by Kat Kinney
For the five years since I’d been back, we’d had each other’s backs. Nothing was off limits.
Except for one topic. Us.
And like every other fuckup in our long and spectacularly twisted history, that one was on me, too.
2
Lacey
“DID YOU GET THE LINK I SENT YOU?” my mom, Juliet, demanded the moment I swiped to answer her call.
Cracking the front door to Blair’s Bakery, I allowed a blast of icy November air to lift the damp hair off the back of my neck. Every prep counter in sight was covered in dirty mixing bowls. On a regular day, Blair’s sold out of a dozen pies by close. Now it was a week before Thanksgiving and I was up to my elbows in orders for pumpkin, sweet potato, walnut fudge and apple. The black chalkboard menu behind the front counter displayed a fat cornucopia bearing blueberry muffins and cranberry scones. Bunches of bright fall cornstalks stood in the corners between the round wooden tables and chairs. Brilliant gold and crimson leaves decorated by my Saturday morning baking class circled the wide column in the center of the store.
And this might be the last year I would ever see any of it again.
Shutting the door, I let the heat of the industrial ovens wash over me like a hot Texas summer day. “You mean the link for those amazing mango-orange running shoes that totally have your favorite daughter’s upcoming birthday written all over them?”
I was her only daughter. Which she frequently reminded me didn’t cut down on my awesome factor in the least.
“And you have how many pairs again?”
“Can a girl ever have too many?”
“Which is why I already ordered them.” There was a pause on the other end of the line, and I could almost picture my mother standing up from her workstation with its two giant screens to pace before the large bay window overlooking the street. “This is like a snakebite kit, but for werewolves. According to the product description, if you extract the venom shortly after being bitten, it reduces the chances of transmission down to nearly zero.”
My heart sank. “Please tell me you didn’t already—”
“I got us two.”
“Okay.” I rubbed my forehead, not wanting to point out that 1) werewolves didn’t have venom, 2) the results of your typical feral werewolf attack were closer to velociraptor than garter snake, and 3) if shifter scientists hadn’t been able to come up with a way to prevent transmission of lycanthropy after decades of trying, I wasn’t betting the farm on something my mom found on one of her prepper websites.
Just saying.
“I just thought with all the chatter about strange things going on in our area, it couldn’t hurt to be prepared.”
The oven timer dinged. Pushing away from the wall, I stuffed my hands into two floppy cotton-candy-pink Blair’s oven mitts and started sliding pies onto cooling racks. My mother steered the conversation effortlessly from werewolf venom extraction to crossbows that fired ash stakes (okay, those were seriously awesome), but by the time five minutes had passed and she was still on the topic of the new internet site she’d found that proposed tracking suspected shifters by raw meat purchases, my hands had started to shake.
Attempts to change the subject never worked with her. Telling her all the talk of vampires freaked me out had resulted in a call to my landlord about the need for extra floodlights around the property’s perimeter. Which, okay. Also awesome. But beside the point. Sometimes she got fifteen minutes before the side effects set in. Sometimes it was closer to five. Cruelly, the phases of the moon seemed to affect her as much as they did me.
And we had a full moon tonight.
Rubbing my temples, I leaned back against the stainless-steel prep counter. We couldn’t keep doing this.
“Mom,” I said gently.
“—can track them using—”
“Are you still in touch with that recruiter?”
And finally, she fell silent.
“Why?”
My stomach bottomed out. But there was no going back now. “Because I think we should go down to Austin next weekend and look at apartments.”
Picture a gingerbread cottage that’s been set out in front of a fire hydrant and bedazzled with cupcakes and you’d pretty much have Blair’s Bakery. You wanted to eat it? We baked it, from rich artisan breads and fresh-made sandwiches, to seasonal pies made with homegrown Texas pecans and Hill Country peaches. But what put Blair’s on the map was our cupcakes.
Tourists lined up down the block in the summers to get a taste of whatever cupcake flavors we were debuting that week. Red velvet with white chocolate frosting topped with blueberries for the Fourth of July. Praline crunch, which last month sold out before my best friend Dallas got to taste one, and had caused him to sulk the rest of the afternoon.
When I’d first started working at Blair’s back in high school, we sold cupcakes, of course, but they were your standard chocolate and vanilla sort of fare. It wasn’t until an unfortunate werewolf bite left me with a lot of sleepless nights and too much energy to burn off that we expanded into over two dozen daily varieties and a social media following that went into zombie horde mode if I forgot to tweet out a picture of our daily menu board every morning.
The last thing I wanted was to leave Blood Moon. But the year I’d been gone had changed me and my mom in ways large and small. Her fears for my safety now attached themselves to anything and everything. Mass shootings. Global pandemics. Food shortages. I couldn’t leave the house without receiving three texts wanting to make sure I was okay. Like a trip to the local HEB was fraught with zombies and ghouls instead of just my next door neighbor who never remembered his reusable shopping bags and had to finger every cantaloupe out on display before remembering he only ever bought beer and bean dip.
Then vampires outed themselves to the human world and my mom’s anxiety switched into an obsession that paranormals were coming to kill us all in our sleep. To her credit, she wasn’t the only one who went full-on prepper. For a while there, vampires had pretty much all of mankind carrying around holy water and rewatching old episodes of Buffy for slaying tips. If West sent me one more link to garlic supplements or extra moisturizing silver lotion (guaranteed to repel werewolves!) complete with a string of emojis I had no hope of deciphering, I was so going to block him. And spoiler alert: my mom had already gotten both of them for me as a stocking stuffer. Because, fuck my life.
There were moments I wanted to scream. I’d spent more nights crying alone on the floor of my shower than I could count. Except I could never show any of it to my mom. Because the paranoia, the anxiety, the delusions?
I was the one who’d done this to her.
“Okay, can I say something and if you totally hate me afterward, just remember that I love you and I totally forgave you for eating all the samosas last week?” my mom began.
“Um, that was so you.”
“And Dean and Rory are endgame.”
I rolled my eyes. We both knew I was so #TeamJess.
My mom and I had two addictions: Gilmore Girls and Indian takeout. We hung out every Friday night and binge-watched Rory and Lorelai trying to figure out their man troubles over split cartons of vegetable tikka masala, spicy lamb vindaloo and warm garlic naan. I told my mom everything. Well… almost everything. Which was how I knew exactly what was coming next.
“What if this is a chance for you to branch out, spread your wings? You’ve stayed here in Blood Moon all these years because you wanted to help out your aunt, but if we moved to Austin, you could finally open your own cupcake trailer, eventually your own shop like you’ve always talked about.” She hesitated. “Maybe even meet someone.”
“Wow, um.” A shiver raced up the back of my neck, the wolf rising in my blood. Since the night I’d been changed, I’d struggled to maintain control of my feral side. It was always harder for Bittens than for Borns, those of us who were human first and changed later versus having been born werewolves.
I blinked, vision graying out, my mother’s voic
e fading to a blur as the wolf sank its claws deeper into my mind. This past year I’d started a popular series of Saturday morning baking classes for kids. I’d increased Blair’s social media presence. I’d even led an initiative with other restaurant owners and community leaders in the downtown district, including The Rusty Spoke and Dark, where our leftover food was collected each day by volunteers from local church groups and distributed to communities experiencing food insecurity. I practically ran Blair’s as it was. I’d been a part of shaping it into what it was today in every way that counted. Austin? Austin was pretty much the coolest city ever. Unless you wanted to be living exactly where you were, in the town you’d spent ten years making your own.
And besides. We both knew that wasn’t her real argument. Her real argument was currently loping across the road in frayed jeans, a white tee that fit snug across his cut chest, and the same flip-flops he’d refused to throw away since high school.
Picture every mistake you wished you could take back rolled into a lanky six-foot-three-inches of trouble. Dirty blond hair that just scraped an annoyingly chiseled jaw. A panty-dropping smirk that had been the source of more than one girl in town egging your car when all you wanted to do was scream that they could all have him. That best friends didn’t equal together. Even if he was pretty much David Beckham’s younger, hotter cousin.
His words, not mine.
Dallas Caldwell hopped up onto the sidewalk beneath our awning, swiping a strand of hair behind his ear, and ugh, I did not just check out the gun show.
Being a were meant keeping feral urges in check, the wolf’s need to fuck, fight, and feed flaring out of control every month when the moon was full. For just over a year, I’d been hooking up with Dallas’s brother Ethan, a series of one-night stands that had ended in a huge blow up after he’d kicked me to the curb in a text (because seriously, jerk of the year) to get back together with his longtime infatuation, Hayden Crowe.
For one stupid second, I had allowed myself to think there had been something there, that all those nights Ethan and I had been together had meant something. Maybe that was foolish, but when you’ve always been the girl who was good enough for right now, but never for forever, it was hard not to feel a tiny bit resentful when you showed up at five in the morning with a sack of peanut butter cookies, expecting the guy you’d been seeing to tell you the whole text thing was just a big misunderstanding, only to see another girl standing there in your place, wearing his shirt, giving you death-eyes.
And maybe that was my mistake. Thinking things could one day be different. Wanting too much. Sometimes it was better to just go with the flow and live in the moment. If you didn’t allow feelings to form, there was no getting hurt when everyone went their separate ways.
I was just rounding the counter, trying to drown out the sound of my mother delivering an oral ten-point presentation on the virtues of aerosolized holy water, when said best friend crashed head-first into my door.
And for the second time that night, I felt my stomach crater. Because as usual, just when I needed him, Dallas Caldwell was drunk.
History was a double-edged sword. It was a wild first kiss shared between two sixteen-year-olds on a starry summer night that ten years had never been able to erase from your lips. It was a vast canvas of stars swirling overhead as a girl and a boy held hands in the back of a truck. It was eyes the color of the morning sky seared into a memory that took years to form a scar.
The problem with history was that for those lucky few, it forged a bond no one new had any hope of cracking. See exhibit A: Ethan and Hayden. But sometimes roots grew so knotted and tangled it was impossible to break free without destroying you both.
Which was the other problem. History could be an addiction, too.
“I have to go,” I told my mother.
Dallas stormed into my kitchen like it wasn’t two-freaking-thirty in the morning, smelling of woodsmoke and Old Spice, a scent I should have hated more than I did. One look at the fire blazing in his eyes told me his shifter hearing had picked up enough of our conversation from out on the street that I was going to have some explaining to do.
I held up a hand. “Before you start—"
“The hell you’re leaving.”
“Okay. Good talk.” Snorting, I swiped a loose strand of hair out of my eyes. Why was it that model-hot guys always came with enough drama for an entire season of Scandal? “First? My aunt has been talking about selling—”
“Who says the new owners won’t keep you on? They’d be out of their minds not to.”
“Maybe. Or they find a buyer who wants to convert the place into a deli.”
“So you come work for me,” Dallas growled, continuing to stalk the length of my kitchen. No one could channel their inner hot brooding Viking quite like Dallas Caldwell.
I rolled my eyes, because we’d had this conversation before. “You don’t need a full-time baker—”
“The hell I don’t. You can make all our bread in-house. Homemade pies. Cupcakes—”
“You and I both know I was under contract when I came up with those recipes. They belong to the bakery, not me. I try to open up shop down the street, or sell my cupcakes from The Spoke, and the new owners can sue for breach of contract. They may not be interested in running a bakery, but they know having one across the street will drive down their profits. With a non-compete clause that’s good for two years, I won’t be able to bake anywhere in Blood Moon.”
Dallas cursed and slammed the flat of his hand into the wall. But it wasn’t like he didn’t make his staff sign the same paperwork. Trade secrets were gold in the restaurant business and Dallas had built The Spoke from a beat-up food trailer he used to drive around to work sites at lunchtime. After he’d spent four years up in Calgary learning to smoke meat in a smoker he’d made out of a busted-out filing cabinet. And by meat, think bighorn sheep, deer, elk, whatever he could catch in wolf form up in the Canadian Rockies. I still had the letter he’d sent home to West, describing that first night where the buzzards wouldn’t even touch his leftovers. How’s that for a one-star review?
But that was the thing about Dallas. Even back then, exiled from his family and two thousand miles from home, he got what so many others who failed and gave up didn’t: if you could eventually get a bighorn sheep to taste good, you could get all-natural black Angus prime to taste freaking amazing.
“You know that isn’t the real reason I’d be doing this.” I pushed away from the counter, going over to the cooling rack for one of the deep-dish sour cherry pies we both knew were his kryptonite. “My mom’s been getting worse. Some days she seems okay. She’s the one who will literally techsplain down to a room of corporate executives because her coding is that good. And then I’ll turn on the news and see there’s been a mass shooting. Or an abduction. Or a supernatural sighting in one of the major cities. And it’s like she completely shuts down.”
I stopped, taking in his expression.
“Sorry.”
He looked down. “Think I blame Juliet for hating me?”
Most people couldn’t lie without giving it away in their eyes. Dallas’s tells were all in the mouth, the way he tapped the bottom edge of his teeth when he was working out a new recipe, or how when he was nervous, his tongue poked out to wet the faint scar bisecting his upper lip, the one he never talked about that he’d had ever since he came back from Canada at twenty-one, completely changed from the carefree boy I once knew.
But it was this expression that had the ability to silently wring my heart to shreds, the downward twist of his lips that had spurred me to kiss him that fateful night nine years ago. It was the look he got whenever he was teetering on the edge of destroying himself, a sentiment I understood all too well.
There were probably relationships that could have survived everything ours had, the trauma, the separation, and come through unscathed. But you didn’t come back from something like that the same person you once were. And I hadn’t known how to begin to put me a
nd Dallas back together when I barely recognized the man who’d gotten off the bus four years after leaving town. Not when some days, I’d barely recognized myself.
Dallas was my best friend, the one who snuck across the street at midnight and superglued all the phones in my aunt’s bakery. I signed for his delivery orders, sent him recipes I knew he would hate just so he would rage-text me back six times, and filled his Escalade with rubber spiders (because seriously, what self-respecting werewolf screamed like a total girl at the sight of spiders?)
The problem was nights like these where there was no one else around but the two of us, the warm glow of heat emanating from the ovens, an undeniable something twisting up my stomach until it resembled a loaf of challah every time the silences between us grew too long.
Because that was the thing about kryptonite. It came in many forms.
While Dallas dug in my freezer for the carton of vanilla bean, I plated up a generous wedge of cherry pie to share and we settled at the little table by the window in front. From here there was no missing the Christmas lights bedecking every nook and cranny of The Spoke, from the custom longhorn carved into the doors to the old-fashioned rusted rooster wind vane twisting up on the roof.
I dug a fat scoop from the carton of old-fashioned vanilla, dropping it on top of the pie so cherries and cream melted together in a sugary river. Just the way we both liked it.
Dallas carved off a bite the size of the Grand Canyon, swirling it through the ice cream. “You know if this is what you want, I’ll support you one hundred percent.”
“It’s not that simple.” I picked at the edge of the crust.
“Nothing ever is. You really think your mom would be better off in another town?”