Page 59

Rowan

This was taking too long. The plan Caligo and I had gone over was simple: wake Tyler up, scare him, and get him out of the house. It should have taken ten minutes at most, but I’d been out here for twenty. What if Caligo had killed him? How was I supposed to explain a corpse in my house?

Caligo might not have to worry about the law, but I did. I should have explained that to him, but I’d been too eager to get one over on Tyler and take back my house. Would it really have killed me to go down the legal route, even if it took months? It wasn’t as if I couldn’t afford to stay elsewhere. But no. I had to get vengeful and unleash a monster on my ex-boyfriend, all while fooling myself into believing that I had control over him.

As the minutes ticked by, it was hard to know what to do. Knock? Call the police myself and tell them I’d heard a disturbance? The former felt pathetic, and the latter was akin to holding out my wrists and asking them to snap on some handcuffs.

Just as I’d decided that I had to do something, the door opened and Tyler practically hurled himself out of it. One thing I’d always been able to say about Tyler was that he took pride in his appearance. Being confronted with a version of him who hadn’t even buttoned his shirt correctly was therefore quite jarring. And that was before I noticed the bruising, the split lip, and the cut above his eyebrow. I bit back the urge to ask what had happened. I already knew, of course. Caligo had clearly taken a creative approach to the plan.

Tyler stopped dead when he saw me, his gaze fastening on a point above my right shoulder. “I have some things I need to say.”

“Go on,” I prompted.

“I’m a piece of shit.”

“You won’t get any arguments from me on that score.”

“I wasn’t sympathetic enough after your mother died. I expected you to get over it, and I couldn’t understand why you found that so hard. I should have been more patient instead of making things more difficult for you. I should never have acted on my attraction to Remy. I made the first move, not him, just for the record. I shouldn’t have dumped you in rehab, and I shouldn’t have decided to squeeze every last penny out of you as a punishment for seeing me as I really am.”

The shuddering breath he finished with suggested that he was relieved to have gotten the words out. He risked a glance back at the house, where the door still stood open. When he turned back, he still didn’t meet my gaze. “I hope you and that thing are happy together.”

“That’s rude,” I said. “He has a name.”

“Yeah, well. He never introduced himself.”

He grabbed the suitcase and turned to leave.

“I think you’ve forgotten something,” I said before he could.

“What?”

I held out my hand. “The keys. I don’t want you letting yourself back in before I get the locks changed.”

He dropped the keyring into my outstretched palm and walked off without another word. I watched him until he disappeared from view, then stepped inside. At least Tyler’s alterations meant I could put the chain on the door, safe in the knowledge that even if he had a spare key, he couldn’t get back in.

I found Caligo in the living room. His horns, tail, and red eyes threw me for a moment, and I had to make a concerted effort to control my reaction. I couldn’t have been that successful because one glance at my face had him changing into his more humanoid form.

“Sorry,” I said before remembering that I was supposed to be mad at him. “What the fuck was that?”

“What was what?”

“You were supposed to take ten minutes, not half an hour. And you weren’t supposed to touch him.”

“You never said that. You just said not to kill him.” Caligo left a deliberate pause. “Which I didn’t. I wanted to, but I didn’t. I just had a bit of fun with him.”

I turned, noticing the blood on the wall but saying nothing. Instead, I focused on the differences in my living room. “He rearranged all the furniture. The son of a bitch really was here for the long haul.”

There were differences all over the house: things missing that he’d presumably thrown out, things he’d moved, and things he’d added. The bedroom was in disarray, but I assumed that was Caligo’s doing rather than the state Tyler had left it in. At least there was no blood in there. I regretted being thankful for that as soon as I entered the en suite bathroom and found blood all over the sink and floor.

“He tripped,” Caligo said, “and banged his head on the sink.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“And downstairs…? Did he trip there too?”

“No. I threw him against the wall because his face was annoying me.”