Downstairs in the brewery’s basement, there is a plain-looking door that only my family carries the keys to—the scene of many a sleepless night.
The whole basement looks old, but there’s something about this dusty, vacant oratory that makes everything feel a little worse. I wonder if it was ever brought up to code. Maybe there’s radon down here.
Maybe it’s the gouges scratched into the walls.
The far wall is divided into four stalls, each separated by thick stone partitions. There are gapped sections of the masonry with iron bars crisscrossing through it, allowing us to glimpse one another. High up on the back wall, there’s the thinnest sliver of sky through frosted glass, confessionals to the moon.
It looks awful and medieval, but whatever. It’s necessary. I need to be sure I won’t be able to go after Elise.
God, just thinking about her hurts.
I don’t know what to think. What my mom said about Danielle being kept from her mate didn’t make sense. My circumstances aren’t the same, how could I be kept from a mate I’ve never met?
But what if I let myself entertain the thought that even if I never knotted in Elise before, that she could still be my mate? If I just ignore every reason it didn’t work out before?
The thought brings a sort of restlessness that lights up my nerves with energy it’s hard to place in my human body. I need to move, to express it, but it’s got this tail-wagging giddiness to it that shaking my hands out doesn’t quite reach.
My next thought makes all of it dissipate instantly. She left. She chose to leave. And even if I do buy into the idea that our souls are somehow cosmically intertwined, how cruel would that be to her? How can I tell her this is what I think, what I feel, without feeling like I am cornering her into being with me? That I am just manipulating a narrative to get what I want out of it?
And even if she feels the same, accepts all of it wholeheartedly, how can I be sure it won’t just end the same way it did the first time?
It doesn’t matter, then.
I go in and sit down with my back to the wall; I can see Logan is already locked in for the night.
“This is the sorriest stag night I’ve ever seen,” I tell him, but even as I say it, I think how much I would have wanted him there for me the night before I got married, instead of a bottle of beer.
Even a full-moon night like this, laying on the ground with nothing to do but wait for it to be over. I have so many memories of sitting as close to each other’s doorways as we could, reachingunder the gap to move the little plastic pieces around an old Battleship board, chatting aimlessly about everything and nothing for hours.
I’m about to ask him if he remembers playing Battleship with me, when he interrupts the silence.
“You know, I always thought the prodigal son story was bullshit.”
So, he’s still pissed at me.
Once upon a time, this asshole was my favorite brother. It kinda sucks that it’s just defaulted to Aiden.
“Yeah, you would. I figured it was just someone making up bullshit to make a point,” I evade. “Should have had a better point.”
The quiet is grating.
Logan is eerily calm for a full moon. Or maybe it’s really just me that can’t handle it tonight, for some reason.
The itching pressure in my bones is going to last until I shift fully, but it’s so overwhelming this time I don’t want to just lean into it the way I normally would. It feels like giving in.
I find myself staring at one of the only decorations in the cellar, an antique painting of Saint Patrick. I mean, I know it’s St. Paddy, but it does just look like a guy in a black cloak and bare feet carrying a baby deer away from its mother.
Our dad hung that there after Logan and I had gotten into some trouble. I don’t even remember what it was, just that Dad hung it there with the intent to make us think deeply on our Lycan condition. Given what it stands for, I’m honestly a little surprised no one bothered to take it down.
“Why are we supposed to venerate the guy who’s supposed to have cursed us?”
“Why are we taught to respect our parents?” Logan counters a little too quickly.
“Jeez. Ok, edgelord,” I sigh.
A few beats go by in the nothing, the quiet. I have to get up and pace rather than sit down in the corner.
It’s a fever, it will pass. I close my eyes and try to just endure it.
