Autumn

by Sierra Dean

  She stuck out her tongue at him, and he raised one side of his lip to show her his formidable teeth.

  “You win,” she acquiesced, taking a step away from him.

  Cooper stuck to her side like a conjoined twin, so close he bumped into her when she stopped at the corner of the house. His shoes skinned the bare backs of her heels, making her wince.

  “Cripes, Cooper, watch the feet.” Under normal circumstances she wouldn’t have said anything, but she was prone to worry about her feet more than the rest of her. For a diabetic, foot injuries could be bad news. Like…amputation bad.

  “Sorry,” he replied, sounding guilty.

  Lou could live without a lot of things, but she didn’t think she’d do too well without her feet.

  They edged around the rear of the house, up the rickety back steps and through the screen door outside the kitchen.

  “You need to be so quiet. Like a scream-in-space quiet, okay? My grandma sleeps so lightly a mouse fart could wake her up.” Lou held a finger to her lips, driving home the point they couldn’t be heard.

  Cooper snorted, then covered his mouth.

  “Cooper.”

  “Sorry. Soooorry. But…mouse fart?”

  “Not the point,” she whispered.

  “Sorry.”

  Lou opened the inner kitchen door, grateful for the silent hinges. The inside of the house was dark, and all the noise inside was dulled. Somewhere upstairs was the hushed sound of Granny Elle’s snoring. This time Cooper stayed a half step behind, so when she stopped walking, he had a chance to avoid slamming into her.

  As it turned out, Cooper wasn’t what she had to worry about.

  Her phone vibrated once, then started playing James Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing”. She fumbled for her purse and managed to get the phone answered before the chorus could begin.

  “Bitch, are you alllliiiive?” Marnie shouted with the din of the party loud in the background.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Lou stage whispered into the mouthpiece.

  “WHAT?”

  “I’m fine.” She was trying desperately to get her point across without being heard. She felt a pang of guilt for being so noisy, especially since she’d just been lecturing Cooper to stay quiet. At least if Granny Elle heard Lou talking in the kitchen, it wouldn’t seem as strange as a young man’s voice. Male voices were distinctly out of place in the Whittaker house, so Cooper’s warm rumble was likely to cause trouble.

  “You’re missing a great paaaarty. Archer was—”

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I gotta go.” Lou hung up before she could hear the rest of what Marnie was going to say. Her friend was talking so loud there was no doubt Cooper could hear every word, and the last thing she needed was him thinking something was up with her and Archer.

  Okay…well, maybe that was pretty low on the worst-case scenario list now. Worrying if the boy she liked was threatened by someone else didn’t hold a candle to finding out Cooper’s brother was a coyote. Or that she’d had vivid dreams about the curse that was responsible for his transformation.

  Worst of all was the looming knowledge that Cooper himself might end up like Jeremy had.

  Lou was still trying to wrap her head around Jeremy being a coyote. It didn’t seem possible. Cooper obviously hadn’t expected her to accept the story so readily, and normally she wouldn’t have. Except those dreams. They’d been too real to ignore. Cooper would have needed to be inside her head to describe them so identically. Lou didn’t think she had much choice but to believe.

  But that didn’t make it easy.

  Accepting that Jeremy was a coyote and accepting that Cooper might become one were as far removed from one another as she could get. She wouldn’t let it happen.

  Once the phone was crammed back in her purse, she and Cooper stood side by side in the kitchen, holding their breaths, trying to hear if there were any signs of Granny Elle or Lou’s mother stirring.

  Silence reigned, and Lou released a sigh of relief. She eased open the door to the attic and led Cooper upstairs slowly, not risking turning on the stairwell light. It was easier to creep up now without a big box in her hands, and she got to the top without another knee-skinning incident.

  When Cooper joined her, Lou flicked on a small lamp in one corner next to the dress mannequin. The light was dim and didn’t cast its glow on the entirety of the space, but it was still better than fumbling around in the dark.

  The small pile of goodies she’d been planning to claim from her father’s trunk was still stacked at its side. She hadn’t taken them with her when she abandoned the drawing. She’d simply put as much as she could back in the trunk in case Granny Elle came up, and left everything else easily accessible.

  Lou plopped down beside the trunk and beckoned for Cooper to join her. He shuffled over, seemingly concerned about making too much noise with his shoes, and settled in next to her. Their thighs touched, a line of warm from knee to hip, reminding Lou the evening hadn’t been entirely unpleasant.

  She tried to push the memory of their kiss out of her mind, but the second she started thinking about it she couldn’t stop. It wasn’t her fault, really. It had been the kind of kiss to knock anyone in their right mind a little senseless.

  “I found this in with my dad’s stuff. These are things from when he was a kid, our age, or maybe younger. I’m not sure, he didn’t date it.” She held out the paper, its frayed edges tickling the inside of her palm.

  Cooper took the paper from her and stared at the drawing. Lou leaned closer, trying to see it as he might. The woman was dark and fierce, her hair braided like a crown around her head. Since the sketch wasn’t in color it was hard to tell what the woman was meant to look like, but Lou filled in the blanks from her memory.

  The woman’s hair was dark brown, her eyes amber, like rich honey. She knew the way the woman’s voice sounded, and even knew her name.

  “That’s Morena.”

  “How do you know that?” Judging by his expression he wasn’t looking at the woman anymore, his attention now on the coyote trembling at her feet. It was amazing how much fear was evident in a mere drawing. Knowing now the coyote was once a man, and the woman looming over him was responsible for his furry enslavement, well…the look made a lot more sense.

  Lou explained her dream in detail, filling in the gaps from his narrative. By the time she finished she felt physically drained, and Cooper was white as a sheet.

  He held the paper out like it might burn him, and she reclaimed the page, placing it facedown on the trunk. For a long time they sat quietly, nothing but the sound of their breathing filling the space between them.

  “What does this mean?” Cooper asked, finding a voice for the question they were both contemplating. “I feel like this is supposed to be our answer, but I…I don’t know. All we know is maybe my grandma’s version was right, but I don’t know what to do with that information.”

  Lou sighed, irritated with herself for thinking this would be a simple solution. She picked up her father’s baseball and rolled it between her palms. “You know, this would be a lot easier if we could ask your mom.”

  “Or your dad,” he countered, as if a dead man would be about as willing as his mother to talk.

  Maybe it is, a nagging voice told her.

  Hadn’t she seen her father?

  What if that encounter had been his way of trying to tell her something? And what if she hadn’t been seeing things in that hallway mirror? Instead of replying with a snarky shoot-down about it being impossible to ask her dad anything, she said, “What if we could?”

  “Could…?”

  “Ask my dad.”

  “Lou, your dad is dead.”

  “And your brother is a coyote. Are we really going to argue about what’s possible?”

  “Point taken.” He gnawed on his fingernail, his gaze drifting towards the paper on the trunk. “Do you think he had the same dreams you did?”

  “He must have. I don’t see how else
he would have been able to draw her exactly as I saw her. And it has to be related to your ancestors somehow. I mean, that coyote is a bit too specific to just be a coincidence.”

  “So, what? We get in touch with your dad’s ghost, ask him what the deal is, and while we’re at it we find out why my mom is so anti-Lou?”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “I don’t have any ideas. If I did, I wouldn’t spend my days counting down to turning furry.”

  “So let’s try it.”

  “There’s only one problem.”

  “If there’s only one problem, we’re doing a lot better than we were an hour ago. What’s the new problem?”

  “We have to figure out how to get my dead dad to talk to us.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Lou exiled Cooper to the cool night after deciding it would be best if she tried to contact her dad solo the first time. They stood on the back stoop, the wood groaning lightly under their combined weight. They gravitated towards each other, then away, as if they were compatible magnets who couldn’t decide whether or not to touch.

  Finally she leaned in close, bracing her hands on his chest, and brushed her nose against his, like the Eskimo kisses her mother used to give her when she was a child. The smell of him was now gloriously familiar, and she felt safe inside the shroud of his scent. Cooper angled his head, and their lips met in an almost chaste kiss.

  She leaned into him, wrapping her arms around his neck so he was supporting her weight and she was half off the back step, balanced only on her tiptoes. Lou gave in to the kiss and allowed herself to fall headlong into the warm, fizzy sensation of being so close to him. Her mind got foggy, the real world blotted out by the perfect, hazy wonderment of getting to kiss Cooper Reynolds.

  His hands tightened at her back, arms looped around her waist. She felt so sure of him, so certain she would never fall as long as he was there to catch her.

  A heat warmed her belly and fanned to her cheeks, making her dizzy in the most perfect way. When the kiss deepened, she thought she might have died and gone to heaven. It was so different from any kiss she’d ever had—not that she was an expert by any means—but if more kisses were as good as this, it was a wonder people didn’t walk around lip-locked all day.

  Her hands began to tingle, as if they’d been asleep and had only then started coming back into feeling. But the tingle soon felt more like an itchy burn, almost distracting her from the kiss.

  Cooper’s hands tensed on her, drawing her in close until she was pressed tight against him. He growled into her mouth when he seemed to realize she couldn’t get any closer to him. He backed them both up until her body bumped into the door and he was leaning into her, taking up all her personal space.

  Her cheeks flushed, and she raked her fingers through his hair, trying from her end to bring him closer. They were getting carried away, and for once she couldn’t have been happier about letting go of her inhibitions.

  She came up for air, gasping, and it took all her willpower not to dive back in. Cooper’s cheeks looked as flushed as hers felt, glowing pink under the dim light of the moon.

  “We should stop doing that,” Lou whispered.

  “We should never stop doing that.”

  “You’re too distracting. We’re never going to figure out what’s going on if you keep kissing the smarts out of me.”

  Cooper kissed her forehead, then the tip of her nose. “Lou, you can ask me to do just about anything for you and I’ll walk over broken glass to do it. But don’t ever ask me to stop kissing you.”

  She feigned annoyance with his demand, but placed one last kiss on his lips, trying to memorize the way he tasted. If they didn’t figure things out, she might run out of chances, and she didn’t want to forget every little piece of what it felt like to kiss him.

  “If there’s a way to fix this, we’re going to find it. I promise.”

  “You can’t promise that, Lou.”

  “Let me make whatever promises I want.”

  Cooper brushed her hair back from her face and smiled sadly. “I believe that if anyone had a way to save me, it would be you. Though why you want to save someone like me is a mystery.”

  “It’s not that weird. You’re one of a kind. Who cares what anyone else thinks? I know the world would be less amazing without you.”

  “Are you saying having me around makes the world amazing?”

  “Don’t let your head get too fat. I just don’t want to lose a good lab partner. Mr. Price will end up pairing me with Max. Or Princess. In either case I don’t wear enough eyeliner to make things work.”

  Before Cooper could respond with whatever clever rejoinder he had in mind, Jeremy appeared out of the darkness and began pacing in the backyard. He evidently had little interest in watching them make out because he was making his impatience known. Jeremy yipped and gave a low growl, and Cooper propped Lou back up on the stairs, taking a step back.

  “I guess I should go.”

  “I’ll let you know what I find out. If I can make it work.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I ain’t afraid of no ghost,” she replied, giving him a self-assured wink that belied how terrified she was to try communicating with her dead father. She wasn’t afraid of her father, but the idea of calling up a ghost left her unsettled. When she reached out into the void, there was a chance someone else would answer her call.

  Or worse yet, no one would answer at all.

  She was grasping at straws with this idea, and had no way of knowing if it was even going to work.

  But as Cooper had implied earlier, he had plenty of worries to fill his own mind without her adding to the list by telling him her fears. This was one thing she’d have to do on her own, a scary reality she’d face because it meant helping him.

  She got the feeling it had been an awfully long time since anyone had offered to help Cooper. Maybe they didn’t know how, but it was far more likely that no one would have cared even if they’d known. And his mother had been willing to ignore the warnings and was now suffering the consequences by losing one son at a time to a curse she hadn’t believed in.

  Lou wasn’t sure if Cooper’s mom had given up hope, but it was obvious she wasn’t actively doing anything to save her son. Lou couldn’t sit idly by, though. If there was something, anything, that could be done, she was going to figure it out.

  Cooper squeezed her hand one last time, then he and Jeremy disappeared into the woods. If she didn’t find a way to reverse Morena’s curse, next summer she’d be watching two coyotes run off together, and the boy she knew would be gone.

  She closed the back door, locking it behind her, and wandered up the main staircase to the second floor. Her father’s old room was next to where her mother now slept, and Lou crept inside, trying to stay as quiet as possible. Her mother was a heavy sleeper, but Lou no longer had the added buffer of being in the attic. It was going to be hard to speak to a ghost when her mother was on the other side of the wall.

  The room had changed drastically since her father’s youth. Gone were the boy-appropriate wallpaper and the posters of athletes and rock stars. Granny Elle had redone the room as a craft space, so instead of a bed and dresser there was a folding card table covered in scrapbook paper and several plastic bins holding yarn.

  Leaning against the wall farthest from the door was the full-length mirror Lou had taken down their first full day in the house. It wasn’t fancy, just a cheap wood frame, something Granny Elle might have found at IKEA if the Swedish furniture mecca existed anywhere near Poisonfoot.

  Which it didn’t. Lou had checked.

  But the sketchy bathroom mirror in Nevada hadn’t exactly been fancy either, and it had been suitable enough to bring her father around. And she was now more certain than ever she hadn’t been imagining things in this mirror before she’d put it away. She’d brought her dad’s baseball down from the attic, thinking a tether to his life might help summon him. It didn’t occur to her until she
stood in front of the mirror that maybe she was a tether. What attached someone to the living world more than their own flesh and blood?

  Not a baseball.

  She’d never done anything like this, though, and she was willing to try anything if she thought it might work.

  Lou turned the mirror around to face the room and shifted awkwardly from foot to foot, holding the ball close to her stomach. She went over the last visitation from her father in her mind, trying to think of how she might bring him out now. Last time she’d just been washing her hands. She couldn’t exactly repeat that scenario here.

  There’d literally been nothing special about that gas station, nothing that had bound him there or would have called to him except for her.

  “Dad?” she whispered, leaning close to look into the mirror. In the darkness of the room it was hard to see herself, let alone tell if anyone was there with her. And what if he just showed up like last time? So close to the mirror, she was liable to scream when he appeared.

  She stood back so she could see a wedge of the room behind her, and cast a glance over her shoulder, in case he showed up in the room instead of the mirror. She wasn’t entirely sure how this whole incorporeal messaging system worked, but she didn’t want any surprises.

  This is never going to work, she chided herself.

  But it had to work.

  “Daddy, it’s Lou. If you can hear me, can you give me some kind of…I don’t know, a sign or something?” God this was so stupid. She was standing in a craft room, talking to a mirror. Lou rolled the ball nervously and held her breath, hoping to push away the uncertainty and wait for any sign her father had heard her.

  “I need you.”

  She was almost ready to admit she looked and felt like a fool, trying to communicate with the ghost of her dead father, when a jar of jewelry beads fell over on the card table. Lou jumped but managed not to scream, covering her mouth with her free hand in case a yelp attempted to get out.

  One point for her.

  “Dad?”

  The beads rattled, rolling slowly over the table and moving of their own free will. Lou edged closer and stared down, shocked to see the beads had formed the word Look.