Page 36

Some things, it turns out, you can’t jerk out of your system.

Then I do what I do a hundred times a day. I look out the kitchen window, across the lawn, to Bell & Bone.

And I smell it again.

The rot. The burned herbs. Faint on the clean morning air, drifting from her side of the line, closer to her front door than it has ever dared come while the sun's up.

My wolf goes still. Then he lifts his head, and this time there's no ache in his voice at all.

It's not waiting for the dark anymore.

I'm already reaching for my keys.

7

MAREN

STILL ELEVEN DAYS UNTIL HALLOWEEN

I've been awake for hours, and spite is the only thing holding me upright.

Spite, and the fact that every time I shut my eyes I see the footprints. Muddy. Bare. Walking themselves across my bedroom floor toward the pillow. Toward where my head was.

So. No napping.

Gage came at dawn. Swept the yard on bare feet, crouched by my back steps, and came up with ash on his fingers he wouldn't explain. Burned herbs, he said, like that's a thing a person finds on a Sunday. Then he told me to stay inside and left me alone with a locked house and a hundred questions.

I did not open the shop.

For the first time since I bought Bell & Bone, the sign stays flipped to CLOSED on a peak October Sunday. The whole street smells like woodsmoke and wet leaves. I sit in the dim with a tire iron across my knees, like that's a personality now.

By three I've scrubbed the same patch of floorboard twice. The mud doesn't want to lift.

Then someone knocks. I'm up with the tire iron before I've decided to be.

"Who is it?"

"Me. Gage."

I open the door three inches. He fills every one of them. Behind him the sky's gone, the flat pewter of a storm still deciding whether to bother, and he's holding a pizza box level on one huge palm like a waiter in a slasher film.

"You brought carbs."

"You need food."

"You're bribing me."

"Yes."

At least he's honest about one thing today. I let him in. A man I've never met follows him, toolbox in hand, being paid too much to ask questions.

I plant myself in the doorway.

"Gage?"

"He's a locksmith."

"You brought a locksmith?"