Chapter 6 #2
Savi looks back and forth between Winter and me like we’ve started to sprout fungi from our heads. I am forced to conclude that we suck at the whole attempting to be friends thing. Winter must look away, because she focuses on her plate again.
Briar shuffles around the now-awkwardly-quiet kitchen.
Earlier in the week she asked me about my mother.
About Ty, who she called my boyfriend, which is not inaccurate and yet hilarious.
Tonight she doesn’t ask anything—probably because we made it weird.
She slams some pots and pans around, then doesn’t use them.
She opens and closes the cupboard doors, but doesn’t take anything out.
Finally, Briar rushes over to the fourth available seat at the table and sits down with a hunk of bread. Not Winter’s bread. This bread looks extremely healthy and brown, with seeds.
I have never seen Briar eat anything that didn’t have sugar in it.
We all stare at it. She looks down at it too, and once again, I’m certain I can see some color on her cheeks.
“It’s actually my birthday,” she belts out into the silence.
For a moment, no one says anything.
Then we all do. At the same time.
“Happy birthday,” Savi practically sings, inclining her head as she does. “How wonderful.”
Winter shakes her head. “You seem thrilled about that?”
“Kudos,” I manage to get out.
We all talk over each other, and Briar looks as if she can’t decide whether to be mortified or horrified, but this tracks. This is awkward people doing awkward shit, and it’s easy to just roll with that. I can pretend I don’t notice awkwardness. That’s basically how I survive pack gatherings.
“I don’t usually celebrate my birthday,” she says when the rest of us have subsided back into the silence. Briar makes a face. “I think birthdays are lame.”
“Okay,” I hear myself say.
Savi eyes me. Winter keeps her gaze trained on Briar.
Briar glares down at her hunk of bread, then crosses her arms as if it gave her some lip. With that many seeds and a distinct resemblance to bran, I suspect it very well might have.
“You three are the closest thing I have to friends.” Briar bites this out without looking at any one of us directly, though her cheeks get even redder. “I’m not saying that I want to be besties or anything weird, but, it being my birthday and all, I thought maybe we could . . .”
No one feeds in the next word for her. I’m not sure any of us can move, and anyway, I know that I have no idea where she’s going with this. It could be anywhere at all. Does she want cake and a bit of singing? Is she after a little of that hair-braiding? A few cage matches?
I can believe any of that and none of that when it comes to Briar.
We all stare at her, waiting.
Briar clears her throat. “Go out,” she manages to say, as if she’s throwing the words from her mouth and really, they’re made of marbles. “Maybe we could go out.”
“Go out?” Winter echoes, as if she’s never heard the term.
“Of the house?” Savi asks, and I suppose it’s possible that she really hasn’t heard the term before.
“Do you want to go out with me?” Briar asks, a little too loudly.
A little too bluntly. Almost angrily, really, like this is happening to her when she’s the one making this offer, and I swear it makes my heart hurt a little.
I feel like I see her. “To a club. Because it’s Saturday.
And my birthday. And people do festive shit like this. ”
There’s a beat while we digest this, except I’m already there.
“Honestly?” I say. “I can’t think of anything that I would rather do more.”
Briar jerks in her chair at that, like she was expecting me to bring the wolf out and eat her for dessert. Like she was expecting to be cruelly rebuffed, and that makes me soften toward her even more.
“Same,” Winter says staunchly.
I can feel Savi staring at us, but I grin at my housemate—of a sort—and friend. “We would love to go out with you, Briar. Clubbing in Medford on the far side of the Reveal. Whatever that means to you.”
This is how the four of us end up milling around a crowd of the Kind in the ruins of what was once an old-age home called the Manor that sat atop its own little hill in the midway point of the valley.
These days it houses a collection of various species, all living together instead of off in the usual Kind clans that have been sticking to their own for centuries.
This is the kind of progress I wish werewolves could make too.
It’s not every day you see a centaur canoodling with a Valkyrie in the middle of a rave, and it might not seem like a revolution, but I know it is.
We all got to step out of the shadows that were pushed upon us only for my pack to step back in of their own volition.
There has to be a better way. Maybe it really is dancing.
Maybe I just want it to be this close to the all-pack gathering, where new ideas of any sort are not exactly encouraged, and especially not from females who should be mated by now.
Savi looks around, looks bemused, and disappears. Literally. One moment she’s standing beside me, the next she’s gone, and a few moments later I think I see her up high on the rooftop of the highest building. Alone.
Briar follows my gaze and looks like she wishes she was up there, too. “This is so great,” she says, though she sounds like there’s glass in her mouth, and her face is bright red. “I’m going to, uh, go get us drinks or something.”
Before I can tell her that she should know better than to drink strange brews made by strange magic in even stranger places, she shoves her way into the crowd. In moments, I can’t even track her beanie.
“I don’t want to know what happened to all the people who lived here, do I,” Winter mutters as she looks around, taking in the crowd around us and the loud music that seems to do its own dancing, lifting and falling and beckoning to such an extent that I suspect the DJ must be a siren.
“You already know,” I tell her, and I fling an arm over her shoulders as we move deeper into the party.
“Is this really what monsters do every night while all the humans lock themselves up in fear?” she asks, her eyes wide.
I don’t know how to tell her that while I understand where she’s coming from, I find this glorious.
Back when I was growing up here, parties like this took place way out in the woods, but very seldomly.
Very carefully. No one ever wanted to draw too much attention.
And even then, there wasn’t too much interspecies mingling.
We all knew about each other, but it wasn’t wise to get together in one place. Better not to be an easy target.
“Not every night,” I assure her. Because some nights it rains.
There are mages everywhere, making the sky bleed different colors above this hill.
It’s better than disco balls and all the flashing neon lights that punctuated the clubs I went to in New York City.
The music seems to wind its way into my bones, into everyone’s insides from the look of it, and creatures of every description are dancing, laughing.
Free.
There’s a lot about the Reveal that I don’t love, but then, on the other side, there’s this. The Kind out here beneath an open sky without having to worry about being discovered. Without knowing that if we’re caught, we’ll be the reason our families—or our whole species—will be exterminated.
Exterminated if we’re lucky. Experimented on and then exterminated, if not. Humans with their scientific labs and hatred of anything they can’t explain have always been our boogeymen.
I can’t say I miss those days. And though I try to remain sensitive to Winter’s mostly human response to this—and what it means that this can happen, here in a place where humans lived—I can’t help myself.
For a little while I throw my head back, lift my arms up, and let myself feel. I let the beat take me on this journey with everyone else. I let the music do its level best to convince me that just because one world ended, that doesn’t mean the next one can’t be beautiful.
I want to believe this. I need to believe this.
Winter doesn’t throw herself into the dancing like I do, but when she does move it’s like there’s a force field around her.
Everyone simply . . . gets out of her way.
There’s a ring around her wherever she goes, and it’s only when she looks at me in confusion that I realize she probably hasn’t been in a crowd like this since everything went down between her and Ariel.
“It’s his mark,” I tell her. “Everyone is here to party, not risk the displeasure of the vampire king. They’re giving you space because if they don’t, they know they’ll have to deal with him. No one wants that.”
“I don’t know how I feel about that,” she says.
I laugh, and dance a little more wildly. “I feel that we should take advantage of having our own dance space wherever we go.”
I realize that I have no idea if Winter is the dancing type. I didn’t know her very well in high school, we certainly didn’t run in the same circles, and the past couple of months haven’t lent themselves to a whole lot of levity.
I’m surprised, and kind of thrilled, when she throws her hands up and dances with me.
We dance and we dance. I don’t think about pack shit.
I don’t think about anything. I steer Winter away from any drinks offered by strangers, and I don’t let the curious draw too near once they start to get used to the fact she’s marked by Ariel.
I hope she doesn’t see some of the creepier Kind who are here too, swaying on their tentacles and such, but she doesn’t seem to notice.
Or maybe she’s given them all dating advice in the coffee-stand drive-through and no longer finds them all that creepy.
We just dance. We have a few drinks made of alcohol with no magical boosters.
Winter and I speculate about where Briar went and conclude that she was overwhelmed by her own invitation and likely had to go decompress somewhere, but the music is too good to chase after her. Besides, she knows where we are.
I haven’t felt this light since New York, I realize. And maybe not even then, because there was too much weight on what I was doing, what I was leaving behind while I was doing it, and what my future would hold. And much as I loved my years in New York, I was hiding there.
Not having to hide who I am, it turns out, changes everything.
We keep dancing until the sky starts to lighten in the distance.
The party starts to break up. The music stops, which feels like a small tragedy. Winter and I stagger our way through the crowd and out of the ruins.
And when we do, we come face-to-face with Ty.
He’s leaning against what was once a retaining wall, his back to the valley.
This reminds me of a thousand other nights across the years.
I couldn’t go anywhere without someone—usually one of my brothers—reporting my whereabouts back to Ty.
He would often show up to take me home, a quiet reminder that I was his to everyone involved.
Maybe especially to me.
I look over my shoulder toward the crowd and think I see Briar’s beanie heading in the opposite direction.
I can’t blame her. Ty’s neutral face—the one he’s wearing now—makes most people want to cry.
And run. I figure I’ll catch up with her back at the cottages and see how her birthday went from her perspective.
When I look back, Ariel has appeared.
“Reinforcements?” I ask.
Beside me, Winter laughs, her eyes entirely for her freakishly beautiful lover, all marble slabs of muscle and that cool silver gaze.
“Like I need help hauling your ass home, babe,” Ty says, and he sounds growly, but I can hear the laughter in his voice.
“Fantastic,” says Savi, floating into view. Possibly descending from the still-bright stars. “We’re all together at last. Now maybe we can discuss what’s happening around here.”