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“It’s not smelly. It’s fragrant,” my sister explained as she squirted two healthy dollops onto the underside of my borrowed boots.
“Wow, that’s....” However Michael intended to finish his sentence, we’d never know because he dissolved into a sneezing fit.
In contrast, I found myself leaning in closer. My twin was right. The perfume smelled nice. Musky and sweet and subtly floral.
I reached for my pelt...or, rather, for the spot around my neck where my pelt usually hung.
My hand came up empty. Right. That’s why the perfume didn’t choke me up the way it did Michael.
“Can I open a window?” the kid begged. Tears streamed down his cheeks.
Grace’s growl was almost wolf-like as she flung up the sash. “There, better?”
Apparently not. Michael ended up with his entire head hanging out the window while Grace and I waited for the phone to ring.
It didn’t. Not at two-ish. Not at three-ish. By four, I gave in and ate some of the food my twin put in front of me, although I couldn’t have told you what it tasted like.
My lack of attention was probably a good thing given the fact that Justice was the only one in our family capable of boiling pasta without burning the water. Even that thought wasn’t enough to make me smile.
By five, I stopped distracting myself with inconsequentialities and concluded I’d been played. “She’s not calling.”
All of the reasons Aunt May might want to cut me off from the pack swirled through my head. I fingered the sword at my hip, readjusted my left boot so the knife in its hidden pocket didn’t rub against my ankle, reconsidered—and, for the fourth time, decided against—adding a gun to my arsenal.
Somehow, it didn’t feel right to break the rules of Luke’s pack.
“The alpha would want to know where we are.” Michael’s voice was meek, his eyes trained on the scuffed linoleum. Like Carly, he wasn’t used to disagreeing with someone who outranked him. I’d already made my stance on this particular issue clear as a Fifth Avenue display window.
“Luke would want Carly to be safe, no matter what it takes to make that happen,” I countered. “Once I’m beside her, you can contact anyone and everyone. Until then, we need to play it by the book.”
I turned to Grace, expecting her to back me up on the issue. But my twin had an entirely different matter in mind. “About the scheidung....”
I swallowed. I really didn’t think I could do this now. Not fueled by three hours of sleep, one cup of tea, and whatever food I’d forked into my mouth without looking.
It would have been a lie, though, to say subpar fuel was the only reason for the abrupt queasiness of my stomach.
“Don’t give me that look,” Grace snapped, sounding so much like our dead mother I almost managed a smile. “I’m apologizing. I was afraid of all this....” Her hand wave took in Michael, the guns on the table, the world of the skinless. “It’s not my world. I tried to be part of it. Then I tried to push you out of it, hoping you’d choose me over everything. But I see now that was a fantasy.”
“Grace...” I wanted to hug her, but there was an invisible wall between us built out of a decade of diverging life choices.
“Honor,” she answered. Her smile was real now, if sad. “I’m rescinding the scheidung for the sake of Bastion and Justice. But you and I are different people. I accept that now. It’s like that song, the one you sang relentlessly when we were eleven.”
I shook my head furiously. I remembered that summer, my obsession with the Mamas and the Papas. I just didn’t want to hear Grace say the words.
I couldn’t get my mouth open to stop her, though. And our twin sense didn’t relay my distress.
Or maybe Grace just didn’t care to hear it. Instead, she paraphrased for me.
“There’s no salt on your tail, Honor. You can fly away.”
Before I could come up with an answer that didn’t start and end with blubbering, the phone I’d been clutching all afternoon rang.
***
I MERGED INTO THE FLOW of end-of-work-day pedestrian traffic, phone pressed against my ear. “Turn right,” Aunt May murmured. “Now cross the street.”
She had eyes on me, that much was clear. Which meant Grace and Michael couldn’t dog my footsteps the way they wanted to.
Still, the perfume must have been working because I could sense them back there. Lack of a pelt made my skin chill despite the clothes I’d borrowed from my sister’s closet. Grace’s relinquishment of our relationship made my legs wobbly. But at least our twin connection was still on the job.
As if our truncated conversation had brought us closer together while granting us two separate futures. The tightness in my throat threatened to choke me and I quashed all thoughts of my twin sister. She and I could deal with our relationship issues later. Right now, I needed to focus on Aunt May and the great grand niece she’d kidnapped.
“May I speak with Carly?” I asked, swerving deeper into the pedestrian flow to bypass an eddy of people clustered around a pretzel truck.
“You’ll see her soon enough if you pick up the pace. Down into the subway station now, dear.”
The fact Aunt May could call me “dear” while threatening Carly’s life grated, but I obeyed anyway. Bought a ticket as ordered. Slid through the turnstile and clattered down another set of stairs.
The train door was closing as I approached it. “Get on,” Aunt May ordered.
“It’s too late....”
Steel entered her voice. “Is that really the answer you want to go with?”
I slid through the gap, leaving my followers behind.