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"He came over."

"He has a bed."

"He was cold."

"He has a bowl, Gage. With a name on it."

"He didn't have one when he showed up."

"He has one now. I named him Sid."

"He didn't answer to Sid."

Sid sits down in the middle of the kitchen floor and begins washing one paw with enormous dignity.

He serves salmon.

"Oh, you traitor."

Gage's head comes up. He can't hear it. I'm having an argument with a cat inside my own skull while a six and a half foot wolf shifter watches me lose it next to a cupcake.

"You're supposed to be my familiar."

I am.

Sid pauses mid paw.

I merely have standards regarding household staff.

"How long?" I ask Gage.

"How long what?"

"How long has he been coming here?"

He weighs it. I've learned to see him do that, the half second where he decides how much of the truth I get.

"The day he showed up at your shop," he says.

The kitchen goes a little quieter. Sid stops washing. He doesn't look at me and he doesn't answer, and out of everything that's happened in eight days, this is the part that raises the hair on my arms. A cat who wandered into my shop last Friday like a stranger has been sleeping next door to my house since before I unpacked my dishes.

"Maren."

"I'm fine." I come back to the table and sit down. "I'm having a very normal week."

Gage puts a second cupcake on my plate without being asked.

"You're not what people think you are," I tell him.

He goes still. Like the sentence hit a part of him with no armor on it and he has no idea what to do with his hands now.

"Eat your cupcake," he says.

By nine the wind comes up hard enough to rattle the shutters, and the town outside his windows has gone full October. Someone two streets over has a fog machine running. The Hendersons' inflatable ghost keeps collapsing and resurrecting itself in the dark.

Through the side window I can see my own house. Every window black, and the shape burned across my front door that no amount of sanding is going to take out of the wood.

I lived in that house for six months. This afternoon I packed a bag in four minutes and forgot my pillow.