Nathan
So … Devin was dead.
I’d expected to finally feel bad about it, but I was actually having a pretty good day. After we’d heard that he’d tossed back his lethal cocktail, and after everyone had stopped watching and waiting for me to flip out about it, I’d asked Paul to bring me home. It was time to move on with my life and do something good with it.
Nothing had ever looked as wrong as Paul Ewing sitting in my mother’s floral chair. It was hot as hell outside, yet he was wearing a leather jacket, ripped jeans, and dainty black shoes with studs on them. If they were a few sizes smaller, I would’ve sworn that they belonged to Emma.
He leaned back in the chair, perfectly at home, and propped his girly shoes up on the coffee table.
“We should redo the flooring in here,” he said.
“Why?”
“Carpet is so ten years ago, Nate. After Talia refuses to move here and calls you a creep for asking, we’re going to have to sell this place.”
I swatted his shoes off of the table for being a jerk. “She’s not going to refuse. She’s going to be happy to get her kid out of that place.”
“She’s going to run from you, because strangers who ask you to move in with them typically want to chop you up into little pieces. My grandmother gets away with it because she’s a nice old lady. You’re a dude, and to be honest, you give off a weird vibe sometimes.”
There was nothing in my reach to throw at him, so I flipped him off. “What’s weird about me?” I said.
He put his shoes on the table again and sighed. “Pretty much everything, Nate. We love you, and because of that, we ignore most of your weirdness, but think about it. We met you straight off of the streets, you clearly have tons of secrets, and you don’t like to talk about yourself at all. You could be a serial killer for all I know.”
I hated to admit it, but he was right. I wasn’t a serial killer, but I was definitely weird, and Talia was probably going to run from me. She and her daughter had been on my mind for days, and I couldn’t stop thinking about that horrible safe house they were living in. Giving them a home wasn’t going to solve our problems, whether they had anything to do with the Coven of the Night Star or not, but I’d wanted to solve Talia’s problem.
“Maybe Sophia could help me get her here,” I said.
“Maybe. But could you at least entertain the idea of selling this place? For all you know, Talia likes living there or has family in San Juan that she doesn’t want to leave. You know nothing about this girl. And let me say that again slowly … this girl. How old is she? Is she hot? Are you trying to make Chris and Emma kick your ass?”
He’d made another valid yet poorly presented point. Talia couldn’t have been older than twenty-five. I would never in a million years want to be with someone else, but I saw how it could be twisted into that, just from how it looked. And if the tables were turned, I would flip out if Chris were spending all of her time thinking about a guy she wanted to help. I’d more than flip out, actually. I would shift and bite the guy.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m weird. I only met the girl once. She’s not going to want to move into my house.”
“Told you so.”
“So I’ll ask Sophia to help find Talia somewhere to live, and maybe we’ll still sell this place.”
He suddenly turned into an expert on renovations, and his voice lowered a few octaves. “If we want serious offers, we’ll have to get some hardwood in here. And we should update the furniture for staging. We can keep this chair. It’s very Mid-Century Modern.”
“Paul, what are you talking about?”
“I watch a lot of HGTV with Nana. We can make this place pop.” He waved his hand towards the ceiling. “We can add some recessed lighting. Expose some brick. The kitchen is a complete gut job. We’d add a nice quartz countertop with updated cabinets. Get rid of that hideous wallpaper…”
And that was where I drew the line.
“The wallpaper stays. I helped put that up.”
“When? In the year of our Lord …1929?”
He cackled, and I heard something and shushed him. It could’ve been the sound of something falling over in the garage, or in the backyard. Or it could’ve been a car door slamming somewhere on my street. With my ears, it could’ve come from even further than that.
I heard another sound. This time, it was clearly the sound of a heavy shoe stepping on glass. It crunched so close to my ear that it had to be coming from somewhere near the house.
“Did you hear something?” I asked.
I crept towards the garage, and Paul followed me. I struggled with the doorknob for a few seconds. The lock had been slightly broken for years, just functional enough to be ignored. I swung the door open. Nothing was out of place. John’s truck was right where I’d left it, not so carefully parked between the boxes that I hadn’t sent to Goodwill and my mom’s busted treadmill.
I made a mental note to remember to price the truck online to sell it, too. I couldn’t picture myself driving it around anymore.
Paul turned his interior designer act on again, and we inspected the house. He made plans to enlarge the bedrooms, update the bathrooms, and add a swimming pool in the backyard.
At the backdoor, Paul lit a cigarette. He shot me a look that said, “Don’t tell Emma about this,” and I fanned his smoke away from my face. As he rambled about landscaping, I imagined the yard in its former glory, before weeds had overtaken it and vines had started to crawl up the wooden gate. It used to be a sight to see when it was bursting with the colors from Mom’s garden. Now everything was brown and dead and missing my mom as much as I was.
I tried to remember what flowers had gone in what pots so Paul could replicate the garden, but I couldn’t quite picture it as I stared at the shriveled things inside of the dusty flowerpots. One of those pots was broken.
I raced over there to pick it up, as if cleaning that one pot, out of all the disasters in the garden, would make the yard look better.
As I picked the broken pieces out of the soil, the only sounds were the birds over my head and the sound of Paul flicking his lighter on and off. The pot had been crushed. By a shoe, possibly.
I remembered the sound I’d heard before coming outside, and Paul kept flicking the lighter. I dropped the pieces to examine them.
Another flick.
I noticed a shoe print near another pot. My heart pounded, and Paul flicked the lighter again.
Someone had been in this garden. Today. I sniffed to catch a scent, but I only smelled smoke and dead flowers. The scent of that curled my stomach.
Then, another sound entered my ears. A sound that stirred the blood in my veins. A sound that sped my heart to deathly rates. It was the sound that I’d heard right before Kamon had tried to lure me at Trenton.
The drums in my ears felt sacred and like it would be a sin to ignore them. The beat matched my heart, and before long, we were one. The drums and me. It tugged at my mind and told me to run. To run home. To run there fast.
The banging grew louder and wilder and hit me with such force that I couldn’t breathe. It sounded like home—a home I didn’t quite remember, from a life I’d barely belonged to. I stood and walked towards the sound, and then I lowered into the overgrown grass to prepare to shift.
“Nathan!” someone screamed. I couldn’t quite place the voice or the name they’d called. “Nathan!” I looked over my shoulder. Dark figures surrounded the person who had screamed. The drums kept banging. There was somewhere I needed to be. “Nate!”
That name tugged at my heart. It meant more to me than the first name. Nate.
Nate.
I heard that name spoken in a soft, angelic voice, and I saw brown curls blowing in a girl’s face. She chuckled and wrinkled her nose. It was the most adorable thing I’d ever seen.
Christine.
The drums kept pounding, but I stopped moving. Something else had grabbed hold of me. That name. That face. Those curls. My life…
Paul. The person who’d screamed was Paul.
“Paul?” I said.
He snapped his fingers, and the men dressed in black stumbled away from him. They moved back to his face in the next moment. I ran to him, but just as I made it there, fire erupted between us, and the flames swallowed Paul. The force of the explosion lifted my feet from the ground and sent me flying across the lawn.
I landed face down in the dead grass with a deafening ringing in my ears. It muted every other sound. If Paul was still screaming, I wouldn’t have known. I braced my hands against my ears, hoping to quiet the ringing, if only just enough to concentrate on standing. But it only got louder.
A mute world was a dangerous place for a shifter. I didn’t hear the people over me until one had their fingers twisted in my hair and a needle in my neck.