Jaylin hadn’t sat at a dining table so awkward since the night his mother had told him that his father wasn’t coming home.
She’d said it so nonchalantly like it wasn’t a huge deal. It wasn’t a defining factor. It was just another part of her day, no different than running into their neighbor Marsha at the produce market.
She told him that too. She told him how she’d talked about growing a strawberry garden on the property line. One both houses could pick from in the summer. How nice it would be to bake fresh shortcake like she used to, then in the same breath, she told him that David had left. Packed his things at the break of dawn, took the cash from the vacation fund that sat in a jar atop the fridge and walked through the front door thinking no one had heard him go. And Jaylin was stuck on the plane between now and then, wondering what to say. How to acknowledge that the very person he was to look up to in life had just diminished to nothing but an old shoe print on the kitchen floor.
Instead he looked her in her withered face and said, “Can I help with the garden?”
It was the quietest meal of his life, but somehow this triumphed it. Sadie, Tisper and Matt all seated in front of a plate of eclairs with lifeless looks on their faces. It was like they’d seen a ghost, as the idiom goes. Or maybe it was the wolf, curled beneath the table, licking her chomps in her sleep.
Jaylin had picked a chair across from the others, tapping his fingers anxiously against the corner of the table while a maid hurried over with four glasses between her fingers, large and round like fishbowls. She set them down and went on her way and Jaylin filled each glass with a generous amount of wine. Then he dealt them around the table.
Tisper was the first to take a drink. One long, gluttonous swig and half the glass was gone. In the awkward silence, Jaylin searched for eye-contact, but there was none. After what they’d just witnessed, he couldn’t blame them.
Imani, eager to help them understand, had turned from woman to wolf before their very eyes. Since then, the room had been so silent Jaylin could hear the wind creaking the manor’s bones.
After a long time in the agonizing silence, Sadie poured out a breath. “Okay, I can’t stand this anymore. This is weird, this is weird. This is so fucking weird.”
“It’s not weird.” Tisper’s voice sounded raw, like rickety a drive over rough gravel. “It’s just… well, it’s going to take a moment to settle in.”
“Not weird?” Matt exclaimed. He looked paler than the others and he was the only one who hadn’t touched his batch of eclairs. “We just—we just watched a woman turn into a—”
“Yeah, but,”—Tisper tipped back her wine and swallowed down another ample gulp—”it was kind of…”
“Amazing,” Sadie fawned. “It was amazing.“
Matthew looked to her incredulously, and then swung his head back to Jaylin. “This can’t be possible. It’s a prank or somethin’, right?”
“Were you not standing there with us when she changed?” Tisper asked, and though her voice held steady, her fingers trembled as she extended her glass to Jaylin. “More, please.”
“I don’t know—I don’t know,” Matthew struggled. “Maybe I’m dreaming? Maybe this is all some weird subconscious bull.”
“It’s not,” Sadie said, holding his eyes with her own wide gaze. “It’s not bull, Matt. I told you something weird was going on, I told you I saw a wolf outside the window that night. The weird flashes in my dreams.”
“Again, Sadie,” Matt barked. “It was a dream.”
“Then what about the library? Was that a dream too? Jay would know better than anyone if that was a dream, seeing as he was there.”
Jaylin finished filling Tisper’s glass and sat the bottle down with a thud. “Enough. This isn’t a dream, you aren’t hallucinating, no one’s pranking you and filming it for a reality television show.” He tugged his sleeve up to his forearm and flexed his fingers for all to see the ghastly claws they’d become. “Trust me, I wish it was. I wish it was anything but real.”
“Oh god,” Matt dropped his head to the table and clutched at his hair. “It’s like your mom made it with the Babadook.”
“Jay,” Tisper said, her forehead wrinkled in worry. “What is that? What’s wrong with you?”
Jaylin hesitated and looked to his right. He could see Quentin through the kitchen window, leaning back against the refrigerator door and listening, holding back every urge he had to intrude on the conversation and explain it for himself. He was giving Jaylin the opportunity to share his experience, everything he’d learned. In his own words.
And he did. He told them about Anna. Even after Quentin had escaped, disappeared from the kitchen, no rhyme but all reason. Jaylin told them about the curse of the lichund. About Olivia, about what happened to Bobby that night in the cemetery. About Imani, who still slept beneath the table, and Felix who had posted himself in a chair by the door, just to ensure that none of them left before their debts were settled.
Their debts. That was the one thing Jaylin couldn’t bring himself to explain. That they were all in danger now. That if they didn’t keep their mouth shuts about this strange underground society, they’d be taken away like the others he’d been told of. He couldn’t bear to tell them, so he shut his mouth and waited for Quentin’s return.
They each sat around the table, glasses of wine refilled and cold eclairs piled on their plates. Sadie and Matt looked lost in their own processing, like robots, chewing over incomputable data. Tisper, however, had worked her way to a second bottle of wine, squishing her eclair between her fingers with a sloppy, intoxicated smile.
“What about vampires?” she asked, watching the cream break through the pastry. “I’ve always wanted a vampire boyfriend.”
Jaylin knew Tisper well enough to understand that this was only her way of coping. Heavy news was easier to take with a spoonful of wine.
“I don’t know. Maybe?” Jaylin replied, minding his feet as the maids crawled beneath the table to clean the blood stains left by Imani. She’d changed back and stomped off to take a shower, and it was hard to overlook the irritate twitch in Lillabeth’s brow as she watched the blood scatter over her clean floor. So much mess, only to prove a point. It seemed, this was just the way Imani was. She’s more wolf than woman, Izzy had told him. But that’s why Imani does as Imani pleases. She’s a quick trigger. Stronger than most of us combined.
Jaylin wondered if she was stronger than Quentin. Or how strong Quentin even was. Did an Alpha have to be strong to lead a pack, or was it more about the mentality? Quentin wasn’t large in his wolf form. He wasn’t a deity, there was nothing ethereal about him. He was only a wolf, like the rest of them.
What made him Alpha?
“Promise me, Jay. Promise me.” Tisper tipped back her glass, wine frothing as she sloshed back another sloppy sip. “Promise you’ll tell me if you meet one. A vampire. A hot one though—none of that Bill Compton shit. I’m talking a bonafied Eddy Cullen. From the books, not the movies.”
Jaylin felt a grin stretch his face. It was nice, this feeling of normalcy. Maybe it was fleeting, but for a moment, talking to a drunken Tisper took his mind off of the pain in his leg and the curse on his flesh. “How do I find you a character from a book? They don’t really have a face.”
“You use your imagination.” Tisper wiped a hand down her eyes, her bangle bracelets jingling as her fingers floated down her features. “What do you see when you think mysterious bad boy?“
“A boring, broody personality and a sick obsession with men’s leather.”
“No, no, no. Think about it,” Tisper smeared her words. “What do you see when you imagine a dark, sexy, dangerous, kiss-you-under-moonlight kinda guy?”
Jaylin felt his face heat, because he knew exactly where his mind would go. It would stray to the library, to the feel of Quentin’s breath and the single sheen of light in his eyes, cast through a split in the curtains of a window.
It would drag him back to the night in his room when Quentin looked to him like he’d been starved of something. Famished for something and waiting for Jaylin to realize and feed him what he’d needed.
Then just the night before where he’d come back to the empty apartment, turned to man before him. And all Jaylin could see beyond the red was Quentin’s eyes. The way they’d returned human, but not entirely. There was still something primal in him. It had been there all this time, he just never realized it.
They were sublime, all-knowing. Like every question he’d ever had could be answered just by looking into them. But then, in the vast brown orbs were revelations Jaylin didn’t want to know. Questions never to be answered.
Quentin seemed full of those things. Full of the possible and the terrifying.
“Could you be any more obvious.” Tisper laid her head in her arms with cheeky smile, her tired eyes floating over Jaylin’s shoulder. He turned to see where she’d been looking, his eyes snagging on Quentin’s disciplined shape as he descended the staircase in a clean shirt, Mrs. Sigvard and Alex tailing just behind him.
Jaylin escaped any chance of eye contact, his gaze drifting to the front windows where the sentinels rested on the veranda, guzzling down beer and laughing much too loudly into the night. They’d been banished by Quentin hours ago; he wanted to give the others the peace and quiet to comprehend the mess they’d stumbled into. But still, Jaylin wondered how the wolves could stand the cold of an impending winter for so long now.
“Good, you’re all still here,” Quentin declared as a maid approached him with a mug of hot tea.
Matthew sat up, his hair a disheveled mess from all the times he’d run his fingers through. “Listen man, it’s two AM. I gotta get home.”
“You’re free to go,” Quentin said, taking a binder from Lisa’s arms. “After you sign this.” He dropped the book down on its faded spine, turning page after page until they’d all begun to fill with chicken-scratch names and elegant signatures. “Unfortunately, I’m not permitted to give you copies. But if you have any questions, you can call me. Otherwise, take the time to read it before you go.”
“Wait—no, hold up,” Sadie said. “What exactly are we signing?”
Quentin held out a pen and grinned that terribly unfair smile of his.
“Let’s call it a non-disclosure agreement.”
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