Chapter One
Celeste stood in her late sister’s living room, trying not to breathe through her nose. The apartment stank like a pile of used jockstraps and looked as if it had been worked over by a team of Tasmanian devils. On crack.
Well, she’d definitely broken into the right rathole.
She stood there awkwardly, trying to decide what to do next. Why had she even come here? As a sort of final goodbye, she guessed. To make it real. Maybe to grab a picture or a memento of Jennifer to remember her by.
She held a pile of newspapers in her hand. She’d picked them up off Jennifer’s doorstep. The headline on the top one blared “Werewolf Fever Sweeps the Nation!” There was a blurry picture of a huge wolf-like creature, taken near a popular camping spot in Idaho. Supposedly, there had been several other recent sightings of “werewolves” around the country over the past few months, and a couple of people had managed to get pictures with their smartphones. Werewolves were the new Bigfoot.
Any other time, she would have found that hilarious. Today, she was moving in a haze of sorrow and anger at her twin sister’s wasted life. Yes, she’d been estranged from her sister for years, and she’d been expecting this, bracing for it, for as long as she could remember, but now that it had finally happened, it still hurt.
Mechanically, she pulled a trash bag out of her pocketbook and stuffed the newspapers in. Then she started moving through the house, filling the bag as she went.
Why was she even bothering? No logical reason, but she detested squalor to the same level that her late sister had wallowed in it. Celeste hadn’t seen her twin in six years, but clearly nothing had changed.
Décor consisting of mountains of empty beer bottles on the floor and piles of pizza boxes stacked up on a coffee table with a broken leg. Check.
The reek of rotting food wafting in from the tiny kitchenette. Check.
Dirty clothes strewn across the floor as if they were trying to crawl out the door and escape. Check.
Small, dirty little boy crouched in the corner of the living room, watching her from under a thick mop of brown curls. Che— What the hell?
She choked back a startled yelp.
“Oh. Uh, hello,” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.”
He met her gaze steadily. “That’s because I was hiding.”
Who the heck was this kid? Why was he in Jennifer’s house? This was no place for a child. Or a mammal. “Well, you’re very good at it.”
“What happened to your face?” he asked. She self-consciously touched the thick scar that slashed down from her left cheekbone, angling towards her mouth. She covered it with thick makeup whenever she was working her job as a security tester, because she needed to blend in, but the rest of the time she didn’t bother. It was just one of the things that she did to put a wall between herself and other people.
She brushed a lock of her thick, straight brown hair in front of the scar. “Long story,” she murmured.
He kept staring at her. What should she do now? Celeste had next to no experience with small children, other than having been one herself once. But then, she and Jennifer had never really experienced much of a childhood.
Food. Children liked food. God knows she’d have given her left kidney for regular meals when she was a child, if she’d known what a kidney was back then.
“Uh,” she said. “You hungry?” She fished in her purse.
“Yes.”
She produced a granola bar, unwrapping it for him. He came over and grabbed it and scarfed it down in three big, hungry bites. She knew how that felt.
He looked at her expectantly. Crud. She didn’t have any more food with her. “I’ll go check in the kitchen and see if there’s anything I can cook for you.”
“Don’t bother,” he said, in a voice that was far too adult.
“Okay. Can you last ten minutes? I drove by a pizza place just up the road that said it delivers in ten minutes or less. Greasy Gus.”
He lit up. “I love Greasy Gus!”
“Me too!” she said, oddly pleased that he had the same terrible taste in fast food. “I’ll order us some.”
“Sure. Get the Kitchen Sink. That has all the stuff on it. So you have money now?” He gave her a reproachful look. “You were gone for a long time, Mom. I don’t like it when you leave me at night. In the day is okay, but not at night.”
Her heart stuttered in her chest. This was Jennifer’s son. Jennifer had a son. She’d sent Celeste postcards with no return address a few times over the last few years, texted her from “unknown number” burner phones a couple of times…and never once mentioned a child.
