replied with a nod. “What about him?”

  “We need to know if he’s really dead,” Emma chimed in. When Eddie raised his eyebrows, Emma tossed her blonde hair over her shoulder and shrugged. “Sam thinks she saw him. We need to know if he’s really alive or if she’s just crazy.” She gave Samara a sideways glance. “No offense, Sam.”

  “None taken,” Samara mumbled, mostly because she had a feeling that Eddie was going to say that she was right, that Joe McKinley really was alive. It was the only explanation for what had happened.

  A dark look passed through Eddie’s eyes, and he darted them away from Samara and down to the floor. “Joe McKinley is dead.”

  “Are you sure?” Samara questioned, eyeing Eddie curiously. When he hesitated, she continued. “You don’t have to try to cover things up for him, Eddie. I know you’ve tried to do a good job keeping it a secret from everyone so far, but . . . we aren’t going to tell anyone. I just need to know for my own sanity. I’m pretty sure my grandfather wanted me to see him recently. I’m just not sure why he took off before I even had the chance to talk to him.” It still baffled her as to why her grandfather would show himself to her, but then disappear before they had the chance to talk. Sometimes, it even made her question whether she really had seen him at all, just for the sole fact that it didn’t make sense why he would leave so suddenly.

  “I’m positive that he’s dead,” Eddie said, meeting her eyes again and keeping his voice at an even level. “At least, I’m as positive as I can be, given the circumstances.”

  Colby narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean you’re as positive as you can be? Is there a chance you could be wrong about this?”

  Eddie sighed. “Look, contrary to what a lot of people think, I never actually performed an autopsy on Joe McKinley. I know how to do an autopsy, but I’m not sure I would have been able to figure out Joe.”

  “Then, who did the autopsy?” Luke asked, his voice rising to a slightly angry level.

  Samara shot him a look. Don’t yell at him. We came here for answers, not to spark an argument. You can’t expect him to answer us if you make him mad.

  I can’t help it. All of the werewolves in the world think this guy did the autopsy, and he never did? Something seems off here, if you ask me, Luke replied, not bothering to meet her eyes.

  Samara held in her inner sigh, hoping that Luke wouldn’t make any mistakes while they were here. The last thing they needed to do was start a fight while they were on another pack’s territory.

  Eddie stared down at the floor guiltily. “I know what I did wasn’t ethical, but I had to honor Joe’s requests. I don’t know why he wanted me to be the one who did the autopsy—or to be the one not to do it, I should say—but, for whatever reason, he chose me.” He closed his eyes, as though he were trying to remember exactly what had happened. “The body had to be shipped to me so I could perform the autopsy, except . . . there was a letter that came with it, instructing me not to open the body bag. Joe had written me a note, telling me the reason he had died was because his power had gotten to be too much—that he knew the reason was because it was beginning to drain him of all his energy.” He opened his eyes again and stared at each of them. “Joe didn’t want me to do the autopsy, understand? He gave me the reason he died, and I was to let everyone know that was what had caused his death.”

  “So, you never actually checked to see if that was what really caused his death?” Colby questioned, raising a blonde eyebrow at him. Samara could tell, from the look on his face, that Colby felt disappointed to find out that everything he had had learned about Joe McKinley’s death—or at least his autopsy—had been a lie.

  Eddie shook his head. “No, I didn’t check to see. And to be honest, I’m not sure that I would have known what to check for. It’s not like there would have been a silver bullet wound or his airway had gotten blocked off during a fight or something. He really died of natural causes, just like he said he did.”

  Samara hesitated, considering what all of this could mean. “So, you did see the body then?”

  “Well, yeah, sort of,” Eddie replied with a nod. “I opened the bag enough to make sure there was really a body in there, and there was. He died while he was in wolf form, so there was a white wolf body in the bag. But I didn’t want to look at his face. It just made me feel sort of weird, to see him dead like that, considering I’d never met him before. Can you imagine looking into a dead wolf’s face for the first t
ime after they were already dead? It’s creepy. That’s something that would stay with you for the rest of your life.”

  “Creepy or not, it shouldn’t have mattered,” Luke protested. “You were supposed to do an autopsy, but you didn’t.”

  “But I wasn’t supposed to do an autopsy,” Eddie insisted, and his eyes filled with a look that pleaded for them to believe him. “Joe didn’t want me to do the autopsy on him, for whatever reason. He just asked that I bury his body and announce to the world what he told me. I did exactly that. I couldn’t disrespect his wishes, especially considering he was the most powerful wolf in the world.” He sighed. “Sometimes, I used to wonder if someone might have killed Joe and delivered him to me with a note because they didn’t want anyone to know that they’d killed him, but that wouldn’t make much sense, would it? Everyone wanted to kill Joe. If someone really had done it, they would have been proud of it. Who wouldn’t be proud of killing the most famous wolf in history? That would have made them the next most powerful—or maybe, in some eyes, even more powerful.”

  “You’re right, unless they were afraid that Joe had too many friends,” Samara said quietly. “Maybe they were afraid that someone would come after them for killing him.”

  Eddie laughed. “Joe didn’t have a lot of friends. I know you’ve probably heard that he had a lot of enemies, but I don’t think you realize just how many. He had a lot of enemies. That’s probably why Joe went into hiding for a while.”

  “He went into hiding?” Samara questioned. She was pretty sure she remembered Orkos mentioning that Joe had been planning to go into hiding, but she hadn’t realized that he had actually done it. If he really had gone into hiding, who was to say that he wasn’t still in hiding? It would mean that he had a lot of practice at it.

  “That was the rumor. I think he was supposed to go into hiding somewhere in Arkansas. No one would have thought to look for him there.” Eddie shrugged. “I know that he used to keep a book of his enemies?”

  “A book?” Samara asked with raised eyebrows.

  Eddie nodded. “Yeah, that’s what the Vyka youth pack told me. He had this book with names of the people who he trusted and the ones who he didn’t trust. A lot of werewolf historians think that if they can get their hands on that book, they might be able to figure out who killed him—or narrow it down to a few names, at the very least.”

  “You have that book, Samara,” Colby said, turning to her. “It’s the book he left you—the one where the names are color-coded as either green or red!”

  “You’re right,” Samara murmured, wondering why she hadn’t realized this on her own.

  A light bulb seemed to go off in Colby’s head, and he tugged at her arm excitedly. “I think I finally figured it out! It’s color-coded sort of like a traffic light—red means ‘stop’ and green means ‘go’. The names that are listed as green mean they’re good, and the names that are listed as red means they can’t be trusted.”

  Luke frowned. “That doesn’t make much sense, though. Finn McClellan was listed as green.”

  “Actually, it makes perfect sense,” Samara said, glancing over at Luke. “My grandfather obviously trusted Finn McClellan, even if he is the one who killed him.” She didn’t want to say that she still wasn’t convinced that her grandfather was dead—not in front of Eddie, at least, who seemed confident that he wasn’t alive.

  “Finnegan McClellan?” Eddie asked.

  Samara nodded. “Yes. Did you know him?”

  “Yeah, I knew Finn McClellan,” Eddie replied. “You think he might be the one who killed Joe? When Samara nodded, Eddie said, “That wouldn’t have surprised me at all. That guy was one crazy bastard.”

  Samara raised an eyebrow at him, beginning to wonder if he was telling them the truth about everything. “How is it that you knew Finn, but you didn’t know my grandfather?”

  “When I was first turned into a werewolf, I was a part of the Vyka youth pack,” Eddie explained. “The thing you have to understand, though, is I didn’t want to be a werewolf, so I avoided my pack as much as I possibly could. They didn’t bother with me for a while. If anything, I felt like I got a lot of sympathy from them.” He paused before adding, “Joe and Finn were obviously a part of the youth pack. While I was a part of the Vyka youth pack, we rarely saw the adult pack—and when we did, Joe never seemed to be around. He was always off fighting some pack or another, sometimes with a few select members of his pack and sometimes alone. There were also times when he was visiting his hometown in Alaska. At least, that’s what I was told.”

  Eddie poured himself another glass of lemonade and explained, “So, we just never crossed paths, Joe and me. I didn’t cross paths with Finn McClellan for a while, either. Not until I was ready to move. I got the permission of my youth pack Alpha, a guy named Gerry Lotkins, to join another pack. The reason I wanted to move was simple: I didn’t want my parents to find out where I was. It was tough living in the woods all the time, and I refused to go home because I didn’t trust myself around them. What if I bit them, too? I didn’t want to put them in that sort of danger. I wanted to make a life for myself. You know, maybe to go to school one day, make human friends, get a job, and own a home. I planned to change my name. That’s how I became Ed Rickards.

  “Well, as I was packing up my stuff to leave, Finn comes at me and tries to persuade me into staying a Vyka. I told him I couldn’t, and he got really aggressive with me.” Eddie shook his head in annoyance. “I hate to say it, but I was sort of happy the day Finn died. I worried he was going to come up here and find me—try to kill me, even—if I didn’t agree to go back to the Vyka. There was no way I would be going back.” Meeting Samara’s gaze, he said, “I’d never considered the theory before, that Finn might have been the one who killed Joe. But now that I think about it, I would put money on it, that it was him. He always seemed sort of jealous of Joe, every time someone mentioned him. Almost like he wished he could be as powerful as Joe.”

  Samara shifted on the leather sofa uncomfortably and took a small sip of lemonade. As the lemony liquid stung against her tongue, she could only think one thing.

  If Eddie really was telling the truth, that her grandfather really had died, then maybe she had just imagined everything. Maybe she was crazy. Maybe she was hallucinating, even.

  Or maybe Grandpa Joe really had come back in spirit form. If that was the case, though, the question was: did he come back to haunt Samara or to help her?

  Chapter 7

  “Well, that felt pointless,” Luke said once they were settled back in the car.

  Samara glanced over at him. “How was it pointless? We got some of the answers we needed. Now we know that my grandfather really did die.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Colby said hesitantly from the backseat. “Just because Eddie says your grandfather died doesn’t mean he really did.”

  Samara sighed. “Why would he lie about it, though? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not like he has anything to gain by lying about it.”

  “Actually, it makes tons of sense,” Colby replied matter-of-factly. “We caught him off-guard, sure, but he’s not an idiot. He needs to keep up with the act he started years ago.

  If Joe McKinley is alive—and I’m pretty sure he is—Eddie doesn’t want to break his trust. I mean, would you want to mess with the world’s most powerful werewolf? And that’s not to mention how the rest of the werewolf world would feel about Eddie if they knew he lied about really doing the autopsy.”

  “Guys, Eddie wasn’t lying,” Emma spoke up, glancing up from her cell phone, which she had been text messaging on minutes before. “I can tell he wasn’t lying. I didn’t hear that screechy thing I always hear when someone lies. Even if Eddie’s wrong, he is telling what he believes to be the truth.” Pausing, she added, “I don’t know if your grandfather is dead or alive, Sam, but I do know one thing. I am starving. This werewolf girl really needs to eat. Do you think we can pull over somewhere and get some dinner?” />
  Samara realized that her own stomach was beginning to rumble with hunger at just the mention of food. “Yes, let’s stop at the next restaurant we see.”

  *

  Ten miles and a twenty minute wait later, they all sat at two long tables that the staff pushed together for their large party of eleven. Once the waitress had taken their orders down, Samara and Luke shared everything that they’d learned from Eddie.

  “Ghosts, I tell ya, ghosts,” Steve said, slurping Mountain Dew from his straw.

  Samara smiled, happy that at least someone was thinking along the same lines as her.

  Chris glanced over at her as he shoved a French fry in his mouth. “Sam, when you saw your grandfather on the night of the wedding, did he look like the Trusted Ones? You know, all transparent and stuff?”

  Dipping a piece of chicken into a cup of honey mustard, Samara shook her head. “No, he didn’t look like a ghost. At least, I don’t think he did.” She sighed, trying to remember how her grandfather had looked on the night of her wedding. “I don’t know. It was so shocking for me to see him there at all that I barely paid attention to whether or not I could see through his skin.”

  “You probably would have noticed,” Kyle chimed in. “The first time I saw Bennett, I wanted to shit a brick. It was seriously scary.”

  Even Samara had to admit that it had been pretty scary the first time that Bennett, Nadia, and Dante—the Trusted Ones—had visited them. Of course, half of the reason she had been afraid was because she hadn’t known that ghosts really existed or that Ouija boards—even if they were the type of Ouija boards that were used to call werewolf spirits, rather than human spirits—actually worked.

  Colby laughed. “It’s scary every time I see Bennett . . . especially when I’m in the shower. They’re not joking when they say to check behind the shower curtain for murderers before you take a shower. You should be looking for ghosts, though.”