by Kat Kinney
“Remind me why I missed you?”
“Someone has to save you from your emo grunge playlists.”
He snorted. “Why do I feel like you’ve spent the last three years raging against the establishment and existing on nothing but Mexican Coke and chocolate muffins?”
“And cheeseburgers. Don’t forget the cheeseburgers.”
He huffed. “Fine, Cal. Happy?”
I hid a smirk.
“Changing a human by force isn’t forbidden under were law. Kind of a hot-button issue, especially after that YouTube video got leaked. You’ve got the right-wing groups up in arms railing about the threat to our way of life, always sure we’re about to be wiped out. And the more moderate voices pointing out we’re not doing ourselves any favors when half the were population has an origin story like yours.”
“So why is it still allowed?”
He shrugged. “We’ve got our own political messes, same as the human world. For the time being it’s been left up to each pack to decide whether or not to ban forced changing within their territory. We don’t allow it here in Blood Moon, but let’s just say some of the guys down in Austin aren’t exactly on our Christmas card list.”
“So why would someone change me and leave me there?”
Ethan leaned back against the industrial refrigerator, crossing one ankle over the other. “Doesn’t add up. The vast majority of shifters are law-abiding citizens who view forced changing as barbaric. And even the ones who don’t aren’t gonna be running around biting humans at random. Changing someone is an act of possession. It’s territorial. Primal. Newly-made wolves are the responsibility of their sires and have to be registered and approved by the appropriate Territorial Council within a month of creation. Everyone’s been on high alert ever since YouTube-gate and no one’s taking any chances. The Council has been cracking down on cases of accidental infection, sires who got too careless, you name it. No one wants a bunch of newly-turned weres going feral and exposing us to the world.”
And then I got it. “They’re going to come after me?”
“They could. Lot of local disappearances recently, and no leads. The Council has had Tracers out for months searching for connections. From their perspective, the biggest threat is another accidental exposure. We’ve got to keep things quiet until we find this guy.”
“What if he goes after Ellie?”
“I’ll call Brody in the morning, see what he thinks. From what you’ve said, though, there’s no reason to believe she’s a target.” He looked down. “You’re gonna have to come up with something to tell her. She can’t be brought in on this and you're not going to be able to go home. At least not right away. Most Bittens need a full year before they’re stable enough to control their wolves all the way through the moon cycle.”
I cursed under my breath. I’d been so desperate to get out of Austin before I could hurt someone, I hadn’t even thought past getting here and finding Ethan.
“I’m sort of low on options at the moment.”
He folded his arms, and despite myself, I found my eyes drawn to the way his biceps flexed beneath his shirt. “You can stay here as long as you need to.”
My heart kicked in my chest. “I can't ask you to do that.”
“You didn't.” Ethan drained the rest of his water just as his phone vibrated. “And I get that I screwed up three years ago, Hays, but we used to be friends.”
He glanced down at the screen and stiffened.
So picture those old Scooby-Doo cartoons where Shaggy would walk up to a doorknob someone had wired to the wall socket, and his skeleton would strobe in and out while he jackknifed like Frankenstein crossed with a human lightning bolt. Same reaction. Just minus the Scooby-snacks.
“Sorry.” Scrubbing a hand through his hair, he tapped out a quick text. “Deliveries.”
Going out to the floor, I righted a chair. “I don’t want to get in the middle of anything.”
Ethan didn’t look up, glasses lit up neon blue by the screen. “You’re not.”
His phone buzzed again. He typed. Frowned. Deleted. Because, you know, deliveries. Yeah, right. At eleven-thirty on a Tuesday night?
“I think I should find another place to crash.”
“Why?” he mumbled, clearly distracted.
I rolled my eyes and went back to sweeping the floor. Wanting to throat-punch someone because you couldn’t quit them? Yeah, that was on me. Ethan and I were nothing. Less than nothing. A five-minute hookup he was clearly taking pains to hide from someone more important. I was only torturing myself with these stupid fantasies we could ever be anything more.
The sad thing was, this was so classic Ethan. Cal told me once over beers when I ran into him in Austin last year after a show that his brother was pretty much a case study in drawing people in, then pushing them away. That because of what he went through as a kid, he had a hard time forming relationships. I think Ethan’s bearded brother has always secretly shipped us. #TeamHaythan, and all that.
Whatever. Maybe there was a time I had hoped for that, too. Maybe the girl I used to be always would. But I knew when to put fantasies in the past. This time, I wouldn’t be the one getting burned.
“We’re not together. You don’t owe me any explanations.”
Ethan’s head whipped up so fast he nearly dropped his phone. “Come again?”
I scraped broken glass into a dustpan. “Whatever. You heard me.”
“I already told you I wasn’t with anyone.”
On cue, his phone buzzed with a third incoming text. I rolled my eyes.
“If I can crash on your couch tonight, I’ll be out of your hair in the morning.”
He worked his jaw. “The thing is, now that you’re in our territory, you’re the Blood Moon pack’s responsibility. And trust me, staying here is the better of the two options.”
A chill shot up my spine. “You’re saying your brothers would really—”
“I’m saying until we find your sire and figure out what to tell the Council, you and I are stuck together.”
I huffed out a breath. “Fine. But I think you’re right. This,” I gestured between us, “shouldn’t happen again.”
“Fine by me.”
I rolled my eyes. Like we both couldn’t feel his pulse skyrocket every time he glanced down at the screen.
He switched his phone off. “Tell you what, Hayden. You don’t believe what this town says about me, and I won’t listen to the crap making the rounds about you.”
My cheeks flamed.
Dropping the phone, Ethan rubbed his face.
“Hays, I’m—”
“Don’t.” A furious tear streaked past the edge of my nose. I quickly swiped it away. “Don’t call me that. We’re not friends. We’re not… anything. I made the mistake of believing that once. I won’t make it again.”
And with that, I stormed from the room.
Then
Ethan
WHEN BEN TOLD US his father was coming to visit, I hid in the barn the rest of the afternoon. To be fair, I’d done the grandparent thing before. Twice. After our parents died, one set couldn’t take us. The other didn’t want us. August was too young to remember. Me? Not so much.
“Grandpas bring presents,” August informed me the following day at the bus stop in all of his six-year-old wisdom while I was trying to show him for the thousandth time how to make bunny ears out of his shoelaces so he wouldn’t come home with a bunch of scraggly knots for me to pick out.
“Okay,” I said neutrally. No way was I telling him that just because River and the others could expect presents, he shouldn’t get his hopes up. I’d already done that back in December, trying to prepare him so he wouldn’t cry and make a scene Christmas morning. Instead, River had started going on about putting out carrots for the reindeer. And my little brother had burst into tears over his tamales.
Which had earned me yet another talking to from Ben.
That afternoon, I felt the unfamiliar wolf the moment I got o
ff the bus. As soon as my brother’s sneakers hit the porch steps, I dropped my backpack in the bed of Ben’s truck and snuck off to the back fields.
After an entire day imprisoned in a hard plastic chair behind a scratched desk, shifting was like cannonballing into a deep, cold lake. The tight fist in my chest gradually unclenched as I tore through rows of newly planted watermelons and jumped irrigation ditches. By the time I’d chased a rabbit through the peach orchards, dug a hole in the dirt a mile or so from the house, and spent an hour peering up at the sky beneath the shade of a scraggly fig tree, I could almost breathe again.
A brilliant orange sunset had me longing for my pencils when I felt the first push in the back of my mind. Stomach growling, I snapped off another green stalk of grass with my teeth. Every day I got better at suppressing the pack bonds the rest of them wore like seconds skins.
But ten minutes later, a lanky, dust-brown wolf loped up, gave me and the chewed-up grass a withering look and shifted into West.
“C’mon,” he said, kicking at a sod of dirt. “Everyone’s hungry. Mom’s pissed.”
Sulking, I followed. The two of us wriggled under fences until we reached the edge of the fields and the water tanks. On the porch of the Caldwell’s sprawling ranch house, I kicked off my shoes, wrinkling my nose at the new-leather smell of baseball gloves dropped just beside the door. The living room floor was strewn with so many sharp plastic game pieces there were barely any safe patches in the carpet for my toes. Behind me, West yelped.
The rest of the family was seated at the long dining room table where heaping platters of food sat going cold. I slunk into my chair, avoiding nine identical dirty looks.
“Ethan.”
I twisted my napkin in my lap until it looked like a strip of rawhide. Swallowing, I lifted my eyes to Ben’s.
He nodded across the table. “This is Jameson.”
No one moved. They knew I wouldn’t be calling him anything. August, on the other hand, would have no problem adopting a virtual stranger as his long-lost grandfather because River’s grandpa must be his grandpa, too, and that was just that. He also had no problem calling Sofia and Ben ‘Mom and Dad,’ and at least once a week, reminded everyone at the table that some stupid girl in his first-grade class was adopted, and when were Ben and Sofia going to adopt us, too?
Those were the nights I usually threw up.
I stared at the edge of my plate.
“Hello.”
For once, Ben let it go. Everyone tore into fried catfish, hush puppies, coleslaw and green bean salad. Brody, in the middle of track season, wolfed down fish filets without pausing for air. West slathered his entire plate in ketchup like it was the main course and ran to the kitchen for a fresh bottle, only to scowl when he returned to discover a smirking Dallas had crowned the center of his masterpiece with a dime-sized dollop of tartar sauce. Ignored by all, I picked at my food.
“—police officer took Hayden Crowe away at recess.”
“Why?” I cut in sharply.
It took a second to realize the table had fallen silent. That I’d dropped my fork. That maybe I’d spoken a little too loudly.
Brody and Cal exchanged a look. I lowered my eyes, skin crawling as Ben studied me over the platter of coleslaw.
August, now having the undivided attention of the table, seized his moment. “She had a huge bruise—”
“That’s enough.” And while Ben’s reprimand was directed at my brother, I had the distinct feeling it was really intended for me.
After we were dismissed, I escaped to the bunkroom. A wrapped present waited on my bed, plain blue paper with my name scrawled on a slip of a tag in shaky old-man cursive.
A queasy feeling formed in my stomach, the same one that had come on Christmas morning when Sofia found me hiding in the closet and dragged me, all but clawing at the walls to get away, down to the family room where for the first time I could remember, there was a stack of presents waiting for me.
It was stupid, because you would think after so many years of sleeping in the laundry rooms of people who didn’t want me, and coming home from school wondering if there was a chance there might be Tater tots or maybe even chicken nuggets for dinner only to find my social worker’s car in the driveway and my clothes in a trash bag on the front porch, a stack of presents would have made me happy. But in a world where nothing was permanent, hope was like swallowing a mouthful of crushed glass.
And no matter how many times Ben and Sofia insisted August and I were staying for good, eventually they were going to figure out why no one else had wanted me. And why I always went to bed early on the nights it was my turn to change the trash bag.
The package from Ben’s father was rectangular, flat and clinked suspiciously like drawing pencils. Picking it up, I moved it over to the dresser and set it down carefully as if it were a bomb.
Stretched out on his bed tossing a football, Dallas snorted. “Just open it, freak.”
West threw a pillow at him. “Shut up.”
Stomach in knots, I stripped out of my clothes and shoved a pillow over my eyes, ignoring them both.
Hayden Crowe.
I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.
4
Ethan
EVERY TIME SOMEONE IN MY FAMILY told me to stay away from Hayden Crowe, I knew what they really meant.
Because you’re fucking poison.
Yeah. Message received.
My loft was nine hundred square feet of hardwood floors, minimalist furnishing, and an entire wall of windows with a wide balcony that faced out west over the Texas Hill Country at sunset. Most of the space in the main room was taken up by a white leather sectional and a reclaimed Russian oak coffee table centered over a Moroccan high-pile wool rug. A galley kitchen with stainless-steel appliances complimented the eat-in bar behind the sink. An open doorway led to the bedroom where a platform bed was covered in a dark-gray plush duvet.
Not that Hayden noticed any of it. Reeling from the effects of the rising moon, she stormed past me up the stairs and locked herself in the bathroom while I stacked up the pile of sketchbooks strewn over the coffee table, tossed yesterday’s empty Sprite bottles in the trash, and checked the meat supply in my freezer.
Good thing, too, because sure enough, it was barely an hour later when a scream and a snarl nearly made me throw my laptop, Zoolander-style. A small black wolf stood in the doorway to my bedroom, pale violet eyes flicking between the shuttered windows and the door.
“Nice try, but it’s bulletproof glass.” Pausing Game of Thrones, I rubbed my eyes. This wasn’t my first rodeo. Ben insisted every one of us have a safe room capable of containing a feral wolf. “And in case you’re wondering, I don’t care how cute your ears are, I’m not holding an ice pack on your head while you bite me.”
She growled. Yeah, totally understood that one. Smirking, I headed over to the refrigerator.
“Okay. We don’t have to be friends. But that door is locked, and only one of us has opposable thumbs.”
That earned me another growl. I pulled out the defrosted hamburger I’d been planning to grill with August on Saturday. She whined.
“Oh, so that’s how it’s gonna be, huh?”
Half an hour and a pound of raw chuck later, which of course Hayden made me toss to her in bites in exchange for not eating my couch, because we both knew we were playing her sick little game here, she padded over to the refrigerator. Parking her butt in front of it, she shot me a withering look over one shoulder.
“You’re gonna have to ask nicely.”
She bared her teeth in the wolf equivalent of, I can smell you’ve got chocolate in there, bitch. I rolled my eyes.
The minute I cracked the refrigerator door, she dove into the opening snout-first the way Dallas and I used to when Mom would pick up ice cream on Fridays because, hey, with eight guys in the house, thirty seconds could mean the difference between sundaes and finding the empty carton put back on the shelf and West and River laughing like maniac
s with chocolate chips stuck in their teeth.
I snatched the metal pie plate from the top shelf before Beowulf could eat the foil, then cry about having to be led down to the after-hours vet on a leash for x-rays. Holding it up over my head, I danced out of the way of her teeth.
Enough with this shit.
Allowing my wolf to come to the surface, I stared her down. Hayden whined. Tucking that big fluffy tail, she scuttled behind one of my barstools. I held her eyes, refusing to play. She glared back, throwing up a brick wall against the intrusion.
Damn, she was strong.
A full minute passed before she submitted. Lowering herself to the floor, she put her head down on her front paws.
Cutting a piece of chocolate walnut pie, I dumped it onto one of the deep blue earthenware plates Sofia picked out for me at Pottery Barn when I first moved in.
“I see those teeth again? The rest of this goes straight down the garbage disposal and I get Amazon to two-hour over their biggest bag of kibble.”
She blinked those big violet eyes, innocent as all get-out. Snorting, I kicked the plate across the floor.
You know those videos on YouTube where you could watch a pack of lions devouring a gazelle? Picture that, but with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles flying all over the floor.
A minute later came the sound of toenails on wood. I waited, holding my breath, hoping I wasn’t going to have to mace her in the face with the whipped cream. Instead, a warm tongue licked my foot. And then a very human Hayden was curled in a ball at my feet in a chocolate coma, shivering so badly it was all I could do to brush the crumbs from her mouth, wrap her in a quilt and carry her back to my bed.
Now she was asleep with her back to me, that dark mane of hair a wild scrawl across the pillow. My pillow. And suddenly I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like to have it tickle my neck at night. To breathe in her scent as I curled around her, our fingers and toes mingling under the covers, bare skin sliding against bare skin. No space between us.
What would it be like to stumble up those stairs together at 2 a.m. after listening to a band, so amped up we could barely get out of our clothes, not even making it to the bed before we were up against the wall, Hayden clenching me tight as I lost myself in her? Then to wake up together the next morning where I could kiss her breathless and brush messy strands of hair from her eyes, eager for her to push my head down between her legs and tug hungrily at my hair, begging for more.