Quentin didn’t come back. For hours, Jaylin watched Felix pace the downstairs foyer like an anxious dog, awaiting its human. Knowing he could say the same for himself, he did as Lisa told him to do: he climbed back into bed and shut his eyes.
But as time went on, Jaylin heard her worried conversation with Alex escalate in the silence of the hallway.
“It’s his job, Mom. He’ll be alright.”
“There’s never been anything like this before, Alex. If there were enough wolves to take down Leo…”
“It’s Quentin, Mom. “
“Yes it is. It’s Quentin.”
The anxiety in Jaylin festered, and long after they’d both gone to bed, sleep was lost on him. He reached overhead to push the window open just a bit. Enough to let in a comfortable chill and the croak of distant frogs. Then he heard a sound. No, a voice. A voice that spoke to him like the one in the forest, the night of the party in the woods. That whisper in his ears, speaking so softly and all at once so loud.
The feet he couldn’t walk on seconds ago were suddenly meeting the floor, suddenly holding his weight without pain, without question. And he was moving, out of his room, down the hall, towards the sound of that voice.
It was like a dream, his body taking him down the banister of the stairs, to the floor of the foyer. The front door was open, but Jaylin couldn’t see through the blinding light, pouring pale and full through the double doors. Then he noticed a body drowning in the mass of it. A form, standing in the center of the doorway.
The figure slumped nearly to its knees, and Jaylin noticed something glass roll his way across the floor. Small and long, with a needle tip—a dart of some sorts.
“Kid,” the figure growled—growled to him, like the deep, pained roar of a maimed jaguar. “Get back upstairs!” He could tell, only by the ring of his accent that it was Felix blocking the light. Felix shouting to him, his pleading voice only a distant foghorn to Jaylin. “Get back, now!”
But Jaylin couldn’t turn back. His legs only went forward.
He watched Felix curl into himself, in a way that could only mean terrible pain. A pain so painful, he curled his fingers to fists, made them beat against the ground. Jaylin pained for him too—he’d never seen Felix look so vulnerable. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like to see him this way. Felix. Stand up.
Then Jaylin realized that the blazing light, bleeding in through the windows and the wide open doors—it was the light of a truck in the distance with wheels half its size, lighting a straight path to the manor for a dozen marching shapes in the night. Some were small, too small to make out. Others looked like simple people. They advanced in a calm but firm formation, and from the staircase Jaylin could finally understand what he was seeing. Men. Men with guns. Men with wolves.
Felix reached out for him as he passed. “The hell are ye’ doing? Fuck, kid—get out of here!”
Jaylin opened his mouth to speak, to tell him he couldn’t. That he had no control of his legs, his body. That the voice was too loud, it made his skull tremor, it frightened him. But a snarl crackled the midnight air and two beasts rushed in through the front doors, one bringing Felix down by the shoulder, the other gnarling, snapping at his face with a jaw full of teeth.
Jaylin felt his foot roll over the glass dart and he realized then that whatever contents were in it must have prevented Felix from changing. Mistletoe, he thought to himself. Mistletoe had kept Flora human.
Jaylin was frightened, his heart jolting in his chest, but his legs carried on. The wolves parted for him—going as far as to release Felix from their bite. The sheriff laid there on the veranda, pain in the way he clutched his stomach, defeat in his face as he watched Jaylin go by. “I didn’t know they’d do it,” he whispered as blood imbued the shirt on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, lad.”
Jaylin passed through the doorway, into the brilliant white of the truck lights. He stepped right into the ire of them, blinded again by the way they opposed the night. He blinked, but before he could see through that scathing brightness, he felt a hand in his hair, bearing down, while his arms were forced behind his back by two others, wound together with something cold. Then the burning started. He cried and jerked his arms to escape the heat, by Jaylin was shoved forward, down the steps and past the yellow bleeding hearts.
He could only see the ground. The harsh hand in his hair kept it that way. He bent his body to look back at Felix, watching as he reached out, caught a wolf by the muzzle and slammed it down hard against the ground. Then Felix pulled himself closer and bit into the fur of its neck. The beast writhed and squealed, snout trapped in his assertive grip.
One of the men walking in front of Jaylin stopped in place, turned on his heels and made for Felix.
Jaylin cringed as he heard the metal cluclank of a cocking gun.
“Stop!” he shouted just loud enough that the man who chauffeured him forward hesitated in place. “There’s a human inside,” Jaylin pleaded. “One who doesn’t know.” It wasn’t true, but as Jaylin thought back to the rules Quentin had read aloud, it was their secrecy that felt the most important. The most prominent to him. They wouldn’t kill another werewolf if it meant threatening their confidentiality. They couldn’t.
“Put it down,” the voice of a female ordered. A voice that Jaylin heard clearer than all the rest. Clearer than he’d ever heard anything before. “We don’t have time for the clean up.”
He focused his ears to the sound of metal stirring as the gun was lowered. Then a hit, like a punch to a sandbag, and Felix expelled an anguished groan.
Jaylin walked on, locked in this stranger’s unrelenting grip, down the gravel road, towards the sound of a rattling engine.
Then their footsteps stopped. Jaylin was yanked back by his hair and his sight fell upon a beautiful face. A long, sharp chin, two round almond eyes and fair blonde hair, plating down her back. Her skin was dark though, even soaking in the light of the headlights behind her, dark like the color of roasted pumpkin seeds, Jaylin thought. Dark against her small, pretty smile.
“Hello, Mr. Maxwell. You’re a very good listener. I’m going to ask you to do one more thing, okay?”
Jaylin didn’t want to look at her for some reason. It was too powerful—like looking into the sun. So he let his eyes shut while her voice set in. The same one he’d been hearing in his head all this time.
“Get in the car. Let’s go home.”
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