Wolf Pact: A Wolf Pact Novel by Melissa de La Cruz Read Free Book Online Page A

“Will you take it? I don’t like having it around.” He seemed glad to be relieved of the burden.
    “What happened to her? The girl you found?”
The girl covered in ashes and blood.
    “Mental hospital.”
    “Do you have the address?” asked Jane, ready with her pen.
    He nodded. “I can get it.”
    This is it
, Bliss thought, her excitement bubbling as she tucked the journal into her bag
.
Find the girl, Bliss knew, and she would find the hounds.

N INE
     
    S t.Bernadette’s Psychiatric Clinic had taken great pains not to look like a mental asylum, to distance itself from the negative connotation of institutional sanatoriums: nightmarish loony bins where crazies were locked up and caged, left to sit in a mess of their own filth. It was a small four-story building located on a pretty hillside in a sleepy Cleveland suburb. There were no bars on the windows, there were no armed guards at the gates, and none of the nurses were named Ratched. The lobby was peaceful and cheerful, decorated in soothing pastel colors, and patients were allowed to wear their own clothes—none of that shuffling in hospital gowns and slippers.
    The mental hospital looked innocuous enough, but even so, when Bliss arrived in the afternoon, she could not help shuddering. In a past life, she had been sent to a place not unlike this one, and she could still remember the horror of that experience: the shackles and the tests, the buckets of cold water poured on her head during her ravings. The clinic was more like a college dormitory than a prison, but Bliss could bet that the windows at Case Western weren’t built from two inches of shatterproof acrylic you couldn’t break with a sledgehammer.
    Shehad left Jane back at their motel. For a moment she wondered whether she’d done the right thing; Jane had wanted to come, though she was too tired to protest when Bliss insisted she stay behind. But Bliss wanted to speak to the girl alone. It was her task, after all, her burden, to find the hounds.
    “Sign here,” the young guy at the desk said, pushing over a few papers.
    Bliss scribbled on the page. “What’s this?”
    “Liability waiver. Means you can’t sue the clinic if anything happens to you after seeing her. Or when you see her.” He had a flat nasal accent, less midwestern than southern Appalachian, a real twang. Bliss had always thought of Ohio as the Midwest, like Kansas or Nebraska, but as they’d moved through the state, she’d discovered it was a real patchwork, a hodgepodge of big cities and dying steel towns, affluent suburbs that rivaled the toniest Westchester neighborhoods and a pretty rural countryside dotted with horse farms and lush green forests.
    “I don’t get it. What’s going to happen?”
    Theorderly shrugged. “Not supposed to say, but see that lady sitting over there?”
    Bliss nodded. There was a smiling middle-aged woman sitting by the window, talking softly to herself. Once in a while her whole face would twitch in a frightening spasm.
    “Yeah, well, Thelma used to work here. Now she’s a patient. She was your patient’s nurse you know. Spent a week with her and went insane. And then there’s the janitors …” He stopped without finishing the sentence. He only shook his head as he took the clipboard back and handed Bliss a visitor pass. “What do you want with her, anyway? You a reporter or something? Or family?”
    Bliss shook her head. “Neither.”
    “Law enforcement?”
    She shook her head again. The orderly finally stopped asking questions and they arrived at the girl’s room. Bliss noticed immediately that there was something strange in the air. The feeling of death was all around, a grim darkness just behind the door. She did not feel frightened, only curious. She had lived with the spirit of Lucifer, so she knew what evil felt like. This was not the same. It was not the emerald-sharp feeling of hatred and spite; this was a feeling of dread and sloth, rot and ruin, misery and