Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Juno Jensen was sitting on the island counter in her kitchen dipping Oreo’s into Biscoff cookie spread, watching a rerun of Scooby-Doo on the small TV on the side table across the room. She turned her gaze away from the TV when she heard the lock in the back door click and her mother walked in a second later with two bags of groceries.

Juno popped the Oreo in her hand into her mouth and jumped off the counter. “What’d you get me Mom?” she asked, taking one of the grocery bags from her mother. She set the bag on the counter where she had just been sitting and started taking stuff out. She smiled approvingly at the rice milk carton and scrunched up her nose when she pulled out a bag of egg roll wraps. She turned around and held up the offensive item to her mother.

“I was reading a recipe online and thought I would try something different for dinner,” Wendy Jensen said, walking over to her and plucking the package out of her daughter’s hands. She stuck the package in the fridge and left the door open to put the rest of the groceries away.

“Well, you and Dad enjoy puking your guts out,” Juno replied, grabbing the cover of her cookie spread and recovering the jar. She put her Oreo’s in a plastic bag and stuck them and the cookie spread in the snack cupboard and then proceeded to begin unloading the second grocery bag.

“Where are you going?” Wendy asked, frowning. She walked over to the counter where Juno had taken out all the groceries and started grabbing the refrigerator items.

“Britney called me an hour ago and told me someone from Whitefish Bay was having an impromptu party,” Juno said. “She and Greg are picking me up any minute.”

Whitefish Bay High School was a local public high school within the Milwaukee city limits. Juno didn’t attend the school as her parents were wealthy enough to send her to a private school called University School of Milwaukee, or USM as people preferred to call it. USM was located in the Milwaukee suburb of River Hills, north of the Milwaukee city limits, but many of the students lived in Milwaukee. Both schools were a short drive away from each other, and students often comingled at some of the same spots in town.

“Juno, that’s the third party this week you’ve gone to,” Wendy said disapprovingly as she put stuff away and closed the fridge. She turned to look her daughter.

“It’s summer!” Juno protested. “Besides, senior year is coming up and I’m going to be too busy doing responsible senior stuff once school starts.”

“I don’t think activities like Senior Ditch Day and Senior Grand Slam will take up as much of your time,” Wendy said. She reached around Juno and grabbed the bread. “Especially Ditch Day young lady,” she added in a mock stern tone.

Juno grinned mischievously. “That’s going to be my favorite.”

“Why does Greg always pick you guys up?” Wendy asked. “You have your own car.”

“It makes him look good when he pulls up with two good looking single ladies riding with him,” Juno said. In actual truth, her friend Greg didn’t have much of a taste for alcohol, so he didn’t mind being a designated driver.

“Where is this party at?” Wendy asked.

Juno shrugged. “How should I know? Why? Are you going to come out for a drink or something?”

“No, but I would like to know where you are, especially if you’re going to be out late. And be quiet when you come home; your father wasn’t pleased the other night when he was woken up by you throwing up in the bathroom.”

Juno sighed. “I don’t know the address. I’ll text it to you when I get there ’kay?”

Her phone started vibrating and the voice of Charli XCX filled the room. Juno grabbed her phone and looked at the screen. “Greg and Britney are here,” she said. She pulled the phone off the charger and kissed her mom on the cheek. “Bye Mom, love you!” she said as she rushed through the house, grabbing her purse off the living room couch.

“Love you too!” Wendy yelled, smiling and shaking her head as she heard the front door open and slam shut thirty seconds later. She sighed as she glanced at a family photo sitting next to the small TV on the other side of the kitchen.

She walked over to it and turned the TV off and picked up the photo. It was from a family picnic the three of them had taken at the end of the previous summer before Juno had started her junior year. Juno had often called it a fluke that she had not inherited the classic Scandinavian looks of her mother and her father, Wendy’s husband Neil, who both had pale skin, blue eyes and blonde hair whereas Juno inherited a more classic Mediterranean look with an olive skin complexion, dark brown eyes, and straight jet black hair and a shorter stature than her taller parents.

If only Wendy had the heart to tell her how far off Juno’s idea of the fluke really was.

She sighed and replaced the photo next to the TV, wondering where the time had gone in the past seventeen years.

By eight o’clock the sun was setting, and Wendy was in the kitchen wrapping eggrolls when she heard the front door open and her husband appeared a moment later.

“Hmm, that looks good,” Neil Jensen said as he set his briefcase down. He walked over to his wife and kissed her forehead.

“Yes, well your daughter isn’t very keen on trying them,” Wendy said with a bit of disappointment in her voice.

Neil shrugged. “She’s obsessed with pasta,” he said as he turned away to go to the fridge. “Is she here?”

“She’s at another party,” Wendy said, rolling her eyes. She gestured to the eggroll wrappers. “And this is pasta.”

Neil opened the fridge and grabbed a beer and then shut the door as he turned back to his wife. “Not to her. Wendy, she’s going to be leaving for college in a year. What she does after she leaves this house is not going to be up to you anymore. If she chooses to return to her roots, there is nothing you can do about that.”

“I know that,” Wendy said in frustration. “But the idea of her getting to close to her Italian heritage is not something I’m comfortable with. Especially since she doesn’t know anything about her roots.”

“Would it be so bad if we just told her she was adopted?” Neil snapped, finally losing his temper. He slammed his beer down on the counter and glared at his wife. “Would it be so bad if we started treating her like an adult, and not some mentally challenged child? She’s old enough to know the truth by now, and if she wasn’t, then we haven’t done our due diligence as parents.”

“We adopted the child of a witch who belongs to one of the most powerful magical bloodlines in the world, a child that family don’t know even exists,” Wendy said quietly. “If they ever found out about Juno, we would be helpless to stop them from taking her.” She took a deep breath. “Not to mention the others who would come for her just because she was unlucky enough to be born to the wrong mother.”

“We knew what we were getting into when we took her in,” Neil said carefully. “We knew the danger. But we also knew how much we wanted a child and that dream came true. I don’t care what bloodline she came from, she is our daughter, and I have enough faith in her to know that she will feel the same way even after she learns the truth.”

“But what if she starts looking for her birth parents?” Wendy asked quietly. “After what happened with Nathan, I don’t want anymore surprises.”

“What Nathan did was inexcusable,” Neil said. “However, he’s your brother and he was just trying to look out for us.”

“He put our child in danger!” Wendy shouted, slapping the counter. Her eyes were blazing now, and Neil took a step back. “Our baby could’ve been taken away from us and he didn’t even have the gall to acknowledge that, to accept any blame for that. I expressly told him to mind his own business and he didn’t. He’s only lucky that that man chose to leave us be, and that Clara gave us a second chance.”

Neil sighed. “Wendy, where is this all coming from? Why are you worrying about this now? What happened?”

“I have a bad feeling,” Wendy said promptly. “I just have this feeling that something terrible is going to happen, and that this life we’ve built for us and our daughter is going to blow up in our faces.”

Neil scoffed and picked up his beer. “This is not the first time you’ve gotten these feelings.” He stepped toward her and gave her a quick peck on the forehead. “I’m going to change my clothes and watch some football. Let me know when dinner is done.”

Wendy bit her lip as she watched her husband leave the kitchen. She waited until she heard him going up the stairs and then walked to the front of the house and stopped at the front window in the living room.

There was a car sitting at the end the end of the block. In the fading light, she couldn’t see the color that well, but she didn’t need to; it was maroon.

She normally wouldn’t have noticed the car except that the color was unusual to her, and it had suddenly appeared a few days earlier. She never saw it coming or going, so she had no idea what the driver looked like, but it was always in the same spot, with a perfect view of her house. And while whoever was in the car could clearly see Wendy and her family, Wendy had no way of seeing who was in the car as the windows were tinted, which told her the occupant had no intention of being seen.

She was nervous to tell Neil that the presence of the car was what had her on edge. Something about it was just nagging at her, but she couldn’t figure out what it was, and she couldn’t go to Neil with it just because of a ‘feeling’ because he would just blow her off.

A distant ringing pulled her out of her thoughts and she took a deep breath as she went to the secretary the main hallway between the living room and the kitchen. It wasn’t until she stopped in front it that she realized what it meant, and she felt the hair stand up on her neck and arms.

She turned around and opened the hallway closet that was opposite the secretary and on the floor in the back corner was a little black safe.

After unlocking the safe and pulling out a key, she went back to the secretary and unlocked the drawer and pulled out a small phone that was ringing off the hook.

“Hello?” she answered in a carefully controlled voice.

Greg Dawson pulled up to Juno’s house later that night. “Thanks,” Juno said, getting out of the car before falling flat on her face.

Greg got out of the car and ran around to the other side to help her up. “Do you want me to walk you to the door?”

“No, thanks,” Juno said, steadying herself. “I would take you up on that offer but on the off chance that my dad is still awake and on the other side of the front door with a shotgun in his hands, I politely decline for your safety.”

Greg smiled as he let go of her but stood by her tentatively. “Enjoy this while you can,” he said. “You only got one summer left to do it before we have to grow up.”

Juno laughed and gave him a drunk hug. “I know. Thanks for the ride.”

“No problem. I’ll just wait in my car until I see you go inside.”

“Thanks.” She waved goodbye to him as he got in his car and she walked to her front door. She found her keys and let herself into the house, and then turned to wave goodbye to Greg before he drove off.

As she shut the door, she turned around and felt her leg bump into something.

“What the hell?” she muttered, looking down to see what it was. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she noticed about half dozen suitcases packed by the door.

She frowned and pulled out her phone to see that her phone was loaded with missed calls and voicemails from both of her parents, the last one being two hours earlier.

“Mom? Dad?” she called out. Hearing no answer, she took a deep breath and put her phone back in her pocket.

She walked to the kitchen and set her purse down on the counter before going to the fridge to look for something to eat. When she opened the fridge, she was surprised to see that the light wasn’t on. Frowning, she stuck her hand inside and found that the inside wasn’t nearly as cold as it should’ve been. Groaning, she shut the fridge and stepped over to the light switch and flicked it to turn on the lights, but those weren’t working either. Now she knew something was wrong with their fuse box and she was going to have head upstairs for the dreaded task of waking up her dad.

“Hey Dad, this is your drunk underage daughter coming to wake you up at two o’clock in the morning because the lights aren’t working,” she said to herself sarcastically as she walked out of the kitchen and headed to the stairs. “Yep, I’m just so responsible like that.”

She reached the top of the stairs and froze suddenly. She thought she’d seen a shadow moving near her bedroom for a split second. Then she shook her head, mentally kicking herself. There was nobody there. She was just drunk and seeing things. She rubbed her eyes and headed to her parents’ room and opened the door.

In the moonlight, her parents bed was a mess and her gaze slowly lowered to the floor and screamed at the sight in front of her.

Neil and Wendy Jensen were lying dead on the floor in pools of their own blood.

With tears streaming down her face, she moved towards her mother’s body and tentatively touched her head. Her face was bruised from a powerful beating that someone had given her, and there was blood gushing from the gash in her neck where someone had slit her throat. She was almost unrecognizable to Juno.

“Mom?” she whispered, stunned.

She heard a gurgling sound and jerked her head up to see her dad twitching.

“Daddy!” she cried, rushing over to him.

Her father’s eyes widened as she came to his side. His throat wasn’t slit like her mother’s, but his shirt was soaked in blood, and there was a trickle of blood coming out of his mouth.

“Daddy you’re going to be okay,” Juno sobbed. “You’re going to be okay. I’m going to get help.”

Neil shook his head slowly. “Run,” he said weakly. “Run!”

“I’m going to get help and then I’ll be right back Daddy.”

She kissed his forehead before standing up and turned and ran out of the room only for a figure to jump out of a hallway closet and grabbed her.

Juno struggled in the powerful grip of the person and threw herself into the room, where her attacker lost their grip on her as they both tumbled to the ground and Juno cried out as she felt herself fall into her parents’ blood and looked into the eyes of her dead mother for a second before she jumped up and ran out of the room.

She made it to the stairs and had her foot on the top step when she felt a hand grab her hair and yank her backwards where she was thrown into the bathroom and she saw stars as her head slammed into the tiled floor and looked up to see the face of a jackal towering over her.

Juno jerked awake, breathing hard. She had heard screaming, someone screaming loud and they sounded terrified. The screams had shaken her up so bad that her heart was pounding, and she felt a chill go running through her body.

She looked around. She was in a hospital room.

She heard a shuffling of movement and turned her head to see a figure slumped over in the chair next to her bed. The face was covered by blonde hair, but Juno felt a sense of relief at the sight of her mother.

Juno didn’t inherit her mother’s blonde hair. Her hair was just naturally jet black, and her skin was an olive tone, something she couldn’t really grasp with having two blonde haired, blue eyed and pale skinned parents.

“Mom?” she said quietly.

Her mother didn’t stir.

Frowning, she cleared her throat and tried to lift her arm to throw the blanket off but felt a sharp burst of pain shoot through her body and gasped, wincing as her arm fell back on the bed. Now she felt the soreness, the weakness, the helplessness. She felt like she had been hit by a Mack truck.

She looked up as her mother sat up, and as the hair fell away from her face, Juno felt her mouth drop open.

The relief she had felt a moment earlier instantly disappeared as she stared at Zoey McKellen, the wife of her mother’s younger brother Nathan.

Nathan was eight years older than Zoey and wore the pants in their marriage. Zoey was eight years younger than Nathan and had married him eight years earlier, when she was twenty-six and had just graduated from grad school as a psychologist. Her young, vibrant nature and appearance appealed to the students she counseled at the high school she used to work at and when Juno was younger, when her mother and Nathan had been closer, Juno and Zoey had formed a special bond.

But about five years previously, her mother and her uncle had had some falling out, and Wendy abruptly cut all ties with Nathan, refusing to reveal what led to the estrangement. Juno was upset at losing someone she considered a close confidant, but her mother stubbornly held onto her resolve to keep Nathan out of their lives, eventually leading her to distance herself from the McKellen family, until they all became ghosts to Juno.

For Zoey to be sitting there in Juno’s hospital room, next to her bed – a spot that would’ve been reserved for her mother – meant that Nathan was around. And if Nathan was nearby and her parents were nowhere to be found, she had an awful feeling that something bad had happened.

“Juno!” Zoey breathed sitting up quickly. She rubbed the back of her neck as she leaned towards Juno. “How are you feeling?”

“Zoey, what happened?” Juno asked desperately. “Why am I here? And what the hell are you doing here? Where’s Mom and Dad?”

Zoey’s eyes widened slightly, and Juno saw her them watering up which had the domino effect of making her own eyes water.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Zoey asked with a tremor in her voice.

“Not until you tell me where mom and dad are!” Juno snapped.

Zoey sighed, wiping the tears streaming down her face with the sleeve of her sweater. “Honey, what’s the last thing you remember?” she repeated gently, her voice breaking on the last few words.

“I am not answering your questions until you answer mine. Where’s mom and dad?”

“They . . .” Zoey’s voice trailed off.

“Where are they?” Juno shouted.

“Something happened at the house last night. Do you remember what that was?”

Juno frowned as she struggled to remember. “I remember I came home late. I went to a party with my friends. I came home, and the electricity wasn’t working . . .” She froze.

“You don’t have to tell me anymore,” Zoey said quietly.

“What happened?” Juno asked in a low voice as a feeling of dread swept over her.

“The police are saying they think it was a home invasion,” Zoey said slowly.

“But Mom and Dad are okay, right?” Juno’s voice was shaky.

Zoey looked down at the ground silently.

Juno, growing frustrated, punched the bed, wincing as she felt the sharp pain again.

Zoey lifted her head and gave her niece a pained apologetic look and shook her head. “You were the only one who survived. Your parents are gone.”

Juno felt her heart stop.

Zoey put a hand on her arm, but she didn’t notice, nor did she hear what Zoey was saying as she struggled to process the bomb that Zoey had just dropped on her.

Images began flooding her mind. Their bodies on their bedroom floor, falling between them in a pool of their blood.

Their blood.

She looked down at her hands and saw them covered in blood.

Even her own blood curdling screams couldn’t break through the fog in her mind.

A week later, the gray clouds, and the icy rain matched the somber mood of Wendy and Neil’s family and friends, as they gathered for their joint funeral.

The police still had no leads on her parents’ murderers. Juno still had no clue why they had packed the suitcases that she’d found standing by the front door. The police combed through phone records, emails, mail, everything they could get their hands on to find out why Wendy and Neil were suddenly in such a hurry to leave town. They’d told no one of their travel plans, or that they were planning on leaving town at all.

Juno had told the police about the secret phone that had been kept locked in a secretary in the hallway off the kitchen, the one her parents thought she didn’t know about. She’d discovered it years ago, picking the lock on it one night when her parents were asleep. They’d told her that under no circumstances was she to ever go into that secretary, which piqued her curiosity as to what they could possibly be hiding in it. After getting into it, she was disappointed to discover that it was just a phone, a phone that was password protected and after a trying to crack the code a few times, she gave up and quickly lost interest. In hindsight, she wished she had asked more questions since the phone was discovered missing when the police searched the secretary.

Juno stood silently as the priest said his final prayers. Zoey and her uncle Nathan stood on either side of her. Nathan had been stiff as a board, holding an umbrella, while Zoey kept a hand on Juno’s shoulder as she cried softly and shook uncontrollably. Juno was also holding an umbrella over her and Zoey’s heads, knowing that Zoey wouldn’t be able to hold it steady for long enough. The priest is speaking in a loud, somber voice that was like a knife slicing into Juno’s head and she just wanted to scream at him to shut up. She hated him. She hated his bald head, his boney hands, his hollow face, his ugly black robe with the white collar around the neck that signified his status as a person of God. He was just delivering the usual spiel about how much less pain her parents were in and how they were in a happy, safe place. This was just business to him, nothing more. He’d been doing this forever and she sensed that he had stopped actually caring about his job a long time ago. His long speech was just all about her parents, the people who died, but nothing about the people they left behind. The people who were in more pain than the priest could ever imagine.

She looked up at her uncle. Her face was blank, expressionless as he stood at a respectable height of five foot eight with broad shoulders, a soft, flat stomach. His brown hair was greased and pulled back, his funeral suit perfectly ironed with not a single thread of fabric out of place. She wondered how he could not be so disheveled, so unaffected by this. His sister had just died. Had he been this cold, hard metal exterior at her Uncle Jack’s funeral, or at his own parents’? Her grandparents had died before she was born, and her mother used to talk about them often. Juno liked hearing the stories. They’d inspired memories and feelings of love and joyful things and she wondered if Nathan had learned to guard his feelings after a few too many funerals.

His stature was the opposite of his wife, who stood on Juno’s other side. Her straight blonde hair fell loosely over her black cashmere coat and Juno could feel her skinny five-foot two frame shaking with her soft cries.

Nathan looked down at her and Juno immediately shifted her gaze to the other people at the service. Numerous cousins, aunts and uncles, her grandparents from her father’s side, family friends, and other people she didn’t know. They weren’t looking at her, but were either focused on the boring, annoying priest or the two coffins sitting before them.

Now she looked at the coffins and sucked in her breath. She had looked at the coffins before, but she was still shocked whenever she looked at them, realizing all over again that her parents’ bodies were in them.

Juno listened as the priest finished his sermon and then watched as the coffins were lowered into the ground, Nathan gave Juno an umbrella before he, Zoey, and everyone else left to give her one last moment alone with her parents to give them a private goodbye.

Juno walked to the little area between the grave sites and knelt on the ground. Her legs immediately got wet, and soaked, but she didn’t notice it. She did double takes between the coffins and set her umbrella down in front of her, letting the rain hit her hard as she looked up to the sky.

“I love you,” she said softly to the sky. “And I will never stop missing you.” A single tear streamed down her face and she took the umbrella and stood up. She looked at both coffins one last time before turning and walking back to her aunt and uncle, who were standing by their car, protected from the rain by their own umbrella.

There were a few stragglers around, and outside of the main gate was a throng of reporters being held back by private security that her uncle had hired for the occasion.

“I want to walk back to the hotel,” Juno said. “It’s not that far from here.”

“No,” Zoey said immediately. “It’s much too cold out here; you’ll get a cold, or worse: pneumonia. And you’re already soaking wet. And the reporters are out there and will be on you the second you step out there. Come on, honey, just drive out with us.”

“I want some time to myself,” Juno said. “It’s not even that much of a walk, Zoey. And I know about the back entrance.” She neglected to mention that she knew of it because she and her friends used to sneak into this cemetery for little séances after drinking and smoking pot. “Please?”

Zoey opened her mouth, but Nathan cut her off.

“Zoey, let the girl walk back on her own,” he said in a tired voice. “We’ve been hovering over her twenty-four seven since we got here. Let her have some space.”

“But-”

“No buts,” Nathan said firmly. His eyes softened as he looked at Juno. “Just please be there within an hour. Can you do that for me, kiddo?”

Juno nodded. “Thanks. And I’ll be fine,” she added to Zoey.

Zoey nodded and pulled away from Nathan to give Juno a quick hug before Juno said goodbye and walked off.

She didn’t walk directly back to the hotel. Instead, she took little detours to the places that she and her parents used to frequent. Her mother’s favorite little cafe on the corner; her dad’s favorite sports store. The big, red Victorian style house that her mother had been eyeing for years; her dad’s favorite bar where he went most Friday nights. The toy store that her mother had taken her to every Easter until Juno felt she was too old to get anything from there.

And then the park. The park that her mother would take her to every Sunday morning when she was younger. By now, the rain had stopped, but there were still no kids there now because of the chilly temperature. Juno strode over to her favorite part: the swings.

She turned one of the swings over to get some of the water off, and then sat down on it, not caring that her butt was suddenly cold and wet. No one would be able to tell anyway; she was wearing all black.

As she rested her head against the handles of the swing, she noticed an older man in a black jacket with a small umbrella sitting in a bench near the fence that was at the edge of the park. He was just sitting there, staring in her general direction, and to make things even weirder, he was wearing sunglasses on a dark, rainy day. An as an elderly man, wouldn’t his already probable poor vision be even more obstructed by those dark sunglasses? Weird.

But as the wind blew into her, she turned her gaze away from the old man and looked up to the sky as she lifted her legs, rose high, and then pulled back to go back down. Raise, up, back, down. Juno smiled, her suspicions of the old man beginning to fade away as she became lost in memories from long ago. Her mother always used to those words when she was pushing Juno. Her mother’s cheerful laughing entered her head as she spoke and waited for Juno to come rushing back to her and pushed her back up.

Raise, up, back, down.

Juno smiled a little as she could almost feel her mother’s hands pressing against her back, pushing Juno up high.

She was so lost in her mother’s voice that she never noticed the maroon car sitting across the street. It had pulled up as she got on the swing, but no one ever stepped out of it.

Raise, up, back, down.

Nathan and Zoey entered the hotel suite they were staying in and Nathan shut the door as two bodyguards stood outside in the hallway.

Zoey sat down on the sofa in the sitting area and began pulling her shoes off while Nathan made a beeline for the bar and poured himself two fingers of scotch.

“You’re breaking your five o’clock rule,” Zoey said quietly as she stared at him.

“I didn’t realize there was an etiquette book on burying your sister after she was murdered,” Nathan said sourly before he down the scotch. He took a deep breath and immediately poured another glass.

“Well I don’t think it’s proper etiquette to let a young girl wander off on her own after she just buried her parents!” Zoey snapped, standing up. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“Damnit, I was thinking that girl needed some time to get a grip on what’s happening!” Nathan shouted, slamming the glass down on the bar before he whirled around and glared at his wife.

“Her parents were just murdered a week ago, Nathan,” Zoey said in a carefully controlled voice. “Your sister was just murdered a week ago,” she added in a softer voice. She took a deep breath. “No one expects you to have a grip on that right now, especially not on the day when you just buried her.”

“I know that, but everyone expects me to keep it together right now. Juno needs me to keep it together right now.”

“You’ve barely spoken to her in the past week.”

“Because I don’t know what to say to her!” Nathan shouted with his voice breaking on the last few words. He suddenly felt deflated as his eyes began to sting from the water welling up inside them. “My parents are dead. They died years ago when I was already a grown adult, but they were old, and I knew they were going to go soon. They died naturally. Peacefully. I had time to prepare myself. Wendy and Neil were young. They were murdered. And Juno is so much younger than I was, not nearly as prepared, and I can’t find a way to council her through this. I don’t even know how I’m going to get through this. Juno is only seventeen and she’s had her whole life ripped away from her. Hell, I don’t even know her. We haven’t seen her in years.”

Zoey was silent for a moment. “You should tell her what you’re telling me. That you don’t have all the answers and that you’re struggling to find your way through this just like her. Don’t pretend that your struggle is the same as hers, but just let her know that you’ll be there for her.”

“If she’s anything like me, that wouldn’t make a damn difference,” Nathan replied.

Juno was sleeping in her room at the hotel when she suddenly heard loud voices coming from outside her door. Annoyed, she buried her head under her pillow to stifle the voices, but it didn’t do much good; they seemed to only get louder. Zoey and Nathan were in the middle of one of their stupid arguments about what to do about her. The least they could do was keep their voices down while she was trying to sleep.

Cursing under her breath, she got out of bed and tiptoed to the door, pressing her ear against it and then she realized that her uncle was in the middle of an argument. An argument with another man. Juno was more curious than ever now. Who would her uncle be entertaining this late at night on the same day of his sister’s funeral? What could be so important?

And why, when they were obviously whispering, could she hear them so clearly as if she was standing between them? The light in the hallway was on, but there were no shadows in the bottom of the doorway.

“… she is dangerous, McKellen,” an unfamiliar man’s voice snapped. “You know she is.”

There was a sinister undertone in the man’s voice that gave Juno a chill. A chill that felt strangely familiar for some reason.

“Shut up!” she heard Nathan hiss. “She is a scared teenage girl who was brutally attacked and watched her parents die horrible, inexplicable deaths. Of course she’s not the same girl she was. And she may never be. But that does not mean that there is something wrong or deadly about her. I don’t even know where you’re getting this stuff from.”

Juno took a step back from the door as she felt a powerful gaze on her, as if someone was staring intently through the door at her and could sense her eavesdropping.

“I’ve watched her since I got here. I know there is something not right about your niece. And you would be wise to do something about it before it’s too late. What if something happens to that pretty little wife of yours because of that girl? What will it take for you to open your eyes to what she is?”

Juno sucked in a breath. Someone had been watching her? Who the hell was this man and why was he spying on her?

“You have my card and you know where to reach me.”

Juno heard someone ripping something.

“She is a teenage girl who has been through a very horrific, traumatic experience,” Nathan snapped. “My sister didn’t entertain you with this bullshit and neither will I. Now get out and don’t bother me again with your crazy conspiracy theories old man.”

“How will you fare if Clara Vitale comes back to reclaim what’s rightfully hers now that your sister and her husband are dead?”

“You seem to have some difficulty hearing what I’m saying. Try pulling your head out of your ass for once and shake your piss out of your ears so that you can hear me clearly: get out!”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Senator McKellen,” the man said grimly.

Suddenly, Juno could feel something, as if a pair of eyes were burning through the door, looking straight at her and she took a step back immediately, suddenly afraid. She heard footsteps walking away from her door and then heard a door open and close. And then the footsteps headed back toward her room and she quickly ran to her bed and jumped under the covers in time to hear her door creak open. She felt her uncle’s eyes on her, and then with a sigh, he said, “God, Juno, I hope he’s wrong about you,” in a soft, sorrowful voice before he shut her door and walked away.

What is bothering you, Nathan? Who was that man and why has he been watching me? Why does he think I’m a danger to you?

And who the hell is Clara Vitale? What is she coming back to reclaim?

A few days later, Juno walked through her house one last time, savoring the memories before she left with her aunt and uncle. They were biding their time outside loading stuff into the U-Haul that one of her uncle’s employees would follow them back in, using it as an excuse to give Juno some alone time to say goodbye to the only home she had ever known.

Her parents had thought of everything in regard to their deaths. They had the funeral arrangements already laid out; only a call to the funeral home and the cemetery that they had chosen to be buried at. They had even chosen what they wanted on their grave markers. It was almost like they were expecting to die so young and unexpectedly, but Juno tried to shrug it off as her parents just wanting to be prepared for anything.

But when the hell were they prepared to send her away with Nathan? Of all the four siblings that her mother had, Nathan was the only one with whom she was estranged, though Juno could never understand why. There was her aunt Gretchen, who actually lived in Milwaukee, or her aunt Martha who lived in Bayfield, or her uncle Roderick, who lived in Madison. Or any of her mother’s cousins, or her father’s relatives. Why Nathan though, a man with whom her mother been estranged years and lived the farthest away from their home?

With a lump in her throat, she started up the stairs and went to her parents’ room. The room was bare, for it had been one of the first one cleared out. The beige carpet was scrubbed clean, and she could still smell the carpet cleaner they’d used to get rid of the bloodstains.

Her parents’ bodies had been found in here, near the entrance to the walk-in closet. Juno walked over there now and turned on the closet light. It no longer smelled like death in here, but the area would always be invisibly scarred by the events of that night. Just because it didn’t smell didn’t mean that it didn’t feel like death. The condemned house should be burned in her opinion, but who was going to listen to her? Everyone thought that she was mentally unstable, and she sometimes wondered if they were right.

But why was her gut instinct telling her that she was right and that there was something wrong with the way things were going?

She glanced in the mirror and gasped when she saw a figure in the reflection standing in the doorway, wearing a Jackal mask and turned to the door where Nathan was standing, watching her. She looked back at the mirror and saw Nathan standing in the doorway, wearing no mask.

“Maybe you should take a picture,” she quipped as she stared defiantly at him in the mirror. “Take a picture of me standing in the room where my mother’s body was found and then put it on the desk in your office and look at it there, so you don’t have to waste another minute at that door spying on me.”

“You shouldn’t be in this house,” he said, ignoring her attitude and biting words. “I don’t know why you wanted to come here.”

Juno stared at him in disgust. “This was my home. I was raised here. Maybe I wanted a chance to say goodbye to it. Is that okay with you?”

Nathan sighed. “Well, time is up. Your aunt is tired, and we have a long drive ahead of us.” He nodded for her to follow him and Juno took one last, long look around the room before she slowly walked past him into the hallway without another word.

Juno walked outside and slammed the front door shut behind her and took a deep breath as she looked around the neighborhood. She felt a wistfulness as she knew she would never be back here again and slowly walked toward the Nathan’s car where Zoey was waiting inside. There was a car in front of her. But as she reached the car, she noticed another car, a maroon car with tinted windows parked at the corner of the next block. And she couldn’t help but feel like someone inside was staring at her. She stopped and turned to face the car, staring at it, daring the occupant to step out.

“Juno, what is it?” Zoey asked as she opened her door and got out. She turned her attention toward the maroon car. “Do you know who owns that car?”

“No,” Juno said, still staring. “But I’m about to find out.” She started to walk towards the car but was jerked back by a stiff hand on her arm.

“Get in the car,” Nathan said tightly, his eyes on the maroon car. His teeth were clenched and his grip on Juno’s arm tightened as he led her to their car and opened the backseat door for her. Zoey gave the car one last glance and then got back in the front seat.

Juno wrenched her arm out of his grasp with surprising strength before he could push her into the backseat and turned to the car just as it started and drove away in the opposite direction. She sighed in disappointment and looked back at her uncle, who hadn’t taken his glare off the spot where it was parked. “You know who that was, don’t you?” Juno said quietly to him.

Nathan turned his gaze back to her and tightly repeated, “Get in the car.”

Juno raised her eyebrows at him, but silently obeyed his order and got into the car.

Juno stared out the window, looking at the houses as they passed by in a blur. Zoey and Nathan were sitting in the front seat silently. She knew that they had nothing to say to her, nothing new at least. It was like they’d forgotten about the maroon car already.

In some ways, St. Paul was kind of like Milwaukee, but with a lot more trees. They were on a street called Summit now, supposedly the richest street in the state. She was slightly surprised; Nathan was a Minnesota Senator and she knew from her government class in junior year that government officials didn’t make as much money as people thought. But then she vaguely remembered that Zoey came from old money, so maybe they got the house through her.

She glanced at him in the driver’s seat, but he was staring straight ahead at the road. She turned back to the window and out of the corner of her eye, saw Zoey looking back at her for a moment, but pretended not to notice; if she turned to Zoey, Zoey would take that as an invitation to engage in conversation and Juno wasn’t in the mood for talking.

After about ten minutes, Nathan stopped and pulled into the driveway of a red, three story house surrounded by a brown wooden fence on both sides. The drive way went all the way around to the back of the house, where there was a large open yard that stood before a matching red three car garage.

There was a deck connected to the back of the house, with tables and chairs, and an electric grill and the deck spanned out across the whole back of the house.

Nathan moved the car from the pavement and parked behind the deck on the grass while the U-Haul pulled up and parked on the pavement. Juno got out of the car and grabbed the bags in the backseat.

“Home sweet home,” Zoey said, smiling at her.

Juno forced herself to smile back.

“We just got solar panels installed a couple months ago,” Zoey said, motioning to the roof. “They cover most of the roof on the house and the roof on the garage. We’ve saved so much money, and even made some since we hardly ever use any power,” she explained. “Your uncle is always out of town or at the office and I spend a lot of time out and about, but I’ll be spending more time at the house to help you get acquainted.”

Nathan went around to the trunk and opened it. He pulled out two suitcases and headed up the stairs, not saying a word to Juno as he passed her.

“Don’t worry about him,” Zoey said quietly. “He’s just tired from the long drive.” She looked at her husband disapprovingly.

Juno nodded and walked up to Nathan as he unlocked the back door and went inside. The back door led them into a large, vast kitchen. The counter tops were made of Tuscan Spice granite, the stove stainless steel and the side by side black refrigerator. There was one counter, the sink, another counter, and then the microwave on one wall; another counter, the stove, another counter, and the refrigerator were on the other.

In the middle, there was a huge counter top that was probably also used as a dining room table with the same granite top as the other counters.

On the other side of the door was the dining room area, with an oversized espresso colored table was sitting with two cream colored espresso wood chairs sitting on each side. Behind the table against the wall was an espresso china cabinet that displayed a large set of porcelain dinnerware with the same gold pattern on each piece.

“Follow me to your room,” Nathan said shortly after letting her look around.

Juno turned and followed him through a narrow, wooden hallway that led to the foyer. They came to the front door and Nathan stopped and motioned to the living room, which was on the right side. Someone had obviously put a lot of thought into it. In the middle of the wall was an electric fire place and on top of the mantle over the fire place was a mounted flat screen TV. There were two brown microfiber couches sitting across from each other and a love seat sitting in the middle facing the fire place and someone had set two cream colored throw pillows against each end of each couch. There was a cherry wood coffee table in the middle of the couches that just looked out of place, at least in Juno’s opinion.

Nathan nudged her, and she turned and started up the stairs that were on the left of the door. Under the stairs, she saw a closed, wooden door.

“Are you coming?” Nathan asked, halfway up the stairs.

She nodded and quickly went up the stairs as he resumed his walk. The second floor was a little less complicated then the first floor. It was mainly just a long hallway that stretched out on both sides of the stairway. There were doors directly across from each other, all of them closed.

Nathan turned to the right and Juno followed him. He stopped at the third door, which was at the end of the hallway, and opened the door. Juno walked in after him and looked around. There was a bare king size bed on the wall next to the door of the room from where they entered, and it faced another wall with a window looking out onto the street. At the far end of that wall on the right, there was a sliding glass door that led out to a balcony. In between the window and the balcony was an TV stand with a thirty-inch flat screen TV settled on it accompanied by a cable box and a DVD player.

“We thought you might like this room,” Nathan said quietly. He set the suitcases down next to her bed. “Your mother and father always talked about how much you loved your privacy.”

Juno nodded, still sizing the room up. There was a little nightstand next to the bed and there was a desk under the window, and on the wall between the bed and the window. The walls were a bare white with nothing on them. It was almost like she was standing on a blank page in the story of her life. A new chapter about to be written as she got settled into the room.

“It’s nice,” she said.

“The closet’s through here,” he said, pointing at the door on the other side of the bed. “It’s a walk in. There should be plenty of hangers in there for your clothes, but if you need more, feel free to ask. This was one our guestrooms and your aunt was in the middle of washing the bedding when we got the call . . .” His voice trailed off and he uncomfortably cleared his throat. “They’ll be up here by tonight before you go to bed.”

“Thanks.”

“Do you need any help unpacking?”

She shook her head. “No, I can do it myself.”

He nodded. “Okay. Well, you’ve got some more stuff in the car that I have to go get.”

“Let me help you,” she said as she set the bags she was carrying on the bed.

“No, Juno, why don’t you just start unpacking,” he said quickly. “I’ll get the rest of your stuff and it’ll get done a little faster that way.” She nodded obligingly and didn’t say anything else as he walked out of the room. His foot bumped into the door a little and it swung a little, revealing a lock.

She sat down on the bed and looked around again. “Home sweet home,” she said quietly.

Dinner was awkward that night. Nathan had ordered Chinese, which Juno hated, but ate anyway. She tried using the chop sticks, but eventually gave up and switched to a fork instead. She looked between Nathan and Zoey, noting how they would seem like a happy, upper class couple had it not been the disheartened looks on their faces. Their expressions made Juno want to be invisible and she looked down at her food.

Halfway through the nightmare, Nathan cleared his throat and turned to her. “I’m going back to Milwaukee tomorrow to settle the last affairs and to get your car. You’ll need to take a driver’s test to get your license in Minnesota, I think. I’ll have to check.”

She nodded, pushing what was left of her food around her plate. “Okay.”

“You’ll stay here with your aunt and finish getting your room ready. And then Zoey can take you around the city, show you the sites, and work on getting you registered for school and everything. You’ll be going to Central High School. After I bring your car back, I have to leave town immediately to go back to work.”

She nodded again. “Is that a private school?”

Nathan started to shake his head before he realized Juno wasn’t going to look up at him. “No, it’s a public school, but a very good one and it also happens to be close by.”

“I’m sure that you’ll like it here after you get used to it,” Zoey said eagerly, fiddling with her chopsticks.

Juno nodded again, not saying anything.

Zoey accidentally pricked her finger on one of the chopsticks and blood started pooling out.

“Damnit,” she said, sucking on it.

Without even thinking, Juno sniffed toward Zoey, wondering what smelled so good.

“Juno?” Nathan was looking at her oddly. “What are you doing?”

She shrugged. “Something smells really good.”

“You look finished,” he said abruptly.

She nodded and picked up her plate and brought it to the sink. Then she nodded to her aunt and uncle as she left the room. She had passed the living room and noticed that the TV was on. She went in, picked up the remote and was about to turn it off when she saw the news program.

“The young woman’s body was reportedly mutilated, and half eaten, according to officials who found bite marks all over the body.”

Juno’s eyes widened.

“Authorities think the animal may be some kind of dog, but they are not reporting which dog they think it is. But this is the seventh death in two weeks so until the animal is confirmed to be caught or killed, I would stay inside after dark and make sure your doors and windows are extra secure. I’m Jordana Collins with JCKQ News.”

Juno turned off the TV.

Henri Deveraux walked into Osmund Gilmore’s home office without invitation and shut the door behind him quietly.

Osmund Buchanan was sitting behind his massive Victorian style harvest cherry wood desk. Even though he was seated and had the weathered face and piercing brown eyes of a man who had been seen hard times throughout his life, it only added to the air of authority that he carried with him, especially whenever he was donning one of his Armani suits. He was in appearance a man of his early sixties, with graying hair that he stopped dying brown years ago. When he was standing, he had a tall, lean figure and in combat, many of his opponents were surprised by his agility and speed. Osmund simply chalked his victories up to the experience of hard earned lessons of being a vampire since the seventeenth century.

Henri, who had had been turned into a vampire not long after Osmund and been at his side for over three centuries, was not intimidated by Osmund and felt comfortable walking in and interrupting Osmund about issues that he deemed were a higher priority than what Osmund might be working on. Having been turned into a vampire when he was in his late thirties, to outsiders, Henri was a seasoned doctor and the ‘Dr. McDreamy’ of United Hospital with his icy blue eyes and smooth, shoulder length blonde hair that he usually kept tamed and slicked back. When he spoke, most women couldn’t help but be mesmerized by his mixed British-American accent, and when he spoke in his native French tongue, women swooned over him. It also helped that practicing medicine for over a hundred and fifty years made his career a second nature to him and helped rise through the ranks at every medical institution he ever worked at.

Now, when he walked into Osmund’s office, he was not surprised to see there was no open space on the desk at all. To Osmund’s right, his desktop Dell computer was on and to his left, his Dell laptop was also on, and in the middle was a pile of paperwork with gruesome photographs of a rotting, half eaten corpses poking out underneath autopsy reports and numerous police reports from Hungarian intelligence, which Osmund had been looking over intently until he raised his gaze when Henri entered and Osmund watched him with a blank expression on his face as Henri took a seat in one of the chairs in front of his desk with a file in his hand.

“What can I do for you?” Osmund asked nonchalantly, though inside he was brimming with anxiousness. He’d known this conversation was coming.

“I received the report on Melissa Sherburne’s autopsy,” Henri replied, setting the file in front of him. “And on Donald Jarvis.”

Osmund nodded, hiding his surprise. “I didn’t realize we were looking into that.”

“We weren’t until Delissio asked us to,” Henri replied. “They can’t figure out what killed them and the other victims and he’s getting anxious because the department doesn’t want any open cases of this magnitude for the President’s visit.”

“We don’t investigate animal attacks,” Osmund replied. “Tell him we can’t help him.”

“We investigate weredogs,” Henri replied. “I believe from looking at the photos that they were killed by weredogs.”

“They’re highly aggressive but if we had weredogs running loose in the city, we’d know it. They’d be out every night wiping out whole neighborhoods.”

“Not if they’re being trained to hunt and kill specific targets. You remember that incident up on the Iron Range.” Henri gave him a pointed look. “They didn’t believe that weredogs could be controlled, trained to do someone’s bidding, but those dogs were. And they suspected that there were other conspirators because the number of weredogs they tracked and killed did not equal the amount of supplies and equipment they found at the breeding site.”

“We don’t know the amount of supplies it takes to manage a weredog,” Osmund replied.

“Damnit, Osmund, we have a problem here,” Henri snapped. “We need to look into this.”

Osmund sighed. “I’ll have Alex, Marie and Trevor look into it. They’ve wanted a little more work, so they can take it. You can oversee them but give them some space. They’re about go off on their own next year and won’t always have us watching their backs; they need to learn how to work their own cases.”

“And what will you and Jethro be doing?”

“Jethro has to take a trip to Pakistan to clear up that gargoyle mess, I will be looking into the Milwaukee case,” Osmund said simply.

Henri cocked an eyebrow. “Even if that fell under our line of work, it’s out of our jurisdiction.”

“It enters our jurisdiction when the only survivor is settling here.” Osmund opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a file. “Background on the case should something happen here. Skim it over quickly and then give that back to me. The vampires that killed those folks are some nasty bastards. It’s a wonder that girl survived them.”

“It sounds like it was a random attack.” Henri said, picking up the file and giving it look. “She’ll be going to the same school as the kids,” he said after a moment. “I assume that is no accident?”

Osmund said nothing.

“What do you know that you’re not telling me?” Henri asked.

“The case strikes me as more than a random attack,” Osmund said quietly. “Per reports from a source involved in the case,” he added.

Henri nodded. “If you say so.” He shrugged. “But I think this will be closed fairly soon.”

Osmund nodded and turned to his computer, then looked back at Henri when he didn’t move. “Is there something else?” he asked.

“Have you noticed anything strange about your daughter?” Henri asked. “She’s pale, her loss of appetite, taking more and more naps?”

Osmund shrugged. This was the conversation he’d been bracing himself for. “She might just be feeling a little under the weather.”

“So, you are admitting that something is different?”

Osmund nodded. “Yes, but she has not mentioned anything to me and I’m sure she would if there was something seriously wrong. It happens, Henri. Being a little sleepier is no reason to get your panties in a twist.”

Henri frowned and pushed some of his white hair out of his face. “I’m a doctor. I can see the tale tell signs of early symptoms.”

Osmund feigned ignorance. “Symptoms of what?” he asked casually.

“I don’t know,” Henri replied. “But vampires don’t get sick. It’s kind of weird considering that we’re bloody dead and all.”

“You know how Evelyn is,” Osmund replied. “Just wait for her to come to you, or she’ll just bite your head off.”

“I don’t know how long I can wait before my head gets bitten off,” Henri replied. He stood up and set the file on the desk in front of Osmund. “Osmund, you better get her to come clean soon. I’m not going to sit on my ass when I know there’s something wrong with your daughter and I don’t know why you are.” Without waiting for a reply, he let himself out of Osmund’s office while Osmund remained in his seat staring at the seat that Henri just vacated.