Page 400 of Pucking Feral: Part Two

PLAGUE

I do not get weird at pet stores.

IVY

Okay

I snort at her always creative ways of calling him a liar.

Plague mutters something under his breath and pockets his phone, marching down another aisle.

I steer the cart after him, picking up a few steel bowls that won't harbor bacteria. And a bed shaped like a sofa that both Ivy and Whiskey are sure to lose their minds over. The tallest scratching post they have, too, of course. One with a tree house at the top.

Plague reads every label. I put everything he likes in the cart. We have never done a normal pack thing together, and we are, somehow, unnervingly good at it.

Somehow, this domestic bullshit is closer to a life than anything I have let myself have.

I keep waiting for the floor to fall out, and it keeps… not falling.

Unnerving.

Truly.

He keeps eyeing me, too, and I wonder if it's because he's thinking about what happened at the game. When I found a creative way to distract him. The minty taste of his mouth on my tongue is certainly stuck in my head.

His eyes drop to my mouth.

Only for a second. Then they snap back up to the shelf of cat toys he's pretending to read, and his ears go pink again.

"Perhaps we should send Ivy a new picture for her lock screen," I muse, continuing to watch him.

He picks up a feather wand, examines it, and sets it down. "Like a selfie?" he asks in that posh, innocent lilt of his, as if he has no idea what I'm talking about.

If he looked up at me, he would surely see the grin spreading across my face.

"Of course. What else?" I ask pleasantly.

I've learned that with Plague, silence works better than pressure. Push him and he retreats behind endless walls of detachment. Wait, and sometimes he comes to you.

Like a cat.

Chapter 84

Wraith

One of Ivy's hands is in mine, typing on her phone with the other to Valek and Plague about the cat we rescued and the pet store supply run while we sit in the corner farthest from the door.

Whiskey, who was supposed to stay in the parking lot, is on the floor.

He's cross-legged in the middle of the waiting room, building a tower out of wooden blocks with a kid whose arms are wrapped in white bandages from fingertip to elbow, a compression garment covering most of his neck and the left side of his jaw.

"No, no, see, you gotta put the big one on the bottom, little bro," Whiskey is saying, way too loud for a medical facility. "We learn that shiii-zzazz in the Marines."

Nice save, I sign to him.

I watch him physically fight the urge to give me the finger.

"You were in the Marines?" The kid's eyes go huge.