“Uh, maybe another time? I still have a lot to unpack here. But, well, June, I’m not really… staying in town. At least not permanently. It’s just a temporary fix Jackson put in place until my place gets sorted out.”
I tried not to feel an insane amount of guilt at the way my old best friend’s face fell before she quickly brightened up again. “Yeah, of course. I mean, I think I’ll change your mind. I want to help you rediscover everything awesome about this place.”
I thought of Mason and the pack, and chuckled. “Yeah, that so won’t happen, but give it your best shot.”
“Challenge accepted.” She flashed a smile. “Besides, I’m on a research trail that I think you’lllove,unless these last few years have taken away your love of a good research?”
I snorted. “How could it? The nights we spent at my parents’ house were the best.”
“My search history must have looked insane,” Juniper laughed. “Why don’t we go out for those burgers, Bryce? What makes you not want to go?”
“I already said, I have enough to do—”
“The pack won’t bother you with me around,” Juniper interrupted. “If that’s what you’re worried about. I remember how heinous they were to you. You put up with too much from them, and you can bet your ass they got a mouthful about it from me once you skipped town. But if you really don’t want to yet, I won’t push. You want to order in?”
“Lenny’s does that now?” I asked, surprised. “Isn’t he still using one of those old cash registers?”
“Yeah,” she laughed. “That’s the funny thing. But LJ—Lenny Junior—has his nephew running the orders on a bike. In fact, weareordering. Come on, my treat. Cassandra, you want a cheeseburger?”
I watched as Cassandra jumped up and rushed over to check the menu on Juniper’s phone. It was strange how easily June had slid back into our easy ways, and how Cassie felt comfortable around her already, as if she had instincts for Juniper’s kindness. In fact, Cassie had seemed comfortable around Mason, and I didn’t want to think too hard on that.
Instead, I focused on how it’d be good to eat junk comfort food with my best friend, unjudged, even if everything in my brain screamed I shouldn’t eat it, that I hadn’t earned it, but who was I kidding? I’d eat it anyway and store the guilt away for later.
***
Half an hour later, the three of us were on the guest room floor, where our belongings had been half unpacked into the wardrobe, dresser, and shelves. Mason and Jackson had collected a lot of my belongings, on top of what I’d put together myself, and it was strange to be surrounded by the things I had built a home with in a place that wasn’t that home.
Cross-legged and surrounded by burger wrappers and fries containers, June and I had her laptop open with her notes on this new research topic.
“Okay, so this is all about the town’s historic museum,” June said, pointing at the picture of the flat-roofed, wide building. It had at least ten windows on each story, and a whitewashed facade. In the front, a wrought steel gate was closed, framed by perfectly tended hedges. A sign on the frontlawn readWelcome to Honeycreek’s Historic Museum. Simple, but then again, Honeycreek always had been.
“Uh-huh,” I acknowledged, one eye on her screen and the other on Cassie, who had abandoned all colored pens except for black and green. I was on guard for what, exactly, she was drawing.
“I had the idea when I did my thesis,” June was saying, her voice animated. “I got my degree in history right here at PCU, but you probably won’t know that.” She frowned. “Did you ever go to college?”
My stomach clenched. I shook my head and forced a laugh. “You could say that instead of studying, the nights of my late teens and early twenties were full of lullabies to get my crying daughter asleep, and figuring out how breastfeeding worked, and how to stop a toddler from chewing things she shouldn’t.”
“I didn’t chew things,” Cassie said without looking up from her drawing.
“Tell that to every makeup tube I had to keep out of reach,” I teased. I turned my focus back to June. “Sometimes I’m glad for it, because otherwise I wouldn’t have had Cassie, but there were times when it was… difficult. Being a single mother and also moving to a town where I knew nobody… I had no support. No father of my child to support me, no parents.”
“No, best friend,” June sighed. “Although I could have been.Wouldhave been. I just hope you know that.”
“I do.”
“Good. Now, back to this. I’m doing an exposition on the museum, so I’ve been researching the town’s history. Bryce, there is so much to uncover here! There’s more lore than we everrealized in Honeycreek. It goes beyond the shifters and magic. It goes beyond superstition and the rumor of witches. It goesway back.”
The enthusiasm in her voice painfully reminded me of the nights we used to spend in high school reading together. She’d always talk to me about her passion for history and mythology, her dreams of doing a major and minor in them, respectively, and I’d talk about my own of being a performer while wanting to minor in cultural cooking. I hadn’t gotten to do any of that, but seeing the passion in June’s eyes only made mine surge back up.
“Go on,” I enthused, leaning in closer.
June was scrolling over to the blueprints of the museum. She jabbed a finger at the screen. “The museum is built on a crossroad of ley lines! That explains why the town is so… well, exactly what it is.Leylines. I’m talking, like, potential resurrection, energy transfer of souls, people living where they shouldn’t, others not dying where they should. Magic—it all exists right here in this town. The leylines are the reason. Go to any other town, and what do you have? Maybe a rumor, a legend, or two. Rumored things—voices in tunnels, a natural disaster with no warning, a crop circle without any sightings. But this isreal!”
I thought of my clairvoyance, of how that had stirred while in White Bay. I thought of it having lay dormant in me for many years in Honeycreek, and I could only wonder if my shifter abilities overshadowed it. Maybe my clairvoyance was brought closer to my knowledge due to not shifting for a long time.
“That’s insane,” I murmured. “It makes a whole load of sense.”
“Exactly! It’s crazy interesting to me. Mrs. Thomson’s library got hit recently by a fire, but she has her own collectionof books that she’s been letting me borrow. This is a historian’s gold mine. I can’t believe we live right on top of something so fascinating. Hell, the amount of hours of research I could do into this…” Her eyes were bright, and June let out a sigh of happiness. “Anyway, I haven’t told the alpha yet, but I should.”
