CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
JAVIER
“I knowit’s late to be asking this question,” Madeline says as we get out of the car, “but I thought Beast was a stray he found taking shelter in his cabin at your secret society retreat. How does he know her birthday?”
“It’s not asecretsociety,” I say. “Obviously.”
“You’re telling me you’ve never summoned even one demon?”
“Of course not.” I lock the car and offer a hand. “I can get that.”
She waves me off. “I promise I can carry brownies. And no demons besides the cats, you mean.”
“Zorro slept onyourside of the bed last night, and you’re calling him a demon?”
She grins at me under the streetlight, and I realize what I just said. It feels like something in my chest catches, tugs, and stays anchored. Of course it’s her side of the bed.
“I’m just saying are yousureyou guys have never done any summoning? Because unreachable off-grid cabins erected around a central bonfire sounds…blood sacrifice-y.”
“Only if all the times I cut myself or got splinters count as a blood sacrifice. But I think the only otherworldly figure I ever invoked wasJesus Fucking Christ.”
“If you say so,” she says, all teasing and doubtful.
It’s funny, the pieces of our lives that were missing before, the little mundanities, the holes we hadn’t known to fill. The way she takes her coffee in the morning, the sound of her electric toothbrush, the way she rolls out her neck after she’s been working at my kitchen table for a long time. She paces when she takes phone calls, back and forth in front of the windows, and I wonder if she’d carve a path there if she stayed long enough.
“You should come up when it gets warmer,” I say as we’re heading up the steps to Silas’s townhouse. This morning I got a group text informing me that we’d be celebrating Beast’s birthday tonight, my attendance was mandatory, and I should bring a dessert. “It’s a really great spot. There’s a creek nearby and good hiking. The views are spectacular. And it’s so dark at night. And quiet.”
We’re on Silas’s small front porch, and Madeline’s just looking at me with the brownies in her hands. She’s not quite smiling, but the look on her face is so fond it makes me giddy.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says, and then, “You really love it out here.”
It takes me a second to process that, because I’d never thought of it that way. When I moved here, it felt like a leap into the unknown. Exactly the sort of thing I wasn’t supposed to do a little less than a year into sobriety. I’d needed a change—an escape—and this was it. Once I was here it was a puzzle, a half-foreign land, somewhere I stuck out like a sore thumb.
And then, when I wasn’t paying attention, it became home. For all its problems, for all that I sometimes still get asked where I’mreallyfrom, it’s home.
“Yeah, I do,” I say, surprised. Then the door opens and Silas is standing there, waving us in.
“Happy Beast’s birthday!” he says, then laughs at the skeptical look Madeline gives him.
“Fuck no,”Wyatt’s saying. “That place ishauntedhaunted.”
“By what? Squirrels? Spiders?”
He sighs. “Ghosts, Lainey. It’s haunted byghostsand probably a bunch of worse shit, too. What was that thing in the movie you made me watch last week? It was like a bunch of ghosts mashed up into one thing that also had teeth?”
Lainey looks blank. “A vampire? Why do you keep watching these movies with me?”
“Why do youlethim watch these movies with you?” I ask her.
“He says he can handle them.”
“The movies are fine,” Wyatt lies. “It’s Santa Claus’s Last Chance Christmas Asylum that I’ve got an issue with.”
“It was never an asylum!” she says.
“There’s an asylum?” I ask.
