“Like, as pets?”
“I think as entertainment.”
“They don’t have video games out here?” I ask, and Javier starts laughing, silently, his thigh shaking under my knee and his fingers tightening on my leg, and I grin at the vague outline of his face.
“You know, that’s exactly what I said, and they acted like I was the weird one.”
“Well, if the shoe fits.”
“I’m completely normal.”
“You disappeared for two days so you could investigate whether an abandoned homestead in the mountains was haunted.”
Javier sighs a long-suffering sigh. “I didn’t think it was haunted, I’d heard stories that Frog-Mouth Hobbler had taken up residence either there or in a nearby abandoned mine, so I wanted to check out it. Get a feel for where a Hobbler would live.”
He told me that the last time we talked, or maybe the time before last—a phone call that was ostensibly about travel logistics but ended with him telling me where he’d gone after the last time we saw each other, what he’d been looking for. The call lasted two hours. It sounded like a secret. I don’t know if it was, but I haven’t told anyone.
“Did it feel monster-y?”
“At night.”
“Everything here feels monster-y at night,” I tell him, and it comes out like a compliment. “That’s probably why you like it.”
“There are lots of reasons—” Javier starts, the closet door opens, and someone yelps, which makes me also yelp, and Javier’s hand tightens on my knee.
“Who’s—” Thalia’s voice says, and then she’s shoving coats apart and the hall light floods into the closet, so bright I have to shield my eyes. “What the hell? Why are you guys in the closet?”
“Hide and seek,” Javier says. “Thanks for blowing our cover.” He doesn’t move his hand and I don’t move my knee, and even with an arm over my eyes, I can see Thalia notice.
“Thomas is the seeker,” I explain. “Sometimes it takes him a while.”
“Thomas left, like, twenty minutes ago,” Thalia says, and suddenly I realize that it’s quiet behind her, in the rest of the house. The general cacophony that I got used to all afternoon has dimmed in favor the clink of a few dishes, footsteps on the stairs. “Uh, pretty much everybody left, actually? It’s snowing like hell.”
That gets us out of the closet. Javier goes first, favoring his left ankle and right shoulder before he reaches down and pulls me up, hand warm and strong. I can tell my face is flushed, and I tell myself it’s because the closet had gotten too warm.
“You guys are still here?” Caleb asks when we get into the living room and Thalia hands him a coat. He glances outside, and—shit, that’s snow, that’s for real snow that’s covering the ground and everything. I’ve had too many beers to drive a bumper car down at the pier, let alone a real car in actual snow.
“Hide and seek,” I explain, and I’m pretty sure Caleb and Thalia exchange some sort of look, but I decide I don’t see it.
“He’s a dictator, huh,” Caleb says of his nephew with a fond little smile that saysand he deserves to be. “Which car’s yours?”
Javier sighs and scrubs his hands over his face. “The red Ford Focus.”
Caleb strides to the front door, opens it, and very judgily scans the parking area at the top of his mom’s driveway. Apparently he doesn’t like what he sees because he comes back inside, nods once, and announces, “We’ll drive you home, and you can come get your car later.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
JAVIER
“Just be normal,”I beg, arms folded over my chest. “How hard can it be? Just act normal for, like, eight hours.Please.”
I get no response whatsoever.
“I’m sorry I vacuumed,” I tell Zorro, who’s atop the bookshelf-wall structure that separates my bedroom from the rest of my apartment. I even put up a proper curtain across the entryway so no one can look in and realize that the only reason my place is so clean right now is because I shoved everything in there. “I know you think it’s unnecessary, and now you’re mad because you have to jump up here to escape and you consider that undignified.”
The tip of his tail twitches, and he looks away, pretending that he’s tracking a bug or something. That’s the best response I’m going to get, so I shrug and put the vacuum back in the old industrial cabinet-thing that I use as a closet, since my place features zeroactualclosets.
Then I go put on the nice slacks and the button-down shirt that I actuallyironed, thank you, even if I had to go over to Silas’s place and borrow his, and figure I’m as ready as I’ll ever be for my family to descend.
