Chapter 24
Sebbie
Corbin had called me “little reaper.”
As we drove back home, those words kept flashing through my mind.
Little reaper.
It wasn’t the first time, either. He’d called me that before. In the cult lady’s basement, I thought. I tried to pull the memory back, but it was like taffy. It stretched thinner and thinner the harder I pulled, until it was broken and only that phrase remained in my mind.
Of course, that also ignored the much larger issue at hand.
Fluffy had turned into a hellhound, and then he’d turned into Atlas. Everyone seemed to know that about him but me. And he wasn’t the hellhound from my dream, and when I’d said he wasn’t my hellhound, Aiden had told me that I had my own hellhound. So did that mean Corbin was my hellhound? Had I somehow known, and that’s why I’d made him one in my dream?
And, okay, but what the actual fuck? Luckily my random thoughts had lasted long enough for us to get back to my house, because Corbin was parking the car when I turned to him. He’d let me think the entire way home, but now it was time to talk.
“Corbin, what the actual fuck?” I asked.
Okay. Not exactly the opening I was going for, but, I mean—what the actual fuck?
Corbin cleared his throat. “Ah, yeah, so… I’m a hellhound.”
“You say that like it’s a perfectly normal thing to say. Like, hi, I like brie cheese, I’m an avid bowler, and I’m a hellhound.”
“But I don’t bowl,” Corbin answered, looking a little confused.
To borrow a phrase from Q—for fuck’s sake. I suddenly understood why he looked exasperated all the time.
“That isn’t the point. The point is that you say that like it’s perfectly normal,” I complained.
“Well, for me itisperfectly normal. I’ve always been a hellhound, as have the rest of the pack.”
The pack. He called his family a pack. Did that mean they were all hellhounds? I gasped, realizing that “the pack” was more than just the Smith family. (Never mind the fact that they were theSmithfamily—like, could they be any more obvious about choosing an alias?)
“Wait—does that mean that Toby and Josh and Q and Aiden are all hellhounds, too?”
Corbin started to reply, but I cut him off with another gasp. “AmIgonna become a hellhound? Is it like werewolves? Is that why Q was so mad that you bit me? Because you infected me with your sexy hellhound DNA or something? And oh my god, am I gonna get muscles like you guys? Because I could totally rock a hellhound body.”
Corbin was trying really hard not to laugh next to me, which made me think through the whole Toby, Josh, Q, and Aiden thing. They werenotbuilt like the rest of the Smith brothers.
“Okay, so either I’mnotgonna turn into a hellhound, or else Iamgonna turn into one, but you’ll be stuck with my little body just the way it is.”
Corbin reached his upper half over the middle console, dragging me in for a kiss.
“Iloveyour sexy little body exactly as it is,” Corbin said, giving me another peck to prove his point. “Maybe we should go inside for this conversation.”
I nodded my head, and I realized that Corbin had let out a breath, the tension leaving his body. Oh. Did he think I wasn’t going to let him come in or something? I mean, yeah, he was a hellhound and hadn’t told me, and that was kinda sucky, but I’m sure it was like vampires or whatever and you weren’t supposed to just go around telling everyone.
“Ohhh, is there a council that decides who can know? And are vampires real, too?” I asked as we walked up to the front steps.
“No council, and not that I’m aware of,” Corbin answered. He opened the door with his key and ushered me inside.
Yes, he had a key. Yes, I might haveaccidentallyleft a spare key sitting out, and I might haveaccidentallynot known where my key was one morning, so Imighthave told Corbin to go ahead and grab the spare so he could just let us in. And then Imighthave never asked for it back.
What? Like I hadn’t noticed that the man kept bringing more clothes and toiletries over. Like I hadn’t emptied a drawer and just thrown his stuff in there to “clean up” one day. We hadn’t spent a single night apart, and I certainly didn’t want to start. I mean, yeah, we’d probably have to have the whole moving-in conversation at some point. But I felt like there were more pressing matters to deal with.
I walked in and sat on the couch, and Corbin came in and sat on the ottoman across from me.
