(Free To Read) Bad Moon chapter 18; afraid

All night, Felix slept at the foot of his bed—wolf, not man. At least this time, he’d had the courtesy to turn in the back yard—to the let Jaylin spray him down with the garden hose so he wouldn’t leave a bloody mess in the house. 

Jaylin didn’t know what they’d done with the wolves or the woman in the cellar. So long as he was safe from them, he didn’t care. The day felt like a haunting and sleep didn’t find himself long after the sun rose.

It was nearly four in the afternoon when he sauntered down the kitchen for a cup of coffee—startled in his tracks by the sight of Felix, slouched on the kitchen counter. His mother’s tittering laugh came from the tiny breakfast nook—her cheeks a shade of pink when she finally turned and saw him.

“Oh, Jaylin. You didn’t tell me you’d be having a friend over.”

Surprisingly, Felix had dressed in his own clothing this time. He didn’t stink of blood, but soap from the shower. Still, Jaylin eyed him while he reheated the stale morning coffee.

“I didn’t plan for him to.”

“I’m surprised you’ve never told me about him before,” she said, her cheek in her palm. “He’s a ham, isn’t he? What a nice accent. You know, you sound just like Gerard Butler.”

“Hear that?” Felix said with a grin. “Gerard Butler.”

“She’s just saying that because he’s the only Scottish guy she knows.”

“I should get dinner started,” his mother said. She stood slow, the way she always did. Slow enough that Jaylin caught her by the shoulder and pressed her back into her seat.

“Let me do it.”

“Actually,” Felix said. “We’ve got plans. Lisa wants us back at the manor.”

“What?” Jaylin asked, pouring his mug. “Lisa?”

“The Misses.” Felix slid from the counter, long, lanky legs planting him firmly to the linoleum. “She’s asked to meet for dinner.”

“Now?” Jaylin asked. He was a mess—dressed in a baggy t-shirt and gym shorts, his socks each from a different pair. “Can’t I shower first?”

Felix raised his arm, looking to the cracked face of his watch. “Ten minutes—then I pull you out and drag ye’ there by the naked skin of yer arse.” Then Felix bowed to Julia Maxwell, with the gentlemanly twirl of his fingers. “Was a pleasure.” And he slipped around the kitchen, through the front door, before Jaylin could even take a sip of his luke-warm coffee.

–

Felix drove him to the Sigvard’s the same way he’d driven him home—in a red Mustang with too much get-up and not enough AC. He was a strange presence and Jaylin still hadn’t wrapped his head around the proper way to strike up a conversation, so he stayed quiet and watched the shedding cherry trees pass through the window.

After some time, he finally asked, “Who are you, anyway?” He wasn’t part of the Sigvard’s family—Jaylin knew that much. But he lived with them, didn’t he? What did that make him?

Felix laughed. “Isn’t that a question.”

Jaylin looked around at the leather interior. “Is this your car?”

“Quentin’s. Has a thing about cars. Buys ’em, breaks ’em, tries to fix ’em, breaks ’em twice. Managed to save this one before he could do much to her. ’65 Mustang.”

“Bet it’s nice,” Jaylin said, “being rich enough to buy yourself out of your own mistakes.”

“Look a bit closer, laddy,” Felix said. “And lose the rose-tinted glasses.”

Jaylin wasn’t sure what he meant, but when Felix reached for the radio, he accepted the gesture as a plea for silence. For the rest of the ride, he leaned back in his leather seat and watched the sun glow through the gossamer clouds above.

It was five by the time they’d arrived at the Sigvard’s, parked on the lawn just beside a lush hydrangea bush and beneath the hangings of the willow tree.

“Evening, boys,” Mrs. Sigvard called from the veranda, balanced on a stool while she trimmed the dead leaves from a hanging fuschia. She stepped down and wiped the sweat from her brow. “I’ve got the maids in there cooking quite the feast, so avoid the kitchen.”

She looked different now, out of her bathrobe with her face painted ten years younger, her lips red and dewy and matching all the vibrant floral overhead. This was how Jaylin had always pictured her. Lisa Sigvard. The kind of woman who looked like she cut her enemies down with her gardening sheers.

“Where’s Quen?” Felix asked. “He owes me a goddamn beer.”

“Oh, you know,” Lisa crooned, nipping a dead bud from a potted plant, “off on one of his interludes. I heard you had quite the evening, yesterday.”

“Son of a bitch took a needle of bane to him,” Felix said. “Didn’t it used to be they just killed the bastards?”

“The laws in the East have changed,” Mrs. Sigvard responded, wiping the soil from her hands. “No one got hurt, did they?”

She looked at Jaylin as she said it like she was asking him in particular. And maybe it was the way her eyes smirked or the composure Mrs. Sigvard had in the midst of such a bizarre conversation, but Jaylin found it hard to speak. He cleared his throat and the silence went with it. “So you know? She knows… about the wolf stuff?”

“I know plenty. You’ll know everything too. In time, dear. In time.” Then she gestured to Felix with her sheers. “He just stocked the fridge. I’d get to them before he Alex does.”

Felix took to the steps eagerly and heaved open the heavy front doors. Jaylin had started to follow in behind him when Mrs. Sigvard stopped him with a squeeze on the shoulder. “Come with me, dear. I’d like to show you something.”

Jaylin followed her around the side of the building where a wooden fence cut the yard in two, and to the curled iron of the heavy garden gate. Mrs. Sigvard jerked the lock from its latch, and Jaylin was hit with a myriad of smell. Oregano and jasmine and peppermint—and then the scent that brought him back to the warm leather interior of Quentin’s car and the taste of his herbal tea. Lavender.

Mrs. Sigvard led him through the gate and into a rural world where plants became hedge walls and orchards of fruit trees veined into a net of canopies overhead. Thyme and sage and jasmine all grew into one another—mingling at the core, not domesticated into potted plants. He could smell roses somewhere not far off, and then a tinge of sweet pea, but the garden was so grand in fact, Jaylin couldn’t see them at all.

He was led to a pathway, where trees smothered the sky into darkness, limbs twisting together, wrapping around one another to create a natural passageway. It felt like walking in a warren—a labyrinth where branches webbed overhead and cast shadows on the trampled ground. Shadows that shimmered with the wind and danced with the trees like sunlight on shallow water.

He followed Mrs. Sigvard through the archway of foliage, lost in the scents and the smells and the sheer size of the plants around him—some growing taller than himself, others luring him with perfumes he’d never smelled before and others he’d enjoyed the bouquet of at some nostalgic point in his life.

Mrs. Sigvard stopped at a bench, sanded down from the overgrown stump of a surfaced tree root. The ground here was paved in flat stone and gardening tools hung from a board beneath protective covering.

Jaylin never thought there could be a more peaceful place than the library. But here—nothing could hurt him here.

He took a seat on the bench beside her, gawking at the castle of flora and the song of all the birds that had made it their haven. “What is his?”

“Isn’t it lovely?” she asked, craning her head back to watch the finches hop between branches. “This was where Quentin’s heart went when Anna died.”

“He did all of this?” Jaylin hardly made a sound, his voice gone adrift to all the sounds of the garden.

“Anna always wanted to build a garden, but her studies got in her way. This was Quentin’s parting gift to her.”

Jaylin’s chest ached.

He’d never known anyone who lost someone they loved. Just Tisper, who left her family before they could leave her. Sadie, who’d suffered more breakups than the rest of them combined, and Matt, who never really spoke of the things he’d lost. He thought every day of how it would hurt when his mother went. He couldn’t imagine what losing a daughter was like.

The timbre of Mrs. Sigvard’s rich voice pulled him from his sorrows. “Do you know why you fell sick when you breathed the mistletoe?”

Jaylin shrugged. “I was getting sick. I told them that.”

“Do you know what kind of creature reacts that way to mistletoe?”

A breeze rustled the trees, sending flower petals and wild perfumes billowing past him. Jaylin didn’t want to say it. “The same kind that turn wolf when they’re stuck with wolfsbane? Like, in the movies? You think I could be a werewolf?”

“I think Quentin has his intuitions about you,” Lisa said. “I think it would be best to listen to what he has to say.”

“So what does he have to say?” Jaylin swallowed. “He can tell me now. Where is he?”

“I wish I knew,” Lisa said, smiling to nothing at all. “He disappears now and then. That poor boy would climb mountains to escape his ghosts.”

Jaylin had two questions on his mind: who were the people who attacked him in the library, and just what the hell happened to Anna Sigvard? But he could feel a sadness in Lisa. She was like lingering spirit, shackled to the garden walls. So he kept quiet, until he felt her rise to her feet beside him.

“Let’s go, darling. You must be starved.”

He was famished, but Jaylin didn’t know it until he stepped inside and smelled the steaming meats and fresh baked bread, wafting from the bustle of the kitchen.

“Hey, Jaylin,” Alex said, carrying a stack of plates in his arms. “Mom went all out. So I hope you like brioche. Whatever that is.”

“The food isn’t quite the same when it’s not Quentin cooking it,” Mrs. Sigvard said as she took him by the elbow and led him toward the dining table. “But I like to think I’ve got a knack for seasoning.”

He took a seat while Alex spread the plates out, one at each chair. One extra plate left out—for Quentin, Jaylin thought.

Jaylin ate his fair share of food, and a bit more. Once or twice, he caught Lisa smiling from behind her wine glass when she saw the mountain of side-dishes he’d piled on his plate. He ate until he couldn’t stomach another morsal, then he succumbed to drawing pictures in his mashed potatoes while Alex and Felix argued over the last brioche in the basket. Eventually, Lisa took it for herself if only to make them stop.

“What are your life plans, Jaylin?” Lisa asked, cracking the bread in half. “Are you in college?”

“No,” Jaylin admitted. “I’m trying, but I don’t think I’ve got the grades for it.”

“So marry rich,” she tittered from behind her glass.

“Mom,” Alex groaned.

“What? It worked out pleasantly for me.”

“Until he left,” said Alex.

Felix seemed to slow his chewing, daring green eyes glancing up to catch whatever lashing Lisa would unleash upon her son. But she sighed instead and stood from her chair. “How does a pie sound? Lovely, right?” Then she scuttled off to the kitchen, shouting, “Lillabeth! Oh, how do you make that silk pie again?”

As her footsteps faded away, Alex leaned back, looking a bit green in the face. “Too much. She always makes too much.”

Felix took his plate from him and dumped the leftovers into his own. “It’ll be gone by morning. So will Quentin if he fasts me again.”

“Was Quentin the one that was with you?” Jaylin asked. “In the cemetery that night. With Tyler.”

“Was Tyler the one I ate?” Felix said. When Jaylin and Alex shared a mortified look, a laugh began to simmer in his throat. “Relax, I was joking. Just a nibble, that’s all.”

Alex went two shades greener. “That’s not funny.”

“So was that him?” Jaylin asked. “The brown wolf?”

“Aye.” Felix said stabbed at the chunk of meat on his plate. “That was the first in command. Saving scrawny kids from cemetery brawls while he should be carrying out his alpha duties.”

“Alpha,” Jaylin choked. “Alpha of what?”

“The West Coast.”

“When you say the West Coast, you mean—”

“Washington, Oregon, California. This chunk of rock by the sea,” Felix said. “Our home.”

“So that’s why you live here with him?” Jaylin asked, hoping to absorb all the answers Felix had while he seemed talkative enough to give them.

“Aye, I’m his appointed Sheriff,” Felix said. “I go everywhere with him.”

“So you’re like second in command?”

Alex butted in, “More like a guard dog.”

Felix’s lips curled in a snarl. “No one asked you.”

“In Laymen’s terms, Felix is his bitch.” Felix turned to him, looking like he might pounce. Alex shrunk in his seat, hands in the air. “Well technically you are! Put down the steak knife, I’m just teasing.”

Jaylin turned his eyes back to his mashed potatoes. “Lisa showed me the garden.”

“Saw, did ye’?” Felix asked, silverware clacking against his plate. “Man who bakes pies and tends gardens for a living. And here he is, ruling over most populated territory margin in America.”

“He did it for Anna,” Alex said, looking a shade more sullen. He sat up on his elbow and rolled a crumb across the table top with his fingernail. “That’s why he’s an alpha. Look at the things he does for the people he loves.”

The maids had started to gather dirty dishes and leftover food into their arms. Once they’d carried it all off to the kitchen, Jaylin glanced through the cut out in the wall, calculating the distance between Lisa and himself. When he decided she was too far to hear, he asked, “What happened to Anna?”

Alex didn’t flinch, but he didn’t look up, either.

“There was an accident,” Felix said.

Finally Alex glanced up, but at him, not at Jaylin. “It wasn’t an accident, Felix. She was killed.”

Jaylin staggered over the word. When he could manage to speak again, he asked, “What? How? You mean—by a drunk driver or something, right?”

“No.”

“Then by who?”

There was the bang of an overshot door, knocking against the wall. And at the edge of the welcome mat Quentin stood, hair and clothes sopping wet from the rain. He tossed his things aside, his jacket, his keys, his wallet. And as he did, he looked past Jaylin with those tense eyes—rain slipping down his brow. “He asked you a question.”

Alex looked frozen, and Felix slunk down in his chair like a disobedient dog, waiting for a beating. And when neither of them answered, Quentin said, “Then I’ll tell him.”

Jaylin had overstepped his boundaries by asking—he knew he had. But when he opened his mouth to apologize, the look on Quentin’s face forced the breath back into him.

“Me,” Quentin said. The world had gone so quiet around him. “I killed Anna.”

Jaylin’s heart ticked against his ears, and he sat there long after Quentin disappear up the stairs. Long after Felix had started eating again, and Lisa began to rummage around for the right pie to start her chocolate silk pie. All the while, Jaylin felt terribly chilled by it all.

“He blames himself,” Alex clarified. “It wasn’t his fault, but he’ll always blame himself.”

“So he didn’t—he didn’t kill her?”

Felix had started to speak, but Alex cut him off viciously. “Car accident. They’d gotten into a fight and she was too upset to be driving.”

Guilt burned in Jaylin’s aching stomach. They sat in silence, Felix chewing a bit slower, Alex still rolling that crumb along the table, and Jaylin biting his lip until the skin tore. And when the quiet was nearly too much, Alex looked up with a smile and said, “So, uhm…do you like video games?”

They chatted for a while after that, poking at their silk pie and listening to Felix’s stories about his past drunken endeavors. About the motorcycle he used to own—how he totaled it on the freeway, going twice the legal speed limit. “Would’ve died,” he said. “But let me tell you, lad. It’s a chore, killin’ us.”

Once the maids had come to collect their dishes, Jaylin escaped Lisa’s heated conversation about politics and climbed the stairs, pausing at the second bedroom to the right. Soft music snaked through the cracks, joined with the faint artificial light of a TV screen. This had to be Quentin’s room. For a long moment, Jaylin lingered there in the hallway, trying to piece together an apology—anything to make right whatever strange association they had. He wasn’t expecting the door to open. For the darkness inside to greet him. Edged by light, Quentin stood there, wrapped in a loose black T-shirt and sweats.

He was a different man, that handsome grin of his lost—his face now hard and shadowed. He leaned his head against the door frame and waited for Jaylin to speak.

“Sorry,” Jaylin said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

Quentin gave the door a shove open and turned from him. “We’ve dragged you into this world without your permission. Ask what you need to ask.”

Jaylin stepped inside—the walls dark brick around him. He couldn’t make out much but a bed, black sheets spilling off of the side. The faint, blue glow—not from a television, but a neon gas sign on the wall that read Oldsmobile.

“Were you sleeping?” Jaylin asked.

“Trying,” Quentin said. “What is it that you want to know?”

Jaylin shrugged, wiping the cold from his arms. “I wanted to know if you were okay.”

There was a strange pause—a shift in his bearings. He turned to Jaylin, brows furrowed and forehead creased, like there was something he didn’t understand. “That was your question?”

“That’s what seemed important right now.”

Quentin moved forward with that same slow prowl as the night in the library. Jaylin’s heart hit his ribs like a hammer and he felt himself back into the hard edge of the door. Then it was slipping out from behind his back, shutting behind him. Quentin stood there, an arm pressed flush against it. He reached for Jaylin and he shot back against the door at the hand that wrapped his neck. He clutched at Quentin’s wrist, expecting that same squeeze Bobby had given him. That suffocating vise on his air ways.

Instead, his hand drew back in hesitation. “It’s okay,” Quentin whispered. “I won’t hurt you.”

Then his fingers were brushing his neck again, sliding around, but not squeezing. Instead, Jaylin felt his thumb move, searching for something. It settled beneath his jaw, over the hard pump of his heartbeat. In the darkness, he saw Quentin’s eyes, seeking his own.

“I won’t let anyone hurt you,” Quentin said. His dark eyes were reading Jaylin’s face with something new. Something different. And with the thumb that felt for Jaylin’s pulse, Quentin pressed up against his jawline and Jaylin tilted his head back to his directive. There was something gnawing in Quentin’s low gaze—a dark, warm want that drew his attention to Jaylin’s lips. “Are you afraid of me?”

Jaylin swallowed, throat bobbing beneath Quentin’s fingers. “No.”

“What if I killed Anna?” he asked. “I  heard what they told you. She didn’t die in a car accident. I killed her, Jaylin.” With a hard breath, he moved closer. “I shot her,” he said. “With a gun, I shot her.”

Jaylin met his too-close gaze, the depths of it putting a lump in his throat. “I don’t think you’d do something like that…unless you had to.” 

“I had to,” Quentin whispered. There were a million sounds in that gentle voice that pulled at every bone in Jaylin’s body. It wasn’t a sad sound, but a desperate one. Make it better, it said. Make it go away.

Quentin was all shadows, light glinting in his dark eyes. They were too close to make out without glancing from one to the other. And as Jaylin looked between them, they drew closer, the darkness of Quentin Bronx blooming, swelling in the air, catching fire on Jaylin’s skin. His cheeks burned down to his neck and he was suddenly very aware of his own ears—how they flared, hot and prickling.

He wanted to make it better. He wanted to make it go away.

Breath brushed his lips and as Quentin drew too close to see, Jaylin shut his eyes, breathing in the liquored taste of it. Waiting for the soft skin, the warmth on his parted lips. “Still not afraid?” Quentin whispered. 

Something shuddered in his stomach.

It happened so suddenly, that sick, crawling bubble, scuttling up inside him. Jaylin dropped his head and vomited, clutching a blind fistful of Quentin’s shirt.

“Sorry,” he heaved. “I’m—” Then he hunched down and vomited again.

Quentin gave a deep sigh and placed a hand on Jaylin’s head, while every bit of Lisa’s dinner spewed from his body and onto Quentin’s—probably priceless—clothing.

“It’s alright,” Quentin said, while Jaylin gagged and spilled his stomach on the hardwood.  He brushed a set of fingers back through Jaylin’s hair and sighed deeply. “I should’ve warned you not to eat Lisa’s cooking.”