Twenty-four
It was nearly seven when I arrived at the address Mason had sent me minutes after I left him at the game. He had hardly stopped texting since, mostly apologizing profusely about his family. The messages got harder to read as the night went on.
I officially gave up on being mad at him after I got one that said:
i shoulda thought it thru bettr but i culdn ghink abt anuthinv ecxept kissn u
At two in the morning, one of Mason’s teammates dropped him off at the Hotel Siena in downtown Salem. When I opened the door for him, he looked soft and sleepy, nothing like the demon who had torn through Dalton’s defense with blood running down his face.
“What poor underclassman did you force to DD for you?” I asked him.
“Winning-touchdown privileges,” he said, a gentle slur to his words that could’ve meant inebriation or exhaustion. From the way he stumbled straight for the bed, it was a bit of both.
He clumsily kicked off his shoes and rolled onto his back, reaching out with grabby hands. I climbed right on top of him.
“Thanks for going along with this,” he murmured, gesturing to the hotel room as a whole. “I just . . .”
“I know,” I said. “I don’t want it to be over, either.”
Sleeping in the same bed. Sharing a bathroom. When Mason had texted me what if we take one more night, I hadn’t hesitated.
He started to apologize again for putting me in that situation with his mom. I poked the tip of his nose, and he went a little cross-eyed trying to look at my finger. He stopped talking, distracted.
“Forget it,” I said. “They’re not too upset with you, are they?”
Mason shrugged. He leaned up to bite my fingertip.
“ ’S not like they can be. Pretty sure Ericka was crying over the phone.”
“She hugged me.”
He grinned broadly. “ ’Course she did.”
“It was all very confusing.”
“Wanna hear something crazy?” Mason didn’t give me the chance to respond.
“When we were all at Blake’s and people started getting pretty drunk, this asshole Ryan started trying to say some shit to me about the whole thing, slurred me out a little, and Blake just fucking dumps his ’Rona on the dude’s head.
Like, didn’t say a thing, just put his arm out and dumped a whole bottle of beer on him.
That shit was . . . I need a good word .
. .” He raised one finger for me to wait.
“Like. Electrifying. Uplifting. As fuck. Made me wanna write a song or something.”
I told him, “You’re cute when you’re drunk.”
“Fuck that, I’m so sexy.” He rolled over on top of me. “Gonna show you the sexiest night of your life.”
I lightly pushed his chest, and he toppled like a bowling pin. “Try me when you’re sober.”
Mason took this in stride. “Gimme forty-five minutes. No, thirty. ’Cause of my superpowers.” He climbed off of the sheets and clambered toward the bathroom.
“Where are you going?” I laughed.
“I’m gonna get clean and seduce you like crazy.”
“Oh wow, okay. Take it easy.”
I eventually had to get my headphones out of my bag. Mason spent his entire twenty-minute shower wailing Nina Simone’s “I Put a Spell on You”—including the saxophone part.
***
When I got home late Sunday morning, my brother was in the entrance hall.
“Shit,” I hissed, hastily shutting the door behind me. “What were you thinking? I could’ve hurt you.”
Cedric sat low on one of the twin staircases. Luckily, the spot hadn’t been hit by the light coming in.
“I wanted to catch you before you hole up in your room,” he said. It was a weird time of day for him to be awake.
I stilled. The last couple of times I’d seen Cedric up during daylight had been when the werewolves had just moved into town.
Had Daphne gone and talked to my family despite what I’d said to her?
“Is something up?” I asked, super nonchalant, not at all pissing myself.
Blessedly, Cedric said, “Nothing’s up. How was your trip?”
I squinted. “Uh, you feeling all right?”
He beckoned me over. I approached him like I’d approach a feral cat.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said a few weeks ago. About how we don’t talk anymore. You’re right. I’ve been a shit brother, so tell me about your weekend. Did your school win the game?”
“I was actually hoping to talk to Dad for a minute . . .”
Cedric patted the spot next to him on the stairs. I sat, eyeing him warily.
“It was fine. We won.”
“I didn’t think you cared about football.”
“I don’t. Cella wanted to go. She has friends on the team and the cheer squad.”
I waited for a snide remark. Cedric had always vocally disapproved of my close relationship with a human.
His rules didn’t seem to apply to himself—ever since he was my age, he often disappeared after dark to sleep with a rotating roster of local girls who didn’t know any better. But I couldn’t have one friend.
No remark came. He waited.
“I don’t really know what else to say,” I said. “It was just a stupid game.”
Cedric rolled his eyes. “You’re awful at this. I’ll go first. Check this out.”
He bent forward and rolled up the right leg of his pajama pants.
On the side of his calf was a new tattoo, still slightly raised.
Not another stick-and-poke but a real tattoo he must have whipped out his gun for.
The tattoo was of a familiar plant with small flowers that grew in blossoms. Crawling on the underside of one oblong leaf, munching at its tip, was a striped caterpillar.
Cedric had only given himself a few machine tattoos, but it looked incredible. It was so different from the grisly stick-and-pokes of strange creatures and bones all over his body.
“Is that . . . ?”
“Milkweed,” he said. “It’s the last thing she ever taught us. Dark, I know, but it’s important to remember.”
Standing abruptly, I said, “Follow me.”
In my room, I showed him the pages upon pages of milkweed that had crowded my sketchbooks over the years. I had drawn it in crayon, colored pencil, charcoal, watercolor, and regular No. 2.
“I remember too, okay?” I said. “Even if you like to think I don’t.”
Cedric smoothed his fingers over a bumpy watercolor I’d made in middle school. “You’ve gotten really good,” he said. His black eyes trailed over the pages on my wall. He asked, “What do you remember?”
It would have been easy to respond if he’d been asking what I remembered about Mom. My memories of her were all my own, and they were precious to me. But he already knew that. The evidence was all over my room.
As for the night she died, I felt too ashamed to admit to the empty hole in my memory. In the moment, my body had frozen, and my mind had wiped clean. If Cedric hadn’t pulled me away, I would have died along with her. I might not have even noticed it happening.
My real memory of that night was split into befores and afters.
The hair-raising feeling right before the werewolf attacked and the soul-crushing moment, minutes later, when my mind returned to my body.
I was already back inside the house with a cold wet towel against my forehead, and my dad and aunt and uncle had already left to track the murderer down.
I remembered my dad before that night: hands smeared with paint, more father than chief.
The version of him that remained after had stuffed his easel into the very back of his closet because he couldn’t handle so much time to think.
He had extended his work hours and managed the clan obsessively, taking on even the tiniest issues and refusing help.
I remembered my aunt Francesca before, holding my hand as we wandered the forest picking flowers.
And I remembered Aunt Francesca after, hardly able to look at me.
I had understood, even as a child, that she blamed Cedric and me for Mom’s death.
I don’t think she wanted to, but she couldn’t help it. She wasn’t the only one.
There was Cedric before that night, always reaching out for something to carry, and Cedric after, uninterested in holding me because his hands were already full with all of his rage.
“I’ll tell you what I remember,” Cedric said, setting the old sketchbook down. “Do you know how I learned what’s inside the human body? I saw it ripped out of her. That’s how.”
I took a sharp breath.
“I gave up sleeping completely for a year after she died because all of my dreams were blood-soaked,” Cedric continued.
He licked his fangs. “I know you think I’m insane.
Well, that’s the kind of thing that drives a person insane.
I had to choose to leave her behind to get you out of there.
But I looked back. Nobody saw what I saw.
And everyone else just . . . moved on. We’re fucking playing nice with the werewolves like it never happened.
Like ten years is enough time to forget.
I’m going to live forever, and I will never forget. I refuse to. And I refuse to forgive.”
“That’s . . . Cedric.” I wanted to comfort him, but what could I say that hadn’t already been said? None of it had worked anyway. “The point of the peace is to prevent more bloodshed.”
“They’re animals!” Cedric hissed. “All they know is bloodshed. They’re hunters who play with their food.”
He was so wrong, but I couldn’t tell him that without giving myself away.
“I’ve never told anyone this. During that first year, when the endless nights made me stir-crazy, I used to sneak out to the cemetery with a shovel and one of Uncle Dante’s butcher knives.
I would stand over that monster’s grave for hours trying to find the courage to dig him up.
I wanted to cut him to pieces, Kieran. Just to pay him back for what he did to Mom. ”
“Shit,” I muttered. After Dad fought the lone wolf, a handful of adults had taken the body to the cemetery and buried it.
They didn’t want any piece of him to remain in our forest, poisoning the dirt where Mom had grown her garden.
I’d never seen his grave. I imagined Cedric, eleven years old, standing over the unmarked patch of land that had become the lone wolf’s grave with a knife meant for slaughtering animals. “Did you ever . . . ?”