“Oh, Mommy,” Dylan whispered quietly. “This is so damn unfair.”
Tears welled up and flooded over. Maybe she’d saved a lifetime of crying in preparation of this moment, but there was no stopping them now. Dylan wiped at her tears but they kept coming, too many for her to sweep away with her latex-covered hands. She got up and went around to grab a tissue from the box on her mother’s wheeled bed tray. As she dabbed at her eyes, she noticed a ribboned package sitting on a table at the other side of the small room. She walked over and saw that it was chocolates. The box was unopened, and from the look of it, expensive. Curious, Dylan picked up the tiny white card tucked under the silk grosgrain bow.
It read: To Sharon. Come back to me soon. Yours, G. F.
Dylan mulled over the initials and realized it had to be the runaway shelter’s owner, Mr. Fasso. Gordon, her mother had called him. He must have come to visit her sometime after Dylan had left. And the message on the card sounded a bit more intimate than your basic boss-to-employee, get-well sentiment…
Good Lord, could this actually be something more than one of her mom’s many disastrous infatuations?
Dylan didn’t know whether to laugh or cry even harder at the idea that her mother might have found someone decent. Granted, she didn’t know Gordon Fasso outside his general reputation as a wealthy, charitable, somewhat eccentric, businessman. But as far as her mother’s taste in men ran, Dylan figured she could—and had—done a lot worse.
She can’t hear me.
Dylan froze at the sudden sound of a female voice in the room.
It wasn’t her mother’s.
It wasn’t an earthly voice at all, she realized in the split second before she processed the static-filled whisper and then turned around to face the spirit of a young woman.
I tried to tell her, but she can’t hear me…can you…hear me?
The ghost’s lips didn’t move, but Dylan heard her speak as clearly as any other specter her Breedmate gift had allowed her to see. She held the sorrowful gaze of a dead girl who looked to be less than twenty years old.
A distant familiarity sparked as Dylan took in the goth clothing and the pair of black braids that hung over the girl’s shoulders. She’d seen her before at the shelter. The girl had been one of her mother’s favorites—Toni. The runaway who’d no-showed at the job Dylan’s mom had gotten for her. Sharon had been so disappointed when she told Dylan about losing Toni to the streets. Now, here that poor lost child was, reaching out at last, but from the grave and truly too far gone for anyone to help her.
So, why was she trying to communicate with Dylan?
In the past, she might have tried to ignore the apparition, or deny her ability to see it, but not now. Dylan nodded when the ghost asked again if she was being heard.
Too late for me, said the unmoving lips. But not for them. They need you.
“Need me for what?” Dylan asked quietly, knowing her own voice never carried into the afterlife. “Who needs me?”
There are more of us…your sisters.
The young woman tilted her head, exposing the underside of her chin. Riding on the slender line of her ethereal skin was the birthmark Dylan knew well.
“You’re a Breedmate,” she gasped.
Holy shit.
Had they all been Breedmates? All the ghosts she’d ever seen were exclusively female, always young, seemingly healthy-looking women. Had they all been born with the same teardrop-and-crescent-moon stamp that she had?
Too late for me, the ghost of Toni said.
Her form was beginning to break up, fading in and out like a weak hologram. She was becoming transparent, little more than a detached crackle of electricity in the air. Her voice was less than a whisper now, growing weaker as Toni’s image dissolved to nothingness.
But Dylan heard what she said, and it chilled her.
Don’t let him kill any more of us…
Dylan’s face was ashen as she came out of her mother’s room.
“What happened? Is she okay?” Rio asked, his heart knotting at the thought of Dylan possibly facing her mother’s passing all alone. “Did anything—”
Dylan shook her head. “No, my mom’s fine. She’s asleep. But there was…Oh, God, Rio.” She lowered her voice and pulled him to a private corner of the hallway. “I just saw the ghost of a Breedmate.”
“Where?”
“In the room with my mom. The girl was a runaway from the shelter, one my mom was very close to until she went missing recently. Her name was Toni, and she—” Dylan broke off, wrapping her arms around herself. “Rio, she just told me she was murdered, and that she’s not alone. She said there are more like her. She showed me her Breedmate mark and then she told me not to let any more of ‘my sisters’ be killed too.”