“That’s bullshit,” says Lys.
She frowns. “It’s something my mom used to say.”
“Well, your mom is wrong. Sometimes they’re just big hurts, no matter what size you are.”
She peers up at him and finds him focused on the card, turning it over and over like a talisman. He sees her looking and tucks it out of sight, scooting up just enough to slide it into his back pocket.
“You and your mom are close?”
“We are,” she says. “Or, we were.”
She thinks of waking to find Hemlock on her chest, yowling futilely in the dark. Beside the bed stood her mother. She’d been oddly hunched, jaw slack and eyes dull. She hadn’t responded when Shea called out to her. She’d only lunged. It should have rattled Shea more than it did. Instead, it felt like a natural progression. The next logical step in her mother’s slow disappearance into herself.
“It was hard for her, after my dad left,” she explains. “She started spending more and more time out by the Gravewood. She used to say she could hear him in the wind.”
“She was lured?”
“Maybe.” It hurts to admit it—that there’s a chance she hadn’t been. “Sometimes I think she would have gone into the woods either way. She and my dad married so young, and I don’t think she ever learned how to be alone.”
“She wasn’t alone,” says Lys. “She had you.”
“I guess.” Shea draws her knees into her chest. “I wasn’t the easiest kid.”
He’s quiet for a long time after that. She can feel him watching her, unapologetic in his focus—not bothering to pretend he’s doing anything else. She focuses on the fraying seam of her sock, plucking the thread until it unravels.
“Why a wolf?” she asks, when the quiet starts to eat at her.
“Maybe I like wolves.”
“Or maybe there was something you needed protection from, too.”
His mouth tips into an almost-smile. “Do I look like I need protection?”
“Not now. Not like this. But maybe before.”
He says nothing. Without the card, he falls to tapping his finger against the fiberglass. The drumming keeps time with her heartbeat. He seems on edge. Restless and overstrung. Had he been that way when he was small? She tries to imagine him before. It isn’t hard. She’s seen him after a feed—quicksilver stare and an easy smile, no fangs in sight. She tries to picture him in a school like Hornbeam. In a tie and sport coat, a stack of books under one arm. He must have gone to school somewhere. He must have had a home.
He must have had something terrible enough to run from.
“Stop thinking about it,” he says.
“About what?”
“About me.”
“I’m always thinking about you,” she admits, and watches his smile die. She hadn’t meant to say it like that. She hadn’t meant to say it at all. She knows better. She knows this feeling in her chest isn’t real. She knows these thoughts were put there by the venom in her blood. By this poisonous thing that compels her to him, makes her docile and unafraid.
He knows it, too.
“You can’t help yourself,” he says, his voice acidic.
She’d been thinking the exact same thing, but hearing him say it out loud turns her mortification to hostility.
“I can, too.”
Lys’s brow lifts. “Yeah?”
It’s a push. A small one. She pushes back.
