Chapter 395: The Subtle Danger
"Where are they?" Ally screeched for the millionth time. She was staring at the front door of the lodge with her eyes fixated on the door as if she was determined to hunt down Killian and the rest if they didn’t return in the next few minutes.
Inez turned and looked at the woman who resembled a two-year-old toddler. Her tantrums were no different than one and the more Inez looked at her, the more her head started to ache. She had a sense of foreboding that this woman was going to cause a hell lot of trouble.
Just as she had expected, the woman spun on her feet and glared at her. "Can you tell us where they are and when they might return?"
Under normal circumstances Inez would have ignored the woman but currently she was still healing from the injuries that she had received, and her siren was irritated with Killian’s absence. So, she turned around and glared at the woman who was screeching like a pig getting butchered. With her brain being elsewhere, Inez snapped, "Keep talking and you will have something else to worry about."
Ally cocked her head to one side and smirked. "Oh? And what that might be?"
"Like a cracked skull."
"you —"
Ally stepped forward and Selene turned to look at Matt, who rolled his eyes and glanced at Fenric. "You better control your monster."
Fenric raised his head from the screen of his phone and glowered at Matt. "She is not my monster. If anything, she is Killian’s; ask him to come and restrain her."
"Who was the one who brought her here?"
Selene didn’t even look at the man while tapping on her phone as she stated, "You were the one who brought Al here, Fenric. Even when we told you that this is a confidential matter, so she is your responsibility. Calm her down or else I will tell Killian what you did."
"She is the member of the pack and I just discussed it with her. I never told her the entire truth."
"That doesn’t change the fact that you told her."
"It was just a little slight—"
"You know that she goes crazy when it comes to Killian." Matt muttered.
The bickering continued and words continued to bounce off the walls of the lodge, amplifying the chaos until they became a physical presence in the room and Inez sat in the middle of this chaos, watching Ally stare at the entire pack as if she couldn’t believe that they were talking about her like she was not standing in front of them.
It should be normal—this had often happened and it should have calmed Inez down, as the familiar familiarity should have done — the way it always had and yet it couldn’t. There was something seriously off with the current situation. She just couldn’t place her finger on it. The noise was still the same. The pack members were still snapping and growling at one another and Greta was still staring at them as if she was waiting for the situation to escalate such that she could intervene when it got too bad.
"Didn’t I tell you that Killian is fine?" Selene said, glancing at the woman who was getting more and more agitated with each passing second. She seemed completely unfazed by the fact that Ally looked like she was about to explode.
Their antics were still the same. And yet Inez could feel her skin crawling like there was this subtle feeling of wrongness. The sensation continued to creep through her skin, piercing through her flesh and then settling down in her bones. It made her feel suffocated, like someone was choking her. It became hard to breathe. She raised her hand and rubbed her bosom, pressing the heel of her palm against her chest, trying to soothe the gnawing tension that kept building within her chest.
But nothing seemed to be working.
"Sel, you really need to stop questioning me—" Fenric’s voice stopped echoing in her head and became a static buzz in her head without Inez doing anything.
Inez was right there and yet she wasn’t there at all. She could hear things but she couldn’t understand; the voices behind her had turned into background and she remained seated in the middle of the room with her mind racing, searching for the source of dread that was coming. It was not a vision. She knew that it wasn’t. There was no voice, no nothing. There was no clear warning or sign. Just a feeling —that kept nagging becoming more and more insistent and urgent, like a radio that was getting in and out of the station.
She tried to breathe. Trying to deepen her breathing but her lungs simply refused to take in any ounce of air within them. Something kept telling her that danger was coming and yet she couldn’t do anything because she couldn’t see the danger in front of her. There was nothing that could explain her feeling or the risk factor that she kept thinking was there but it wasn’t.
She rubbed the tips of her fingers together, trying to interpret the warnings that were running like a horse galloping on the racetrack. It was like she was trying to read through the morse code without even fully understanding the pattern, having never read or learnt about it. It was just a constant tapping against her skull. She could see the dots and dashes. With the anxiety swivelling harder than ever and yet she couldn’t even translate what the fuck they even meant.
There was something – just something about the air inside the lodge that made her nervous.
"Inez?"
She snapped her head up and her gaze found Selene’s. She had been looking at her every now and then while managing to hold the chaotic squabbling ongoing. However, this time around when their gazes met, Selene seemed to have realised that there was something amiss, as she didn’t look away from her. The slight furrow between her brows started to deepen as she studied Inez’s face.
"What is it?"