Wolf's Bane (Monstrous Hearts #2)

Chapter Three

An hour after Darby's visit, Alice's trembling had dwindled into a dull headache that throbbed behind her eyes. Probably, she should have been looking into lawyers to see if Darby's threat had a solid foundation. Probably, she should have thumbed through that damned manuscript to see what else had been put in there.

Instead, she shoved the armful of papers into the back of a closet, piling them onto a few packing boxes and covering them up with muck boots. Then, she cleaned. The mop slapped against the floor. The bristles of the scrub brush tore at the sink. Even the soft dust cloth hissed as it wiped over surfaces. A fury of domesticity against the sudden intrusion of the unknown.

Throughout it all, Darby's words filled her head, uncovering memories in the way of a sledgehammer cracking apart cement to reveal worms writhing in the forgotten earth beneath. Alice remembered broken plates and the ragged note in her mother's voice whenever she yelled. How her body would tense just before she exploded. The strange things she would fixate on... Like the wristwatch Alice's father had always worn.

It hadn't been anything special, but from the dulled leather of the band and the muted gleam of the metal hands, anyone could tell it was old, loved, and depended upon. Alice remembered how, one day, her father had come out of the bedroom with a puzzled frown, and when he'd picked her up and kissed her goodbye, his wrist had been bare. Later, Alice had been strapped in her booster seat and dabbing chubby, careful fingers into blue and yellow paint, pleased with how she could make streaks of green appear on the paper like magic, when her mother appeared and casually set the wristwatch on the nearby kitchen counter.

There was a hammer in her other hand, and as she raised it, aiming the heavy, rusted iron of the head at the watch, she had growled, "Always ticking. Tick, tick, ticking. Even at night, it never stops."

Then she'd swung the hammer down, and a great crack had echoed throughout the room, startling Alice enough to send her hands jerking along the paper and leaving sharp, shocked strokes of blue.

Alice didn't remember how her father had reacted once he had found out what had happened, or her mother's explanation for it, if there had even been one. What remained burned in her mind were those beautiful, little gears left crushed and still, and the cracked face that had popped free. Her father's watch, something he wore every day. Now just a broken, useless thing.

Alice realized her eyesight had blurred over from the memory. Even so, she continued scrubbing at the sink, the bristles of the brush vicious in a way she never allowed herself to be.

A pearl of fear lived deep within, polished throughout the years as her uncertain child's heart had hardened into a weary adult's: that she would be a source of misery to whatever loved ones she had. Contrary to what Darby claimed, she had tried so hard for Magdalene even once her adoration faded into something tired and weedy. Her own complaints—smothered. Her angry words—choked back. All that self-binding rooted in the fear that if she ever opened her mouth to scream at her lover, her mother's voice would come out.

Something ran through her maternal line. The gentle phrase for it was a history of mental illness, but Alice had learned a little more after inheriting her grandmother's cabin. Wolf pelts that came alive, Colton's dark hints about what he had seen while working odd jobs for Franny Harford... Witchhood ran through the women of Alice's family, and she didn't know what that meant. Madness, certainly, from what she remembered of her mother. But how did it begin? From birth? Did it creep up with the years as the heart toughened with experiences, failures, love found and love lost? What sparked that slow spiral down, and had it already happened in Alice's head?

The previous night flashed through her thoughts like lightning. How she'd heard Magdalene's laugh. How she'd even believed for a split second that she'd seen her. What had that been? Painful memories resurfacing, or the first hints of her mind turning as treacherous as her mother's?