by Kat Kinney
Hayden stared down at the remnants of the chocolate heart, all but dissolved in the foam. “Was it because of me? Because my father was an addict?”
“Everything Ben did was to prevent you from turning into another Lacey Blair. I was the one he didn’t trust. Not after Dallas. Not after my outbursts as a kid. He wasn’t about to have another of his sons responsible for changing a human against their will. Not on his watch.”
“No.” Setting the mug down hard, Hayden rose. “Whatever Ben set out to do, he’s convinced you you’re a monster. And he couldn’t be more wrong. Just once, I wish you could see yourself through my eyes. You’re talented as hell. Patient with all the little kids who hold up the line describing which Pokémon they want you to pour. And don’t think I haven’t noticed you buying tacos for the guys who sleep out in the park every morning when you go over to Guillermo’s to get ours.”
“Stalker.”
Leaning into my space, she removed my glasses, smoothing her thumbs over my eyebrows. I closed my eyes, drinking in her touch.
“You’re so private that sometimes I want to scream,” she continued, softer now. “Because more than anything since the day we met, I’ve wanted to be let in, wanted to be the one person you trust with your secrets. But whether that takes a day, or a month or a year, I’ll wait. You’re worth it.”
And suddenly we were kissing, Hayden’s fingers twined in my hair, her breath hot on my tongue, and for one breathless, tangled moment, everything was so, so right.
If you would have asked me right then to name three things of which I was absolutely sure, it would have come down to this:
1) Love was daisies and bowls of Cocoa Puffs. Burned grilled cheese sandwiches and whipped cream on a nose with precisely seven freckles. Pizza and tiramisu eaten in bed on lazy nights watching zombies take over your laptop while a girl’s cold toes found refuge against your leg. Stolen French fries that claimed you as hers.
2) I wasn’t sure I would ever truly deserve her. Maybe I never would be.
3) Maybe that didn't matter. Maybe fate was a series of chances. Maybe it was a lost boy and a stubborn girl circling in a field of daisies until one day they collided. Or maybe in the end, some things just came down to choice. And I was choosing us.
11
Hayden
I HAVEN’T ALWAYS BEEN the best sister. Maybe that was something all siblings said, universal as fights over stolen nail polish, curly versus straight hair, and which of you could definitively claim ownership of the one Justin Bieber shirt you both got for Christmas.
Sidebar: Thanks, Aunt Piper.
There was the epic battle over who stuck their pinky finger across the demilitarized zone extending down the middle of the backseat, which, seriously, had been going on since horses and buggies were a thing. Car makers should have just painted a freaking racing stripe down the center console and ended the debate forever. Bad. Ass.
If I could have taken back the time I screamed at Ellie for eating the entire bag of chocolate kisses Piper sent from Austin, leaving a graveyard of fluttering paper streamers and red, green and silver foil balls stuffed under our comforter, I would have. She didn’t stop crying the rest of the night, both of us knowing the only other thing to eat in our trailer was an ancient can of stewed beets. And didn’t say a word the next morning when her Hello Kitty Barbie woke up with a nose ring.
While I laughed like a sadistic bitch.
Then later, there were boys and betrayals. Crushes and stolen Lollapalooza decals. There was Flufflestiltskin, a cursed cheese puff of a rabbit with a taste for my Doc Martens, and about a million other thoughtless things we shouted at each other without thinking, words I would have yanked back in a heartbeat if I’d had any idea how much I’d come to regret them later.
Because the truth was, Ellie and I were there for each other every time it counted. Period-gate. Algebra-Two, where she laid beside me on the bed night after night, explaining my homework even though her Pre-Cal class was two grade levels above mine. And most of all, the very first time I ever sang alone in public, when she walked a mile down to the park despite sleet and ice to watch me play the ukulele and sing Feliz Navidad.
Sometimes you realized too late that life was short. That you had to hold onto the people you loved like white on rice.
CadburyFunny: I need to talk to you. About Violet.
Heart kicking in my chest like a high school drummer on Red Bull, I stared down at my phone. A kaleidoscope of memories flashed before my eyes. Pad Thai movie nights. Cherry-mango snow cones. Screaming Katy Perry in the backseat of Axel while Piper took us on road trips. Could I even imagine a world without my sister in it?
Tucking my feet under me, I hit dial.
“I know,” my sister said by way of greeting. “And by the way, please remember that I taught myself to read at the age of three, can speak passable Klingon, and can name forty-nine different infectious diseases commonly found in rabbits. It might have taken me a month to figure it out, but I’m not stupid.”
Shit. I blew out a breath, deciding then and there the werewolf council could kiss my fluffy tail. I was done treating Ellie like I expected her to betray me. If my tofu-loving, hummus-eating, Great-Dane-shampooing sister wilted at the sight of one little werewolf, the universe was seriously screwed.
“We shouldn’t really be talking about—”
“Labradoodles?” Ellie suggested dryly.
“—over the phone.” I picked at the cuff of my yoga pants. “Um. How did you—?”
“Your eyes. The fever. And hello, a German Shepherd named Violet that likes Cocoa Puffs? You are like, seriously the worst liar ever.” The line went silent for the longest five seconds of my life. And then— “Are you okay?”
Tears stung my eyes. “Getting there. I’m sorry about our trailer.”
The door to the balcony slid open, Ethan frowning as he took in my expression. From the look on his face, something had happened. Something not good.
“Is Ethan—”
“Yes.”
Ellie huffed, and I could just picture her, a thousand miles away in New York, twirling her hair around one finger as she paced. “Okay. But remember I have Piper’s old softball bat in my closet. And I’m not afraid to use it.”
I snorted. “You tried to join PETA in the second grade. I don’t believe for one second you would hit a mosquito with that thing.”
“And because we all know labradoodles are super-trustworthy—”
“Um, we’re talking about you.” Ignoring the growly sound Ethan made (which, totally not helping), I began ticking off points on my fingers. “You’re a vegan. You cried for a week when we rented All Dogs Go to Heaven. You have a strict catch and release policy for cockroaches. You used to dig celery sticks out of the trash at school and bring them home to the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog—”
“Marigold.”
“—so the Cadbury Bunny would get fresh greens even after those nasty girls called you Smelly Ellie. Because screw them. Bunnies before bitches.”
A beat. And then—
“You could have told me.”
When we hung up half an hour later, my eyes stung from crying. Ethan kissed the back of my neck.
I turned, wiping my eyes. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t know. Something’s up. Brody’s on his way.”
Sinking onto a barstool, I rubbed my temples. “The Council was supposed to be here days ago—”
“There was a big cage fight operation that nearly got busted up by the Feds out in Lubbock. Everyone’s busy doing cleanup.”
We locked eyes for a long moment. Ethan nodded down to the coffee table.
“Any progress?”
“I keep coming back to this one.” Photographs sprawled out over Ethan’s sketchbooks like an eerie row of playing cards. I picked up the one of the girl with hazel eyes and tawny brown skin. With those gorgeous cheekbones, she could have modeled. Instead, she was trapped in a stack of case files the detectives in Aus
tin had been working on for over a year. “But it could be coincidence. How many people did I serve every night tending bar?”
“Brody said go with your gut instinct. Topher is linked somehow to these disappearances. We just have to figure out the connection.”
“And I was supposed to be one of them.” I chewed my lip ring, squinting at the girl. Was she on the sound crew at one of the clubs? Someone I’d met when Ellie and I had been dragged along to Meera’s krav maga class? What did we have in common? How were we being chosen?
“You and Cal checked out our booking agent,” I said, thinking out loud. “The club manager. The bouncers—”
“All human,” Ethan confirmed.
I dropped the photograph beside the others. “This is hopeless. We’re never going to figure out the connection this way. And we’re running out of time.”
Ethan’s phone buzzed.
“That’ll be Brody.”
Pecking a kiss to the top of my head, he ducked downstairs to flip the lock. I grabbed my fondue fork, stabbed a green apple wedge, and stirred it through the pot of gooey melted gruyere cheese, white wine and garlic we’d mixed up for dinner. With the freaky werewolf situation not exactly under control, we’d been eating in, which tonight had included two courses of fondue complete with cauliflower, apples, crusty French bread, and (don’t judge) doughnut holes.
Hushed voices sounded on the stairs. Ethan met my eyes at the door, expression grave. I rose, the room suddenly spinning.
“—missing persons report out of Austin—”
“—your bandmates—”
I think I must have screamed, the sudden buzzing in my ears drowning out whatever came next. Ethan was there in an instant, locking me against him in an iron grip as the world threatened to tip off its axis.
“Hayden—”
Breaking free, I swept the rows of photographs off the table, sending them spiraling to the floor.
Brody hooked his thumbs into his service belt. “Don’t have much on Shondra yet. An officer discovered her door unsecured this morning when they went to interview her about Eun-ji. The place was trashed. Obvious signs of a struggle. Eun-ji was grabbed downtown just after dark, so we got surveillance footage.”
Ethan smoothed back my hair, and when I pushed him away, drying my cheeks, went to retrieve the fallen photographs.
Brody unclasped a large manila envelope. “Need you to see if anything jogs your memory. Posture, an article of clothing, a car parked somewhere off in the frame. We’re not excluding anything that could potentially be a lead.”
I took in the grainy images. A streetlamp illuminated a row of parked cars. My hands began to shake as I turned to the next photograph. Two figures. Swallowing, I flipped ahead. A third. Stomach roiling, I forced myself to turn to the next image, tried to focus on the details of the two strangers when all I kept seeing was my bandmate fighting to avoid the gaping maw of the open trunk—
Bile rose in my throat. I flipped the final photograph over and bolted for the bathroom, making it just in time. Thankfully, no one came after me. Sick and shaking, I rinsed my mouth and leaned against the wall, reluctant to go back out just yet.
“You’ve got the shackle marks,” Ethan said in a low voice. “His general condition and the stuff he mumbled up at the cliff. Either he’s telling the truth about someone being after him, or he’s so far gone he can’t tell reality from the movie playing upstairs.”
I clawed a hand through my hair, trying to think. I knew most forced changes were perpetrated by males because females didn’t carry a high enough viral load in their saliva to transmit lycanthropy through biting. But that didn’t mean a female shifter couldn’t have been involved from an operational standpoint.
When I came out, they were studying the photographs. Ethan immediately rose, going to the fridge to grab a Mexican Coke and pouring it over ice for me.
I leaned into his side and sipped it slowly through a straw, stomach still queasy. “Where do we think Topher was staying?”
“A lot of feral wolves band together and form off-the-grid encampments, coming into the cities to steal and forage for supplies.”
“So these feral packs—"
Brody cleared his throat. “They’re packs, but only in the loosest sense of the word. No order. No governing structure. Feral encampments are supposed to fall under the jurisdiction of their local Alphas, but many don’t want to mess with them. They’re warned to stay out of sight and keep out of trouble.”
“Is there one here?”
“No. They’re no good for the people living in them or the community. The day I became a peace officer, I swore an oath to protect the public, human and shifter alike. This pack has helped rehabilitate shifters struggling with control and will continue to do so. But the only way that works is making them members of the community—providing extra support and structure until they’re ready to be back functioning on their own and fully independent.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, sick at the thought of what could be happening to my bandmates. “Do you think they’re still alive?”
“Probably,” Ethan said grimly. “They can’t be changed until the full moon. Most likely they’re being held somewhere. I keep coming back to those track marks on Topher’s wrists. We’ve been operating on the assumption that we’re dealing with another pack that’s gone off the grid, that someone’s been picking up runaways. Addicts. Young people on the move between cities—”
“Cases never likely to see the light of day.” Brody looked down. “Whoever’s behind this knows what they’re doing.”
“Yeah. But what if those aren’t track marks at all?”
Brody cursed under his breath. I turned to Ethan, who quickly continued.
“You remember August thought he scented a human trying to get into Ellie’s car? Vamp blood is nearly odorless. It’s their one natural defense against weres, and why Tracers have such a hard time tracking them. But when the prickheads feed, they give off the scent of the blood they absorb for up to seventy-two hours.”
“So one of them could have smelled human?”
“Pretty much.”
Brody stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows down at the street. “There’s a long, bloody history between vamps and shifters where they’ve held us as blood slaves. When vamps drink from us, not only do our healing abilities allow them to temporarily withstand sunlight, but combine their strength and speed with our ability to regenerate and you can create a pretty much unstoppable army. Trouble is, there’s a catch.
“The lycan virus is incompatible with their blood. We don’t know if it alters their genetic structure or repeat exposure eats away at the myelin sheath protecting their nervous tissue, but drink from us enough times and fang-heads lose muscle coordination, can’t move, swallow or breathe, and eventually die.”
Ethan jerked his chin. “They force the lowest castes in their houses to drink from captured shifters and send them out to attack rival covens. Between the caste revolts, vamp infighting, and the Council sending in Tracers to clean out houses where shifters were being held, entire covens have been wiped out. That fang-head who outed us all to the human world three years ago? There was a rumor making the rounds he was from a lower caste, forced to drink our blood so many times neurological effects were already setting in. He knew he was dying. This was his eff you to the people who’d used him as a pawn in their war for power.”
“A cease-fire was signed shortly after that dashcam footage went live.” Brody rubbed his stubble. “If you’re right and one of the covens is trying to reignite the Blood Wars—"
I rose to my feet. “This isn’t going to end until we end it ourselves.”
Ethan held my eyes. “What’s your plan?”
“We do this on our terms. Control the variables. Announce a benefit concert for the last weekend of the Harvest Moon Festival. Blast it out over social media.”
“That’s in four days.”
“It’s last minute, but I’ll ask around, see
if there’s anyone willing to drive up here and play.”
I felt his flare of protectiveness through the bond. “What makes you think whoever’s after you will bite this time?”
Turning, I met his eyes. “Do you trust me?”
* * *
The final morning of the Harvest Moon Festival dawned unseasonably warm. Pulling into the empty field that had been reserved for parking, Ethan cut the engine.
“You sure about this, Daisy?”
I closed my eyes. He’d spent the past four days retreating further and further into himself. Our conversations had been stilted, our silences in comparison seeming to scream. I knew on some level he believed this was his fault, whether because it was his world I’d inadvertently stepped into, or because we’d failed to apprehend Topher out at Bluff Point. And nothing I said could convince him otherwise.
But as much as the thought of Ethan hurting tore me up inside, I couldn’t worry about that right now. The police had no new leads on my bandmates. And Ellie was getting hang-up calls from a blocked number.
Which meant we were out of time.
Taking one of the pens he always kept in the cup holder, Ethan uncapped it and outlined a tiny daisy at the base of my palm.
“Anything happens out there today—"
“You’ll Devils-Food-mocha-muffin me back home?”
“You’d prefer Thin Mints?” Smirking, he drew a matching daisy on the inside of his thumb.
“You try fighting off enemy werewolves while wearing chocolate infomercial goggles.”
A beat. Then—
“Just promise me you’ll be careful.”
I leaned across the seat and gave his neck a love bite. “Let’s go. This princess has a castle to storm.”
Blood Moon’s chamber of commerce had expanded the Harvest Moon Festival from what used to be a one-weekend event with a couple of cheap carnival rides, a cotton candy stand, and a ten-minute corn maze a good hound dog could have solved drunk (which no joke, actually happened one year) into an explosion of pumpkins and cornstalk decorations adorning every doorway, two haunted houses, costume contests, and a fleet of food trucks selling everything from kettle corn to pumpkin-flavored ice cream. If you were a local? Good luck trying to park in town the last half of October when tourist season was in full swing. But it was a town tradition, and there was something nostalgic about seeing the hay bales and signs for apple cider come out every September.