Cold Feet (Empathy in the PPNW Book 3)

by Olivia R. Burton

  “You forgot the cupcakes!” she accused, her voice deeper than I would have guessed. I looked down, realizing she was right. Briefly, the stranger in my living room was forgotten, no longer an issue in the face of missing sweets.

  “Goddammit!" I swore, dropping my bag. I yanked open my front door, looked out desperately, but I’d known even before doing so that Mel had long before driven off with my treats in the back seat. Turning back to my living room, I found Chloe standing just outside the kitchen, smiling.

  “Hey! How was the trip? And what’s up with the back of your head?”

  “She forgot the cupcakes,” the girl whined. I turned to her, looked her up and down and frowned. Her oozy emotions were focused on disappointment, but there was a spike of nervousness there, too. Somewhere at the back of her psyche was a vibrating globule of arousal. When she turned back to face me, I frowned.

  “Who are you and why are you concerned about my cupcakes?”

  “Because they’re delicious!”

  “Gwen,” Chloe said with a chuckle, closing in on us both. “This is Izzy, my new boyfriend.” As Chloe said the B-word, Izzy started wheezing, making the erratic sounds I’d heard over the phone. Glee rocketed forward through the wobbly gelatin of his psyche and I felt a shiver run through me at the strangely delightful experience.

  I took a second to look Izzy over again, to reorganize my brain so that “girl-thing from The Internets” could settle into the same compartment as “Chloe’s boyfriend,” and then shook my head, sure I wouldn’t be able to change the associations that quickly. Chloe hadn’t had a steady relationship in the entire time I’d known her. She wasn’t as bad as Mel, didn’t sleep with everyone who nodded hello on the street, but she liked to have fun and it wasn’t unusual for her to have dates most nights of the week. Chloe, who reads body language as well as I read emotions, and who knows me better than I know myself, wrinkled her nose in worry, sensing my confusion.

  “Izzy’s not human,” she said, as if it was personally her fault.

  “Yeah,” I said, and Izzy grinned, before walking over to Chloe and wrapping himself around her like it was the end of a long, hard day and hugging Chloe was the only think that could bring him comfort. Trembling glee oozed into contented pleasure and I grinned, unable to help myself.

  Chloe cooed into his ear, kissed his cheek, and then smiled my way, a little tense, like she was a fourteen-year-old girl presenting her very first boyfriend to a stern father. I wondered why Chloe was so nervous about my reaction and decided I should probably stop making it all worse by glowering and huddling against the door like I thought Izzy might attack.

  “I’m…it’s nice to meet you, Izzy,” I said, forcing a grin. I should be nice, I thought. There was no reason not to be nice.

  “Sometimes, yeah,” Izzy said, his tone thoughtful. “There was that one time where you fell in that quicksand, though.”

  “What?” I asked. He didn’t answer, his gaze focused on some middle distance, his expression inscrutable.

  “Not human, remember?” Chloe said, by way of explanation.

  “I don’t understand what’s happening,” I said.

  “Now that’s an every-time thing,” Izzy said, in a tone I usually only hear from people who knew me well.

  “Hey,” I snapped, deciding in an instant that I didn’t care who Izzy was dating; he was no longer welcome in my house. I was supposed to be in pajamas, splayed on my couch eating a hundred cupcakes and two sheetcakes, not standing in my living room trying to detach my empathy from the sticky blobs of affection and titillation floundering around some strange creature who wasn’t making any sense.

  “Come on,” Chloe said, detaching herself from Izzy and closing in on me. “Let’s get you settled in. I’ve no doubt you need to do laundry, and probably did before you even left.”

  “What’s happening, here?” I demanded as she took my bag and started heading toward the laundry room. “That’s the girl from the—I mean, the boy from The Internets, the one Mel hit on.”

  “So it is,” she said as she rounded the corner into my hallway. I sighed, exasperated, torn between following her and sticking around to make sure Izzy didn’t do anything I didn’t want him to. I wasn’t even sure what he might get up to, but he was a stranger in my home and my recent experience with strangers in my home had led to missing Twinkies, enigmatic sticky notes, and the occasional smiley face drawn in lipstick on my bathroom mirror.

  Deciding Izzy couldn’t be any worse than all that, I headed down the hall and found Chloe in my narrow laundry room, filling the washer with water and soap.

  “Is he gonna eat my Twinkies? He smelled like Twinkies. You should go back and tell him not to eat my Twinkies.”

  “What’s up with the arm? And why are you balding?” she asked, ignoring my tirade. I reached up with my good arm to touch the back of my head.

  “Is it that noticeable?”

  “Well, it’s bandaged and you’ve been favoring it since you came in.”

  “Not my arm, my hair.”

  “Eh, you can wear a hat. What’s up with your arm? Did you get into it with one of the puppies over a half a Skittle?”

  “Mel bit me,” I said, deciding to ignore her mocking.

  “Like, sexy bit you?”

  “No,” I groaned, making it clear in my tone that what he’d done to me could not have been considered sexy in any sense of the word. Leaning against the wall, I folded my arm against my belly, suddenly very aware of the pain being dampened by the half a pill I’d taken on the drive back. “He attacked me. His sister had to sew me up and I couldn’t even go to the hospital because of the questions it would raise. My arm looks like a map of all the railroads in the country if they’d gotten drunk and tried to make out.”

  “Railroads can’t get drunk,” Chloe said, sorting my clothes by color with the speed of some magical laundry machine that probably didn’t exist but that certainly should be invented and delivered straight to my door.

  “Well, then they wasted a lot of vodka.”

  Chloe snorted, tossed a few dark shirts into the water. I watched her work before clearing my throat and considering my words carefully. I didn’t want to tell her what I’d been doing with Mel before he’d unknowingly tried to kill me, but I knew it would come out eventually. It would be like when I’d done something wrong as a kid: just tell mom what you did and take your metaphorical lumps.

  “Speaking of not at all sexy, I had sex with Mel,” I said, feeling my shoulders creep toward my ears as if the blowback from my revelation would be painful. Chloe turned to me, her face lighting up.

  “Oh, do tell!” she said, abandoning the laundry in an instant and focusing all her attention on me.

  “It was pretty bad.”

  “Like…” Confusion burbled out of her. Her jaw flexed twice before she got any more words out. “Good bad? Like, ‘baby you look phat in those jeans’ good?”

  “No one says that, anymore.”

  “Explain.”

  “Well, it’s an older slang—”

  “Gwen!” she snapped over a laugh. I snorted, indulged myself in a giggle.

  “I mean it was bad. It was unsatisfying and kind of awkward and I have no intention of doing it ever again.”

  “Well, you had no intention of doing it the first time.”

  “Yeah, but.” I paused, realized I didn’t really have an explanation. “I don’t know. He wasn’t…unbearable this week.”

  “High praise.”

  “Plus, he owed me cupcakes; you know what I’ll do when cake is involved—especially chocolate cakes with pink frosting flowers the size of my whole face.”

  “You are quite a whore when it comes to cake.”

  I pouted, thinking about my sweet, delicious payment bouncing around in the back seat of Mel’s car. “He’d better not give those cakes to anyone else. I’ll kill him.”

  “So, it was bad? Like…bad? Bad like stale cake bad?” Chloe asked, ignoring my threat on
Mel’s life and going back to my laundry.

  “No, like broccoli bad. Legitimately bad. Stale cake I can dunk in chocolate sauce or smother in caramel. Or eat with ice cream. You can always do all three if the cake’s more—”

  “I am having a really hard time believing that,” Chloe interrupted, knocking me off my sugar overload tangent. “I’ve been there and it was great.”

  “It was just… Ugh, I don’t even want to talk about it. He got off, I didn’t, and then he got all bouncy and kissy and made dinner and,” I quickly rambled out the rest, eager to be off the subject of Mel and I having sex, “then we went and fought a spider fairy, and I got torn up, and I woke up with some puppies.”

  “Holy shit, you what?”

  “Woke up with some puppies?” When Chloe didn’t engage my joke that time, I shrugged. “It was a trickster fae. Um… Ink…uncle…shit.”

  “Unktomi?”

  “That’s the one. How do you know?”

  Chloe just shrugged like it was no big deal, but that little worm of panic I’d been seeing in her the last nine months scrambled through her psyche like a giant, hungry bird was swooping straight for it. I pushed on, not liking that I’d made her worry.

  “It made Mel think I was the bad guy, but when he attacked me he figured out what was really going on. I’m just lucky things weren’t worse. Sarah showed up, the two werewolves kicked its ass, everyone was rescued, and ta-da! The end.”

  “That’s what was up? The unktomi was killing couples and the center was covering for it?”

  “Oh, no, sorry. It had—well, it was working with this guy there, a wendigo.”

  “A wendigo?” Chloe demanded, horror rushing through her.

  “Yeah, you’ve heard of them?”

  Horror got doused by fizzy anxiety and Chloe shook her head rapidly for a moment before answering.

  “That undead thing that eats people in that episode of Supernatural?”

  “Uh,” I said, knowing what she was referencing but still feeling a little lost. “Maybe. I don’t think this is quite the same thing, since I don’t think it ate people whole—though, it did live in caves in the woods.”

  “That’s awful, even if a real wendigo is only sort of like the TV one. So, did you see it? Was it gross and bloody?”

  “It was the doctor helping Mel and me, Coontz.”

  “Now I’m really lost. Was Coontz eating people or not?”

  “Not. Wait. Maybe? I don’t know. They—Coontz and the spider—were drugging women of birthing age, knocking them up, and then holding them hostage so the spider could eat the babies.”

  “Oh my god,” Chloe said, horror splashing across my chest like she’d thrown a bucket of ice water my way. “Please tell me you found a giant flip-flop and smashed the shit out of that thing.”

  “Mel just sorta ate its eyeballs off and Sarah tore open its belly. It was one of the grossest things I’ve ever seen.”

  “I bet,” Chloe said, anger still burbling. We stayed silent for a bit, before Chloe flicked her gaze to my face, hesitation pursing her lips. “Did it…did it actually eat all of the babies?”

  “Mel said it had been going on awhile, and from the size of it I can assume it was well-fed, but I didn’t ask to see the paperwork on how many. I don’t want to find out. Knowing it existed was bad enough. Remember I told you I got super sick when Mel and I were making out? That was just because the thing was nearby.”

  “The wendigo, or the spider?”

  “The spider. Coontz just smelled bad.”

  “That doesn’t sound like what we saw on TV.”

  “You have to get the whole story from Sarah, she was the one who figured out what was going on. I’d given up thinking it was him and wouldn’t have even known he was anything other than human if the unktomi hadn’t been involved. That thing, though, was the real problem. Any time it got near me, I’d get dizzy and nauseated.”

  “You sure it wasn’t morning sickness?” Chloe asked, her lip quirked.

  “Bite your tongue,” I snapped, knowing what she was inferring. “Owen and I use condoms, and Mel claims he’s sterile. Which is a big boon for the world, quite frankly.”

  Chloe rolled her eyes. “I believe the thing about the spider and everything you were texting me about the werewolves—those puppies sound amazing, by the way, I need to meet them—but I’m still having trouble with the part about Mel being bad in bed.” Chloe shut the lid on my washer, waved me out of the narrow room, and then steered me back toward the kitchen once we were in the hall.

  “You don’t have to believe it for it to be true. I’m still feeling kind of sick over the whole thing.”

  “But—”

  “Hey, you and I probably just like different things in bed, okay? You like sex with women and dressing up like Little Bo Peep. I like sex that doesn’t involve Mel.”

  “I only donned that costume once, thank you very much.”

  “That costume, sure.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chloe danced into the kitchen ahead of me, going straight to the cup cabinet, pulling down a glass. As she stuck it under the tap, I realized Izzy had settled his skinny butt on the floor in front of my fridge and that every one of my magnetic poetry pieces had migrated from the freezer door and top half of the fridge door down to the floor and the bottom edge.

  “What is he doing?” I demanded, outraged. “What are you doing? Don’t do that! What are you doing?” Disinterested in my tantrum, Izzy glanced lazily over at me as he picked up a word from the miniature stack next to the sole of his foot and placed it deliberately. “You ruined it!”

  Annoyance waded forward to take over his psyche. It was a little disorienting and sort of tasted like Jell-O made out of foil. “I made it.”

  “You ruined it!” I repeated, wanting to rush over and slap his hands away from my fridge, though I wasn’t sure where my anger came from. The first time I’d found the fridge as it had been before Izzy got his grubby paws on it, I’d been horrified, worried, and a little insulted at the tone taken by the caterpillar-sized magnets. It had been almost a year, though, and I’d sort of started relying on seeing them every morning. I’d never gotten the hang of understanding what they were trying to tell me until after the fact, but they’d still been a constant surprise and an occasional delight.

  I thought back to when I’d read the phrase, “werewolf puppies!” spelled out on my fridge door and how confused I’d been. Now, of course, I realized the creature that had left them there had known that I’d meet Mel’s family at some point, just like it had known so many other things that would happen in my life. That was how it always went: a phrase made no sense until what it was referring to happened and then I’d read it again while getting juice or ice cream and have an, “Ah ha,” moment.

  My brain screeched to a halt as Izzy’s words echoed faintly through my thoughts.

  “You made what?” I asked warily, feeling my brain stick on the idea like a fat kid trying to climb a wall in gym class. I’d been that kid and I knew firsthand my brain wasn’t making it over without a lot of help.

  “The timeline,” Izzy said with a sigh, placing another magnet. “It wasn’t this one, exactly, but it was still helpful. The stuff still all happened, even if the order was wrong. You’ll understand next year. Maybe. If you don’t take that early flight home.”

  “Early…next…what?”

  “That’s pretty cool,” Chloe said, stepping up next to me to rub my shoulder and press a glass of cold water into my hand. I drank it without thinking, still suffering from a sputtering brain and alarmed shock.

  I was staring at a very convincing skyline of Seattle formed out of magnetic poetry along the bottom of my fridge. Whatever help the words had been before, they were nonsense now, lost to Izzy’s bitterness and boredom.

  “You’re the—you did this? You put those…and ate my…it was you?” I asked as I finished drinking. Water dribbled down my front and Chloe dabbed at my chin with a towel, setti
ng my mostly empty glass on the counter as if she didn’t trust me to hold it anymore.

  “I am the, yes, yes, yes, and yes,” Izzy answered, as if my questions had been whole and made perfect sense.

  “You’re the one who’s been stealing my Twinkies?” I accused, outrage blooming.

  “That’s rude,” Izzy insisted, sticking magnets to the fridge to express exactly that same thing in crooked sentence form. “I was helping remember? You wouldn’t have realized Norma was dangerous if not for this.”

  “I don’t understand what’s happening,” I said, shaking my head. I did, sort of, but I didn’t want to believe it. Nearly a year of waking up disappointed I couldn’t eat some thing I’d bought—like last weekend’s frozen French toast delight that I’d wanted to stick in the microwave and dip in corn-syrup-laden, maple-impersonating junk food—and now this. Nine months of spending money on crap I wanted but statistically wouldn’t enjoy, and now this. A human gestational period worth of confusion and sticky notes and now this? “You owe me!”

  “I paid up!” Izzy argued, popping to his feet and rounding on me as if we’d start taking swings at each other. Instead of putting up his dukes, he tucked a hand into his back pocket, pulled out half a bag of Sour Patch Kids and dumped a bunch into his mouth, chewing angrily.

  “Those are mine!” I shouted. Izzy tucked them against his chest, turning away like a spoiled child being asked to share for the first time. Before I could grab the bag and run into my room and eat them hiding in the corner of the closet, Chloe took me by the shoulders, steering me out to the living room. I fought her a bit, but she’d done this sort of thing before and knew how to keep me focused forward. She settled me onto my couch, sat with her back to the front window so I’d have to look away from the kitchen or rudely not face her at all. I sighed, crossing my arms over my chest.

  “Do you know how much money I’ve spent feeding him over the last year?”

  “The same amount you’d have spent on junk food anyway,” Chloe pointed out.

  “But—”

  “It’s okay, Gwen,” Chloe said, patting my knee. “Look, I ran into Izzy at the Internets and we got to talking.”