Gypsy Moon (All The Pretty Monsters #4)(22)

Another text comes through—a very costly, very large bed being custom made...

“So…you gave the beta vampire an invitation,” Tiara drawls.

She says it in a way that makes me feel as though she’s leading me into a trap.

Another text. Another expensive item.

Oh, so I’m being punished for inviting Shera in, and those wicked omegas are going to hit me in the pocket since they can’t fight any other way.

“I think I need to turn off my alerts before I get sick,” I murmur, half emotionally hung over, half still asleep. “And, yes, that happens after you’ve survived a kidnapping together.”

She sniffs. “If I were a beta, you wouldn’t have even been abducted.” She clucks her tongue. “Unfortunately, the fight or flight instinct doesn’t allow for that. Flight is always attempted first. Purebloods are even more driven by instinct than the turned wolves, under normal circumstances.”

“Under abnormal circumstances?” I ask.

“It’s no coincidence that Idun is rising and all of us feel stir crazy and more aggressive than usual—which is hard to top, even under normal circumstances.”

“Tiara, I’m sorry, but I can’t do this conversation this early.”

“The sun is starting to set,” she dutifully points out, but rushes to add, “but I get what you’re saying. We’ll discuss Idun later, since we’ll all be dead when she rises. No big deal.”

She hangs up on me, and I stare up at the ceiling.

“Anna, it’s times like these when I could really use you,” I say on a huff.

“You should fuck Arion already,” a familiar young voice says, causing me to shriek and go with my own flight response to being startled.

Unfortunately, my legs get tangled in the sheet and I crash to the ground with a hard grunt and a muttered curse.

“Violet?” Vance calls from…somewhere else in the house, almost sounding amused.

“Just perfect,” I bite out, glaring over at the ghostly triplets, who are smiling at me from the window right beside me.

My own flight response landed me closer to the intruders. Not farther away.

“Sorry not sorry,” the middle one says, smiling like an ass. “It’s sort of sad hearing you speak to Anna so much, so we’ve decided to forgive you now that the spirit draining piece is gone from you.”

I touch my chest reflexively. Surely I should have felt something like that missing. The first triplet arches an eyebrow.

“Are you disappointed it’s gone?”

“Just confused by the mysterious appearance and disappearance of it.”

“Back to the point of Arion,” the one closest to me says, growing impatient. “You need to be with him before Idun rises. It’s important to break their bond.”

I give her an incredulous look. “What happened to not interfering with the living? And since when do you care about monster politics?”

“We don’t,” the other two say with a dramatic roll of their eyes, before giving the odd-ball triplet the stink eye.

“What we want is for you to do more curse breaking, because it’s brought us out of the very beginnings of the ghost sickness. She’s just starting to debilitate again,” the middle one says, tossing a thumb in the other sister’s direction, who is no longer an odd ball.

Now I realize they were just annoyed she was rushing their agenda too eagerly.

“I’m sorry, but breaking alpha curses is easing your ghost sickness? When did you even get sick?”

“We had a few crazy weeks where we had to use a lot of our ghostly, very costly gifts to evade some of your Portocale kind who sneak in at a different time once a year to wipe out harmless, easy-to-kill spirits haunting this town, in an effort to keep themselves alive,” the no-longer-odd-ball says.

Couldn’t they have died in pajamas that had their names on them? Is that too much to ask? Or maybe not be identical or something?

“The point is, we need you to break some more curses—preferably all of them for every alpha—that way we also get our immortality,” the one on the other end chimes in.

“But for now, you can start with bedding Arion. If Idun rises before Arion’s bond to her is truly broken, he’ll be on her side and the new war will take precedent over the curse breaking,” the eager one goes on, her knee bouncing as she stares very intensely at me.

“How long has the spirit draining…thing been gone?” I ask by way of diverting the conversation.

“Unimportant,” the now-aggressive one says as she moves even closer to me. “What is important is Arion. He’s making it easy, and you’re being stubborn. Break his bond to her so you can focus on the rest of his family and all the other alphas, erasing curses one by one.”

“I had to screw Damien while he was a monster to break his curse. I’m not having sex with every man or woman in his family,” I tell the ridiculous ghost.

“Why not? You’re opening your legs to all the other pretty monsters,” the one on the far end drawls.

“You wear a lot of red,” the one in the middle randomly interjects as she absently stares at her nails. “Our mother always said only whores wear red.”

“Your mother also killed you so she didn’t have to be a mother, so I think she’s the worst person to take advice from,” I reasonably point out.