Her long black hair drifted around her like bands of seaweed in water. Her coal black eyes sparkled despite the lack of moonlight where she watched us. She smiled with jagged teeth. “Have you seen my children?” she asked in an eerie cry that seemed to echo from all directions.

“Holy shit.”

It was my only response before I attacked.

Chapter Three

“Bren, don’t!”

I ignored Celia and leapt off the deck, landing in my six-hundred-pound timber wolf form. The spirit’s high-pitched cackle raised the brown fur on my back in perfect “come and get me” mode. She disappeared through the evergreens just as my jaws opened to bite.

Normally my fangs wouldn’t have done jack shit against a spirit, but this one had taken a physical form. Good for me, bad—seriously bad—for her. Her long sheer gown swirled like flickering flames behind her as she sprinted around the firs in a dizzying blur. Damn it, she was fast. I hauled serious tail to keep up, using the blood red color of her gown to lure me to her like a goddamn bull.

“Where are my children . . . help me find my children.”

Her shrilled voice mocked and taunted me, disorienting my senses as it echoed from all directions. So I ignored everything but my sight and used my speed to propel me closer to her evil, decaying ass.

My paws thundered over the thick vegetation and masses of crumbling bark. We’d barreled halfway up the mountain when I pounced. The force of my weight slammed her thin figure across the earth, digging a small trench into the soil. My claws held her down while I dug my fangs through her skull. Gray matter spilled like chunks of rotten cauliflower. She screamed with rage and pain. I had her. I totally had her.

Too bad that’s when her children decided to show up.

And let me tell you, they were ugly little bastards.

Two boys donning rags of slithering insects broke through the trees and thick ferns. Their clawed little fingers stretched out, batting the air as they hissed with long black tongues. Their eyeless sockets fixed on me. “Mama. Mama,” they blubbered in low, throaty voices to the beat of “red rum.”

They launched onto my back, biting with sharp little teeth and puncturing their nails through my fur. I bucked and rolled, trying to hang tight to their mom and wrench the creepy shits off me. I would’ve managed if not for the scorching hot pain that shot through my rear. Something ripped through the muscle of my hind leg. And it wasn’t pretty. It seriously wasn’t pretty.

A little spirit girl about five or six, with—no lie—long writhing centipedes for pigtails, munched on my leg like it was a box of Cracker Jacks. Blood poured out of me like a leaky dam, splattering her dress of beetles and roaches, and making her chew that much faster.

Son of a bitch. I released Mommy Dearest and severed one of her daughter’s wrists. The kid’s hair didn’t appreciate that one bit. Seven centipedes snapped from her barrettes and slithered along my fur, searing through my flesh like trickles of boiling water and snaking their way along my back. Her brothers giggled in haunting demonic little spurts, like they were having the time of their undead lives. And because laughing at my royally screwed self wasn’t fun enough, the pint-size ghouls continued to stab their claws into my hide while the insects lining their clothing slid from their bodies to join the swarm crawling across me.

I growled and snapped at them, only to fill my jowls with a throng of wriggling bugs. The spirits held tight and their insect army scrambled faster. I swore, knowing I was in serious trouble. If these bugs made their way into my brain, they’d devour me from the inside out and use my soul to raise more dead. Shit. Where was a can of Raid when a werewolf needed one?

The centipedes wriggled their way across my thick fur. I felt every damn movement of their tiny legs as they marched across burning my flesh. The first squirmed its way into my ear just as the sound of sloshing water reverberated behind me.

Celia, my little hell kitty, gasped behind me. She sprinted forward, holding tight to a giant green pail in her hands. The child spirits hissed at her, this time in alarm. Whatever Celia carried was something they obviously feared.

The contents of her bucket splashed against me, forcing the spooks from my body. The boy who didn’t move fast enough hollered with a mind-numbing wail. His clothing scurried away in a frenzy and tunneled into the earth while his body was eaten away by whatever Celia had doused him with. His ribs cracked, one after the other, exposing his rotting and disintegrating organs.

Celia gagged from the reek of his dissolving innards. Luckily the leftover centipede rammed up my nose conveniently blocked part of the rancid scent.

“Oh God.” She swung her pail, sending the spirit’s remains soaring into the trunk of an old tree. It exploded in a swarm of flying creepy-crawlies that fell to the forest floor and burrowed deep into the earth.

Back to hell where you belong, ass**le.

I lunged at the two remaining kiddos, biting through the spirit boy’s neck while Celia severed the little girl’s head from her shoulders with a slash of her sharp claws.

“Mama . . . Mama . . . Mama,” the decapitated heads cried in garbled and distorted voices before their skulls and bodies caved inward and sank slowly into the earth.

I changed back to human and brushed off the drying shells of the remaining centipedes. My puncture wounds started to fill in. They stung like a mo-fo as they sealed. Still, it didn’t compare to the pain of rebuilding the half-eaten muscle in my thigh. My flesh seared and my nerves bellowed as the power of my beast restored the bulk of the ravaged area. Slowly the ache receded as the skin knitted closed and reformed a new pink layer.

My wolf’s healing ability was one hell of a gift, but not without its agony when it worked that hard and that fast. I pushed the pain deep within me so no more than a grimace wrinkled my features. Outward displays of pain could mark a were as weak and get him killed. I hadn’t survived this long as a lone by being a wimp.

Celia watched the earth reclaim the dead. Her pretty face scrunched when a couple of toadstools sprouted where the ground had swallowed the little buggers. She kicked at them, sending pieces to scatter against the soil. She then bent to retrieve her bucket, careful not to look at me directly. For all the time the weres and I had changed around her, she’d yet to get used to naked bodies walking around like it was no big deal.

“Holy water?” I asked, pointing to her empty bucket.

She caught my motion in her peripheral vision and nodded. “The wolves have had my sisters keep a couple of buckets on hand since these ghosts have started showing up around Tahoe.”