Bride

I wake up forty minutes before sundown, with a body next to mine. It’s warm, very soft, and everything about it screams familiarity.

“Get your own bed, bitch,” I say groggily, turning to Serena.

“Never.” She yawns, huge, with no consideration for her stinky breath or my poor nose. “So.”

“So.” I reach up to clean my eyes, and can still smell the Vampyre blood under my fingernails. I should take a shower.

“Let’s just get this over with,” she starts. “I know you’re mad, but—”

“Hang on. I’m not mad.”

She blinks at me. “Oh.”

“I’m not going to . . . I’m not mad, I promise.”

She searches my face. “But?”

“No buts.”

“But?”

“Nothing.”

“But?”

“For fuck’s sake, I told you—”

“Misery. But?”

I press my fingers into my eyes until golden spots appear. God, I hate it when people know me. “Just . . . why?”

“Why, what?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She bites the inside of her cheek. “Right. So. I kind of kept an unhinged number of secrets from you in the past year or so, and I’m not sure which one you’re referring to, so—”

“The big one.” My tone is flat. “That you’re actually, you know. Another fucking species?”

“Oh.” She scrunches her nose. “Right. Well.”

“I thought you trusted me. I assumed you felt you could tell me everything and our friendship was unconditional, but maybe—”

“I do. I do trust you. It’s . . .” She flinches. Then massages her forehead with the palm of her hand. “I wasn’t sure, you know? At the begi

I gasp, mortally offended. “I don’t.”

“You make jokes about them all the time.”

“What jokes?”

“Come on. They run after mail carriers, are obsessed with squirrels. There was that night we met that wet dog that stank so bad—”

“It was a joke. I had never even smelled a Were at the time!”

“Yeah, well.” She takes a deep breath. “My blood is red. And when your father took me, I still wasn’t able to shift. I wasn’t sure. At that point, all I knew was that something weird and terrible and amazing was happening, and I swear, Misery, all I kept thinking about in the past six months was—what if I die? What if this thing inside me kills me? What is Misery going to do then? Am I going to drag her with me, am I going to be the reason my sister, the person I care about the most—the only person I fucking care about—will die, because of this weird codependency of ours, and—”

I reach out, closing my hand around hers, like we used to when we were kids.

Serena slows down. Stops. Then, after a few moments, she continues, and her voice is much quieter. “In the last three months I had lots of time. Obviously. And there was a surveillance camera in the attic, but it had several blind spots. Before, I had felt like I needed information. I had researched the possibility that I might be a Were, or something else altogether, like I would normally research an article. But once I was alone, all I could do was research myself. Try to feel it. And I practiced. Shifting is like flexing a muscle, except that the muscle is also in the brain. And I still don’t really understand what’s up with me, and what about me is Were or Human, but . . .”

She takes a deep breath.

Another.

Another, and I squeeze her hand.

“So.” She’s not crying, but I can hear the tears in her voice. “Can you . . . Can you once again be my only good friend in the whole fucking world, Bleetch?”

I smile.

Then laugh.

Then she laughs.

“You talk like we ever stopped.”

She is crying now, and I’d be, too, but I can’t. Instead I scoot forward, bumping into a million different elbows, and hug her.

She hugs me back, tighter.

“You can be whatever you are, and you’ll still be my friend. And I won’t ever have any issues with you being a Were,” I say into her hair, which is matted with soil and God, this baby wolf needs a bath just as bad as I do. “In fact, I think I might be in love with one.”

CHAPTER 30

It could have been anyone who was sent to him. Any Vampyre. And yet, it was her.

A roll of the dice.

The luck of the draw.

Idon’t see Lowe for the following three days.

Or: I do see Lowe. Several times. Constantly, even. But it’s never Lowe, the guy who hung out with me on the roof and drew me baths and once pulled back my hair to stare at the tips of my ears and then mouthed pretty to himself. It’s always Lowe the Alpha. Discussing urgent matters. Shuttling between Were and Vampyre territory with Cal and another gaggle of seconds in tow. Conferring with Owen and Maddie Garcia in closed-door meetings I don’t care to be part of, but find myself wishing I were.

Serena and I are attached at the hip, surgically, like we’re twelve again and figuring out trigonometry together. We go on long, comfortably silent walks at dusk. We make jokes about the fact that she can grow fur on her elbow at will. We hang out in my room, Serena reading up on everything that’s happened while she was cut off from the world, me blinking sleepily at the black dots on the ceiling, trying to figure out whether they’re tiny bugs or specks of dirt.

Somehow, I’m always wrong.

“We have good genetic testing registries,” Juno tells us when she comes over to chat with Serena. “We can work on figuring out who your Were parent was. At the very least, what pack and huddle they came from.”

Serena looks at me, searching, and my first instinct is to encourage her. Then I see her throat jerking fitfully, once and then again. “Maybe you should take some time to think it through,” I say, and she nods in relief, like she needed my permission to even consider it.

It’s not like her, the indecision. Then again, Serena is not like her anymore. Serena was held alone in a windowless attic for months, and that’s after she started getting an inkling that maybe she was another species. Serena falls asleep at odd hours and then tosses and turns, and I’ve caught her weeping more times in the past week than in the previous decade of our acquaintance. Serena seems . . . not diminished, but distracted. Insubstantial. Transitioning.

Later that evening, while she absentmindedly braids her hair and stares out the window, she murmurs, “I wonder whether it’d be okay to spend some time with the Weres. Just to see how they are.” It occurs to me that Juno is the first of Serena’s people who hasn’t abducted her, imprisoned her, or abandoned her.

“I need to ask Lowe something,” I tell Owen the following day, when I catch him between council meetings. He’s staring at the touch screen in Father’s office with a deep frown. The bloodstains haven’t been taken care of—or maybe they have, and the near black marks are permanent mementos. “Where is he?”